Houston's East End got an occult-themed rock bar and the underground moved in. Black Magic Social Club at 7036 Harrisburg Boulevard, in the Second Ward along the East End's old commercial spine, is a 21-and-up bar with a stage that has made itself the city's home for everything rock, punk and metal - a roughly hundred-capacity room where touring crust punk, thrash, dungeon synth and darkwave acts play inches from the crowd and the bar keeps pouring until two. The occult theme is set dressing do.....

The larger of two halls within the Wortham Theater Center in downtown Houston, the Brown Theater is one of the premier performance spaces in the southern United States. Opened in 1987 and funded substantially through private philanthropy, the Wortham was purpose-built as the home of the Houston Grand Opera and the Houston Ballet, and its grand lobby, sweeping staircase and soaring glass facade make it a landmark of the city's Theater District. The Brown Theater seats around two thousand four hu.....

Within the celebrated Houston Museum of Natural Science in Hermann Park, the Cockrell Butterfly Center is a soaring, three-storey glass-walled rainforest conservatory inhabited by some two thousand free-flying butterflies of around sixty species drawn from rainforests around the world. The centre, which opened in 1994 thanks to a generous gift from the local Cockrell family, is one of the largest tropical butterfly habitats in the United States and a much-loved fixture for visitors to the museum.....

Halloween night 1950 was opening night for the University of Houston's grand hall, the east wing of an Art Deco administration building designed to give the young university a front door worthy of a city. Cullen Performance Hall at 4800 Calhoun Road occupies the eastern half of the Ezekiel W. Cullen Building, designed by native Houston architect Alfred C. Finn - the man behind the San Jacinto Monument - with long classical wings and regularly spaced pilasters. The building was announced in March.....

The home of Major League Baseball's Houston Astros, Daikin Park is a striking retractable-roof ballpark in the heart of downtown Houston. Opened in 2000 and known over the years by several names, including Enron Field and Minute Maid Park, before taking its current title in 2025, the stadium was a key part of the regeneration of the city's east downtown and incorporates the historic Union Station building into its design. The ballpark seats around forty thousand spectators and is best known for.....

Spread across twelve acres in the heart of downtown Houston, Discovery Green is the city's flagship urban park and a transformative piece of recent civic design. The park opened on 13 April 2008 in what had previously been a sea of surface parking lots opposite the George R. Brown Convention Center, the result of a public-private partnership between the City of Houston and several local foundations that invested more than 125 million dollars in the project. The park is densely programmed for an.....

Behind an unassuming door on Travis Street, five professional actors gather nightly in a hidden library lined with ten thousand books - and one of them has just downed five shots of whiskey. The Emerald Theatre at 412 Travis Street in downtown Houston is the home of Drunk Shakespeare, the immersive comedy franchise in which a rotating "Drunk Shakespeare Society" attempts the Bard with one deliberately impaired member, and the venue was purpose-built for exactly that kind of intimate, interactive.....

Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler played their college ball in this building when it was Hofheinz Pavilion, home of the Phi Slama Jama teams that changed basketball. The arena at 3875 Holman Street on the University of Houston campus opened in 1969 and served the Cougars for half a century before a 60-million-dollar transformation - anchored by a 20-million-dollar gift from Houston restaurateur and Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta - rebuilt it from the concourses in. Reopened in December 2018 as t.....

When Hurricane Katrina's evacuees overflowed the Astrodome in 2005, this building absorbed 7,000 of them; twelve years later it sheltered Houston's own during Harvey for 22 straight days, serving a quarter of a million hot meals. The George R. Brown Convention Center, on the east side of downtown Houston at 1001 Avenida de las Americas, is more than a trade hall - it is civic infrastructure in the fullest sense. Opened on 26 September 1987 and named for the engineer-philanthropist who built Bro.....

Stretching across some four hundred and forty-five acres between the Texas Medical Center and the Museum District just south of downtown Houston, Hermann Park is one of the most heavily visited parks in Texas and a cherished centrepiece of city life. The park was created in 1914 on a tract of land donated to the city by the developer and philanthropist George H. Hermann, whose vision was to create a major public park in a city whose rapid growth had left few large-scale green spaces. The park's.....