At night, when other parts of Houston sparkle and hum, The Heights is dark and silent under its canopy of gnarled and twisted trees, the streetlights at each corner blotted by leaves. The rare pedestrian walks in blackness, crossing under the soft blue glow of a light and then passing back into darkness, stepping into potholes and picking up the gray-white clammy mud of old shell streets, rutted and patched.The Heights is futuristic Houston’s doddering relation. It was christened in the late 1800’s, an unsophisticated era before developers learned the sales appeal of names like Tall Timbers and Post Oak and Kashmere Gardens. The neighborhood towered a dizzying seventy-five feet in altitude, twenty-three feet above the bacterial swamps of the rest of Houston, and its rarefied air was thought to rejuvenate the lungs and purify the soul. In yellow-fever epidemics, thousands of frightened citizens grabbed their belongings and hiked to The Heights, and from these original tent villages with their howling babies and jaundiced adults a pastoral community slowly arose.
