Riverside Terrace: Where Today and Tomorrow Collided with Stephen Fox
Stephen Fox examines the history of a Houston subdivision, initially developed for a middle-to-upper-middle market of (implicitly: white) Houstonians beginning in 1924. As Houston’s economy recovered from the Great Depression during the mid-1930s, Riverside Terrace became the neighborhood most associated with Houston’s Jewish elite. Then, in the 1950s, the neighborhood's demographics flipped as it was desegregated, becoming by the 1970s the neighborhood most associated with Houston’s African American elite. Riverside Terrace has it all: parkways, freeways, segregation, integration, and architecture. It’s how history really happens. This lecture was presented in collaboration with the exhibition Olivia Erlanger: If Today Were Tomorrow.
©Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 2021.