Pasadena: Strawberry Capital & Urban Cowboy

Pasadena has worn a lot of hats. It began as ranch land on the Vince brothers' league, was reborn in the 1890s as a farm colony famous for its strawberry patches, and grew into a hard-working refinery town on the ship channel — before a mechanical bull and a John Travolta movie briefly made it the most famous honky-tonk address in America. This drive traces that whole arc across the city: the ranch that fed early cattle drives, the graveyard on the bayou where the first townsfolk were buried, the one-room school that started in a chicken coop, and the empty lot on Spencer Highway where Gilley's once packed thousands of two-steppers under one roof. Along the way you'll pass through the refinery-town Pasadena that the tourists never see — the one that actually built the place. Keep an eye out; some of these stories survive only on a roadside marker or a bare patch of ground.