Table of Contents
Trip Reports
Natalie Wiest: Boquillas Canyon
Natalie Wiest: Burnham's Ferry
The
Caroline Street Gully and Its Significance to the City
by Louis Albach
The
unimposing concrete panel of civil engineering art at the foot of Caroline
Street, scarcely reveals the importance of this particular drainage to
the town of Houston. The simple, yet engaging, circle and square storm
sewer outlet is all that remains of the large ravine that extended up
Caroline Street.
A number of ravines cut through the Houston town site in 1837. Most prominent among these was the large gully at the lower end of Caroline Street. The size of the ravine decreased significantly south of Congress Avenue, and it continued to gradually narrow until it disappeared between Prairie Avenue and Texas Avenue. As the gully flowed toward the bayou, it curved to the east near Commerce Avenue and cut through Block 6 (Houston town plat) before dropping into Buffalo Bayou near the end of Austin Street.
The Dry Gully,
as it was sometimes called, varied from twenty to forty feet deep and
was a significant barrier separating the business district from the residential
neighborhood of Quality Hill to the east. As a result, bridges were built
across the gully at Franklin Avenue and at Congress Avenue. An 1852 painting
by Thomas Flintoff shows St. Vincent Church situated near the corner of
Franklin Avenue, just west of the wooden bridge across the Caroline Street
gully.
Gully
1873According to James L. Glass, a noted local historian and map maker
who has studied the history of Houston from 1836 to 1839, the Caroline
Street gully may have played a pivotal role in the layout of the town
of Houston. On the sixty-two block rectangular plat of the town, the east-west
streets of Houston were laid out at angle of North 55 degrees West while
the north-south streets were at an angle of South 35 degrees West.
Supposedly,
the streets were offset from a true north-south alignment in order to
conform to the curvature of Buffalo Bayou and to assure "maximum
wharfage and commercial opportunities." However, the Caroline Street
gully was a significant topographic feature of the land where the Allen
brothers wanted to locate their town. By aligning the plat of the streets
to the gully, the Allens were able to maximize the number of available
town lots for sale. Any other alignment meant that several blocks would
have been cut diagonally by the gully and many lots would have been unsellable.
After the Civil War, mayor Horace Taylor set out to revitalize the City
after a period of neglect due to war. Among the civic projects, which
included adding new shell to the streets and the posting of street signs
with names on street corners, was the installation of a culvert in gully
at Caroline Street and Congress Avenue. By 1873, the drainage south of
Commerce Avenue had been filled in, and only the ravine winding through
Block 6 remained. Block 6 was undeveloped as late as 1907, but by 1924,
a major sewer outlet had been constructed at the end of Austin Street
and Block 6 was covered with the tracks of the International and Great
Northern railroad tracks.
Today, Block 6 lies vacant and is used as a parking lot. From the street level, no trace of the historic gully is evident.