Did you know that there’s a ghost town just a few hundred feet from downtown Houston? Well, neither did I. Carolyn and I were out riding bikes today and we road near downtown and came across an area of old (as in, turn of the last century) abandoned buildings. Some of the structures were obviously built in the 20s and 30s, but several were well over 100 year old.

I later found out that what we were seeing was what remains of Freedman’s Town. Freedman’s Town, (AKA, the Fourth Ward) was Houston’s Harlem in the 1920s. The town was settled by freed slaves in the 1800s and was very prosperous until the town fell into disarray as the “Houston Harlem” socialites got older. By the 1970s, Freedman’s Town had become a ghetto. In the 1990s, a gentrification effort was undertaken and most of the original Freedman’s Town structures were bulldozed… but a few buildings remain and here they are:

I think this old schoolhouse is amazing! I hope that it doesn’t wind up bulldozed. So many of the structures seem to be awaiting the demolition team. I’m sure as soon as they are gone, developers will waste no time building more of the partial board monstrosities that have sprung up all across what was once Freedman’s Town.