Montrose: Counterculture, Murals & Mansions

Montrose has always contained multitudes. Laid out in 1911 by developer J.W. Link as a genteel suburb of grand boulevards and oil-money mansions, it spent the 1960s and 70s reinventing itself as the bohemian, counterculture, and gay heart of Houston — a place of head shops, street festivals, artists' studios, and the de Menil art enclave. Today it blends all of those layers: stately old homes on Courtlandt Place, the Link-Lee mansion turned university, murals splashed across storefronts, and the Westheimer strip that still hums after dark. This driving loop threads the neighborhood's history from the mansions of the boulevards to the counterculture streets and back, showing how one part of town could be aristocratic, bohemian, and defiantly itself all at once. Follow the arm_next chain; park where you can to look closer.