Theatre Design & Technology - Winter 2008 - 56

TOGETHER AFTER FLOOD
Arial view of a hard-hit neighborhood.

Alley Theatre staff began clean-up before
lights came back on.

spaces and the ﬁve arts organizations was more than $12 million. Damage to the city owned Wortham and Jones Hall totaled
more than $27 million, and damage to the Alley's building was
well over $7 million.
The amazing part of this story is not the tremendous devastation but the way the city, the performance companies, and
the vendors pulled together to bring everyone back on line with
only a hiccup. Two performances of Giselle were cancelled and
one performance of the Alley Theatre's première of Horton
Foote's Carpetbagger's Children. The Alley, although not city
owned or operated, was able to move its performance to one of
the theatres of Stages Repertory Theatre off Allen Parkway-a
building the city does own.
Also incredible is the way that a public-private-nonproﬁt
partnership got the arts organizations back into their spaces incredibly quickly. Although everyone was trying to ﬁgure out how
to recoup losses, they were all ready to open their new season
in the ﬁrst week of September - just days shy of 3 months after
the devastating ﬂooding. The recovery took a lot of planning
(sometimes on the ﬂy), rapid work by certain city ofﬁcials, the
clout of the arts community in Houston which is considerable
but also a little luck perhaps in the guise of a charming city
employee by the name of Mario.
As is true with many entities, plans were sort of made on
what to do in an emergency but paper plans were pretty much
all that was done. According to Mario Arizia, assistant director of theatres for the City of Houston's division of Conventions

Water had to be pumped out of
underground spaces

and Arts, no one "practiced" or tested those plans to see just
how practical or functional they were. Really, the thought that
anything would ever actually happen was remote at best-a
dangerous situation for the fourth largest city in the U.S. While
Houston had experience with tropical storms and hurricanes,
just like New Orleans, the city had dodged the bullet so many
times that few gave much credence to what might happen if a
storm decided to sit and stay for a spell.
It was, however, a shining hour for management. Arizia is
speciﬁcally credited by those who know with the achievement
of getting everyone back to business in such a short time. He
was provided with the authority to do what needed to be done
with limited oversight by the mayor and the city council. Arizia
is modest about what he was able to achieve on behalf of the
arts community and the city. However, what he was able to accomplish through strong relationships and hard headed business practice is little short of a miracle.
Interestingly, the ofﬁcial credit for the speed of the recovery was given to Houston City Council Member Gordon Quan.
Quan was appointed to head a committee to oversee repairs
to city owned facilities using a grant of $14 million in emergency money. According to a story in the Houston Chronicle
("Theatre District Shows Go On" by Clifford Pugh, 2 September
2001), Quan toured the still ﬂooded Jones Hall basement and
city garages two weeks later and couldn't believe the level of
devastation. He said "it was like something from a science ﬁction movie. I thought, this is Houston, Texas?"

W I N T E R

2008

THEATRE

DESIGN

TECHNOLOGY

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Winter 2008