The Galleria & Uptown Shopping

Uptown is Houston's second downtown, a cluster of gleaming towers built around the largest shopping mall in Texas. At its center is the Galleria, a three-million-square-foot mixed-use complex modeled on Milan's Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, right down to its distinctive glass barrel-vaulted roof and the ice rink that has spun beneath it since 1970. This half-day walk takes you from the mall's anchor department stores to the surrounding landmarks that made Uptown famous — a mirror-polished skyscraper, a soaring waterfall wall, and the ice rink that was the first ever built inside an American mall. It's a tour of Houston at its most ambitious, a district conceived less as a shopping center than as a new city core. Give yourself time to browse; the Galleria holds some four hundred stores. Bring layers — the mall runs cold, and the Water Wall is best on a warm day.