Uptown & the Galleria: Post Oak's Rise

Six miles west of downtown, on land that was open ranch country within living memory, a single developer's gamble grew into a glittering second city. When Gerald Hines opened the Galleria along Post Oak Boulevard in 1970 — an enclosed, Italian-inspired shopping palace wrapped around an ice rink — skeptics thought a luxury mall so far from downtown would fail. Instead it seeded the district now called Uptown: a forest of glass towers, hotels, and high-end stores that rivals the old city center and famously grew up with almost no zoning to guide it. This drive traces that rise, from the mall that started it to the mirror-glass skyscraper and cascading water wall that became the neighborhood's signatures. Follow the driving directions between stops. It's a tour of how modern Houston builds a downtown out of thin air.