Downtown’s Evolving Skyline traces more than a century of ambition through the buildings that reshaped Houston’s silhouette and its sense of possibility. This 90-minute, docent-guided walking tour moves from early 20th-century confidence to late-century experimentation, stopping at landmarks such as 806 Main, dismissed as “Carter’s Folly” when it rose 16 stories in 1910, and the 1929 Gulf Building, Houston’s great Art Deco landmark.

Settled in the mid-19th century at what was then Houston’s western edge, the Old Sixth Ward grew up alongside the railroads that powered the city’s early expansion. Much of the neighborhood was developed by W. R. Baker, a Houston mayor and president of the Houston & Texas Central Railway, and many early residents were railroad workers who built modest wood-frame cottages enlivened with hand-cut gingerbread ornamentation. These houses were practical, personal and expressive — everyday architecture shaped by the people who lived there.

This two-hour, docent-guided walking tour focuses on the lives and legacies of some of Glenwood Cemetery’s most notable women, whose influence stretches from the suffrage movement to the silver screen. Featured figures include Charlotte Allen, wife of Houston co-founder Augustus Allen; suffragists Annette Finnigan and Florence Sterling; publisher and stateswoman Oveta Culp Hobby, who led the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps during World War II; and movie star Gene Tierney.

Our 90-minute docent-guided walking tour explores Turner Addition’s evolution through its 20th-century residential architecture, from picturesque 1920s suburban houses to modern and postmodern townhouses of the 1970s and ’80s. Along the route, we’ll highlight work by architects including William Ward Watkin, Alfred C. Finn, Howard Barnstone and Carlos Schoeppl that together trace shifting ideas about domestic life, design and the city itself.

At the turn of the 20th century, Buffalo Bayou was downtown Houston’s front door — a working waterfront crowded with wharves, warehouses, breweries, factories and produce houses. From the Port of Houston at Allen’s Landing to the commercial blocks that lined the bayou’s banks, this stretch was teeming with activity. The scene today is very different, but traces of that earlier, industrious landscape remain if you know where to look.

Advance ticket purchase is required for this tour.

This two-hour walking tour traces the changing tastes and the varied social and personal motivations reflected in some of Glenwood's outstanding monuments, which range from elaborate Victorian obelisks and angels to crisp, modern compositions. Along the way, docents will explain the symbolism and stories behind the monuments and will discuss the lives of Houstonians both famous and forgotten who commissioned them.

Advance ticket purchase is required for this tour.

The section of downtown east of Main Street is a study in transformation. Once home to Quality Hill — Houston’s most fashionable residential neighborhood in the 19th century — the area shifted toward commerce with the expansion of the business district and the arrival of Union Station in 1911. By the late 20th century, sweeping redevelopment projects like Houston Center and the George R. Brown Convention Center had dramatically reshaped the landscape. Today, the neighborhood is a layered mix of small commercial buildings, early skyscrapers and sleek modern towers.

Advance ticket purchase is required for this tour.

The area now known as the Museum District gained prominence in the 1920s, thanks to its proximity to Rice University, Hermann Park and the Museum of Fine Arts. As Houston expanded, stretches of open prairie were transformed into elegant residential neighborhoods — communities that remain highly desirable a century later.

Advance ticket purchase is required for this tour.

Although Glenwood Cemetery is known for its splendid Victorian monuments, there’s a more modern side as well. This docent-guided walking tour explores some of the newer sections of Glenwood and the lives of some of the well-known 20th century Houstonians buried there, including businessmen George and Herman Brown; cotton magnate and statesman Will Clayton; Edgar Odell Lovett, Rice University’s first president; Astrodome builder Judge Roy Hofheinz; and longtime television anchor Ron Stone.

Advance ticket purchase is required for this tour.

Broadacres was one of several residential neighborhoods developed near Rice University in the early 20th century. Its breathtaking oak allées and formal landscaping were designed by William Ward Watkin, supervising architect of the Rice campus, and many of Houston’s leading architects — including Watkin, John Staub and Birdsall Briscoe — created the homes that line North and South boulevards.

Advance ticket purchase is required for this tour.

Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts campus brings together the work of both local and internationally renowned architects — from William Ward Watkin’s classically inspired 1920s original to modern additions by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and bold 21st-century buildings by Steven Holl Architects. Alongside these structures, landscape elements like Isamu Noguchi’s Cullen Sculpture Garden reflect how museum design and ideas about cultural space have evolved over the past century.

Advance ticket purchase is required for this tour.

Just northwest of downtown, Houston’s First Ward is one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods. Its roots go back to the 1830s, when railroad workers, grocers, immigrants and entrepreneurs began building a community near White Oak Bayou. Despite decades of decline, freeway construction and redevelopment, the neighborhood still offers a vivid glimpse of early working-class life in Houston.

Advance ticket purchase is required for this tour.

Oilman Henry Masterson developed Cherokee Place in the early 1920s as open prairie southwest of Houston gave way to desirable neighborhoods bordering the recently opened Rice University campus. In the years that followed, businessmen, doctors and attorneys built comfortable homes on Cherokee’s large lots. Many of those homes still stand, reflecting the range of residential styles popular among Houston’s middle class from the 1920s to the 1940s.

Advance ticket purchase is required for this tour.

Historic Glenwood Cemetery is known for its beauty, but the stories of the people buried there are just as compelling — especially Glenwood's women, whose legacies range from the suffrage movement to the silver screen. This tour tells the stories of some of those fascinating women and their impacts locally and nationally. Among the featured subjects are Charlotte Allen, the wife of Houston co-founder Augustus Allen; suffragists Annette Finnigan and Florence Sterling; publisher and stateswoman Oveta Culp Hobby, who led the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps during World War II; and movie star Gene Tierney.

Advance ticket purchase is required for this tour.

A walk along Main Street in downtown Houston is a walk through the city's business development and its changing architectural tastes. As Houston's business district grew in the 20th century, the street was built up with soaring skyscrapers, busy hotels, ornate movie theaters and lavish department stores. Suburbanization brought an end to downtown's heyday as a shopping and entertainment destination, but many of the buildings from this era of growth and glamour still stand, giving us a fascinating look at the Bayou City's past.

Advance ticket purchase is required for this tour.

The University of St. Thomas broke with tradition when it hired the modernist architect Philip Johnson to design its new campus in 1956. And though Johnson took inspiration for his buildings at UST from the contemporary designs of Mies van der Rohe, his campus plan was influenced by something much older: Thomas Jefferson's 1818 design for the University of Virginia.

Advance ticket purchase is required for this tour.

When developer W.W. Baldwin laid out Westmoreland Place in 1902, its location on the southwestern side of what is now Midtown was considered the very edge of Houston. Although times have changed, much of Westmoreland's historic character remains, giving us a fascinating look at the residential architecture of the early 20th-century Bayou City.

Advance ticket purchase is required for this tour.

Glenwood Cemetery, established in 1871 on rolling, wooded land near Buffalo Bayou, is one of the most beautiful outdoor spaces in Houston. It is also the resting place of scores of people who built Houston into the city we know today. This two-hour docent-guided tour looks at the lives and legacies of some of the men and women buried at Glenwood who shaped Houston after the turn of the 20th century.

Advance ticket purchase is required for this tour.

Located in the shadow of the downtown skyscrapers, Founders Memorial Cemetery is one of the few physical links to the early days of Houston and Texas. The plot of land along the San Felipe Road (now West Dallas Avenue) began being used for burials shortly after Houston was founded in 1836 and became the resting place of veterans of the Texas Revolution, heroes of the Battle of San Jacinto and government officials of the Republic of Texas.

Advance ticket purchase is required for this tour.

When landscape architects Hare & Hare drew up plans for Houston's civic center in the late 1920s, they envisioned a group of stylistically similar Spanish-influenced buildings arranged around a public square. However, those plans were derailed by the Depression, and the city's governmental and cultural center ended up developing over the next 50 years in a variety of styles with few overall planning efforts. Today, structures in the Civic Center and the adjacent Theater District reflect not only the evolution of Houston's municipal and cultural institutions, but also changing architectural tastes.

Advance ticket purchase is required for this tour.

This two-hour walking tour traces the changing tastes and the varied social and personal motivations reflected in some of Glenwood's outstanding monuments, which range from elaborate Victorian obelisks and angels to crisp, modern compositions. Along the way, docents will explain the symbolism and stories behind the monuments and will discuss the lives of Houstonians both famous and forgotten who commissioned them.

Advance ticket purchase is required for this walking tour.

"Houston's University" was founded in 1927 as a night school meeting in borrowed rooms, but it quickly grew into a four-year university and is now a major urban research institution. Our 90-minute docent-guided tour of the UH campus traces the university's history and the people who made the school what it is today, including oilman Hugh Roy Cullen, its great benefactor.

Advance ticket purchase is required for this walking tour.

The area now known as Midtown originally developed as farmland on the outskirts of Houston, then was transformed into the upscale South End residential district as the city expanded to the south around the turn of the 20th century. Over the years, South End residents moved to newer suburban neighborhoods and their grand homes were demolished to make way for office and retail buildings, apartments and parking lots.

Please note that advance ticket purchase is required for this tour.

Historic Glenwood Cemetery is known for its beauty, but the stories of the people buried there are just as compelling — especially Glenwood's women, whose legacies range from the suffrage movement to the silver screen. This tour tells the stories of some of those fascinating women and their impacts locally and nationally. Among the featured subjects are Charlotte Allen, the wife of Houston co-founder Augustus Allen; suffragists Annette Finnigan and Florence Sterling; publisher and stateswoman Oveta Culp Hobby, who led the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps during World War II; and movie star Gene Tierney.

Advance ticket purchase is required for this walking tour.

The William A. Wilson Realty Co. began developing Woodland Heights in 1907 on 136 acres of land that was once part of John Austin's Mexican land grant. The neighborhood was one of Houston's first "streetcar suburbs" — a streetcar line ran from downtown along Houston Avenue to just outside the Woodland Heights gates, enabling working-class Houstonians to live in a lovely wooded setting and easily commute to their jobs.

Advance ticket purchase is required for this walking tour.

Market Square, one of the public squares laid out in the Allen brothers' original plan of Houston, was home to the city market and City Hall from 1841 to 1939. During that time, the square became the center of Houston's early commercial district. Although the area declined in the mid-20th century, preservation projects have brought new uses to its historic buildings and new life to Market Square itself.

Advance ticket purchase is required for this walking tour.

The story of Turner Addition began in 1871 when Nathaniel P. Turner platted the neighborhood more than two miles outside the Houston city limit, apparently anticipating that the city's growth would soon fill the gap between his subdivision and civilization. As it turned out, development in Turner Addition didn't begin until the late 1910s, when an extension of Montrose Boulevard finally linked the area with the rest of Houston.

Please note that advance ticket purchase is required for this walking tour.

As large as it is, Houston shares a feature with dozens of small towns across Texas: a courthouse square. On Sunday afternoon, May 19, we'll take a look at the history and architecture of the neighborhood surrounding the Harris County Courthouse — one of Houston's most historic areas.

Please note that advance ticket purchase is required for this tour.

Glenwood Cemetery, established in 1871 on rolling, wooded land near Buffalo Bayou, is one of the most beautiful outdoor spaces in Houston. It is also the resting place of scores of people who built Houston into the city we know today — railroad executives, bankers, politicians and architects, among many others.

Please note that advance ticket purchase is required for this walking tour.

What is now the First Montrose Commons Historic District includes two historic neighborhoods platted on what was then Houston’s southwestern edge: the Lockhart, Connor & Barziza Addition (1873) and the Bute Addition (1907). Construction in the area began in earnest after the adjacent Montrose Place neighborhood opened in 1911. Today, the streets of First Montrose Commons are lined with an eclectic mix of large and small homes and apartment buildings designed in a variety of 20th-century styles.