Around the World in 80 Days Part XX – Space City

 

 By John Temple Ligon

 

Heading east, leaving California for Phoenix around midnight, May 23, 2012, I was sleeping in my little compartment to the sound of the train’s wheels rolling over the tracks. I had taken 70 days to go this far, and I had another 10 to go, enough time to visit my second home, Houston, and our most atmospheric American city, New Orleans. From New Orleans I was scheduled to take the Amtrak Crescent to Washington, and after a one-night celebration in Washington, my last train ride of the trip would get me to Columbia in the first few hours of Saturday, June 2, the 80^th day.

In January of 1975 I sat for an interview in downtown Houston with Jack Mitchell, director of the Rice School of Architecture. His boss was David Crane, dean, who was formerly head of the urban design program at the University of Pennsylvania. The two were about to enter into their third year of a new program they called QGW, or qualifying graduate workshop. Instead of declaring architecture as a major in the first year of an undergraduate run of five years, the QGW crowd could major in just about anything – to include requisite electives in drawing, painting, art history and calculus – for a degree and then apply to architecture school for a fast-track four years to a master’s degree, which was not too different from the applicants who wanted to go to law school or to medical school. There was pre-law and pre-med, of course, but every now and then an engineering graduate got to law school and a French major was accepted to medical school.

Point being, admissions committees in just about every professional program are looking for mature people who can contribute to the mix, the chemistry of the class. There has never been, I imagine, such a thing as their ideal candidate.

I was not their ideal candidate, I am certain. Maybe I was a little too interesting. I majored in art history, but I scored considerably higher in the math section than in the verbal part of the GRE, for instance. And I had only one course in drawing and another in entry-level design, so my portfolio probably placed somewhere near the bottom. On the other hand, my military record stood out, and they liked the distance runner. They reasoned, I gather, my distance running illustrated a personality capable of obsession.

But my meeting with Mitchell got off to a sketchy start. He was curious why my first stab at a college education was such a disaster – the alcoholic’s child out of the house for the first time. Even after the military my performance record in the first one or two college years was short of stellar. My last two years, on the other hand, after I was officially an art history major, had absolutely no resemblance to any previous performance. The record wasn’t exactly perfect for those two years, but the grades added up to something superior. And, like my SAT scores, I did real well on the GRE, which was hard to explain. I always tested well, but I always kept a slacker’s schedule. Fifteen years later when I told Duke I wanted to go to business school on a weekend MBA program, they already had my GMAT scores and they had already decided to invite me.

Mitchell explained to me Rice liked to see all its QGW people on scholarship, something of a legacy from when every student at Rice was on full scholarship since the school first opened in 1912 until the original will was broken to attract minority students in the mid-1960s. Once the will was broken in favor of minority students, the ability to change course and to charge tuition was allowed. Even so, in the mid-1970s the tuition at Rice was about half of what was charged at comparable schools. So, logically, an acceptance at Rice without scholarship was still roughly speaking a half-tuition scholarship anywhere else.

Mitchell identified the group I was trying to join as mostly Ivy League, Little Ivy, Seven Sisters, Public Ivy, all top-tier institutions, implying my degree from the University of South Carolina was new to the program.

Then I said the way I made the cross country team, if only for a few months, at the University of South Carolina was that I challenged the coach to let me race his scholarship runners, which they all were, and if I beat his slowest scholarship runner, he had to put me on the team since I was not asking for any kind of education expense subsidy or scholarship. I just wanted to say I was a jock. He agreed, and I finished the 6.2-mile race a hair ahead of the school’s slowest scholarship runner. Then, after a few months when I was asked to sign something, I had to honestly say I had wine with my food about every other night, more on weekends. The horror. I was out, but the acceptance concept carried over to my application at Rice.

I told Mitchel to put me in the group, no scholarship, and if I produced the quality of work reasonably seen as at least average with our group the first year, I had a tuition-free deal for the next three years, and Mitchell could protect the purity of the group with everybody on scholarship. Mitchell agreed and I performed and I paid no tuition for three out of four years. Fair enough. Everybody else got the monthly fellowship checks on top of the tuition-free deal – I didn’t – but I was happy to score the tuition-free status.

The 1973 Arab Oil Embargo hit only two years before I showed up in Houston, but by the time I arrived, Houston, energy capital of the world, was just about the only city in the Free World immune to the recession of 1975. Everybody was moving to Houston. After the 1979 Iranian Hostage Crisis hit, Houston was taking on at least 1,500 new citizens a week. Design and construction were on a frenetic pace, which made for a great laboratory to learn about the building trades, not to mention summertime opportunities in the job markets.

My first summer in Houston I tended bar at the Plaza Hotel on Montrose Avenue on the edge of the gay capital of the American Southwest. I hired the all-female wait staff, and I favored the girls educated in New England. I can’t say why, but they made the best waitresses. They were polite and efficient, but they didn’t take any crap from anybody.

And like all bars some nights we had unusual circumstances to counter.

I must say, I bet I am the only ex-bartender in America who can say he turned down Bob Marley’s order for a drink. He was too late after last call while he was trying to be nice to customers who rushed him and wouldn’t leave him alone long enough to order in time. This was the summer of 1976, not too far behind the time the Southern drawl in Houston could be heard turning down the Black guy for a drink. And here was the South Carolinian refusing service to the world’s most famous pothead in dreadlocks.

Typical for me, I managed to shoehorn a four-year education program into five years. I took off time to work for Alan Taniguchi, former dean at Texas and former prisoner at FDR’s WWII Rio Grande Valley internment camp for Japanese immigrants. But I did get my master’s. Albeit a graduate degree in architecture, which was what was put on my sheepskin – real sheepskin, by the way – my time at Rice was on the urban design track, more about cities and configuration of buildings than about individual buildings.

Besides energy, the obvious, another reason Houston weathered the recession of 1975 so well was it had the Texas Medical Center across the street from Rice with 12 hospitals, four nursing schools, two medical schools, a dental school, and at that time about 150,000 people between paying patients and the well-paid staff.

The main emergency room at the TMC was inside Ben Taub Hospital, where all of society’s ills showed up stabbed, shot, abused, beaten – you name it and you guess what instrument went where. Their emergency room, not more than two or three blocks from where I lived for over 11 years, was a teaching facility for the U. S. Army field surgeons who learned to treat gunshot wounds.

Upon graduation in 1980, I went to work for James M. Sink & Associates, whom we called Jim. He got his education at Southern Cal in the early 1950s, and the dean of the architecture school remembered Jim fondly for years afterward.

In the early 1970s, the former Southern Cal dean was hired by the King of Saudi Arabia to oversee the design and construction of a junior science and mathematics college, a proving ground for young Saudis to make the cut in transition from high school in Saudi Arabia to major universities in the United States. In today’s money the school would cost a billion-and-a-half dollars, at least. A typical architecture/engineering fee could be 7%, or more than one hundred million dollars today. The former USC dean called on Jim to put it all together. About the time the project was complete and the working drawings were delivered, the King of Saudi Arabia was assassinated and the junior college was never built. Jim, though, got paid. Got paid a bundle.

Soon after I went to work for Jim in 1980, we witnessed the 1981 Economic Recovery Tax Act, where one feature allowed a father to build a residential unit and rent to his own children and still depreciate and deduct for income tax purposes. This feature was the beginning of untold numbers of student condominiums across the country. Austin, Texas, was ahead of most university communities with its new student condominiums, which Jim and I went to study with Columbia’s John Morgan.

We put together a 54-unit project built above its own parking garage in College Station, Texas, home of Texas A&M University. We knew we were smart. Our market study was current and reassuring. We had demand like we couldn’t believe. Unfortunately, several other teams came up with the same study results and proceeded to build student condominiums concurrent with our project. When we were ready for occupancy, College Station had three or four similar projects on the market at the same time. We immediately shifted sales strategy to rentals instead of sales, and we put an entire sorority on the top of three levels, filling up the lower two levels with boys happy to live under the sorority.

A sales failure but a development success, we built these units, all 54, in less than three months using prefabricated modules. Worked like a charm.

Back in Houston Jim’s firm was out of work. We did all right with our student condominium, but that was that. Texas began to quit drilling for oil in 1983. The rest of the country was recovering from the recession of 1979-1983, which was a hangover from Jimmy Carter’s Misery Index combined with Paul Volker’s choke holding, inflation killing high prime rate. Mortgages were holding at 17% or more and no one was borrowing. But it worked. Inflation came down, and the low-inflation boom for the next 20 years was a great time for business.

If I can remember it right, the Baker-Hughes rig count in 1982 – when the spot-market price for a barrel of oil in Rotterdam was $40 – and also in 1983 was about 4,000, and the next year in 1984 the number of oil rigs being drilled was 2,000, while in 1985 the count was down another 50% to 1,000, and in the summer of 1986, 500 – or something like that. By then the price of oil per barrel was down to $10. In other words, design and construction firms started laying off in late 1982, and by summer of 1986, they were shutting down.

What market was left to design, to build?

Pregnant lawyers. I ran little Ligon & Company in downtown Houston, where I would bump into a gilt-edged big-time law firm junior partner in her Brooks Brothers grey flannel suit covering her pregnancy. At six figures in income in 1986, these lawyers planned on au pairs for their own in-house daycare. I would suggest a house expansion or – better – a backyard addition to house the au pair, separating the happy parents from their au pair when it was time to separate. An au pair down the hall couldn’t have that.

I got three two-car garages topped with au pair pads, all about the same time. A writer for the Houston Chronicle got wind of it, came to my office for an interview and had her staff photographer tour the three “Temple temples,” as my clients called them. She put me on the front page next to Teri Garr for New Year’s Eve 1985, where 500,000 readers saw my smiling face in front of a $25,000 garage apartment and a 25-pound baby.

But it was not enough. I and Mrs. Ligon left Houston in the early fall of 1986. I remember a parting statistic: 50,000,000 sq. ft. of empty class-A office space, never upfitted. That means Houston had the equivalent of 50 50-story see-through buildings recently built but never occupied. Now that is overbuilding.

 

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