The McGovern Centennial Gardens
	The Cullen Sculpture Garden and Glassell School
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Just south of the ZaZa Hotel is the beginning of Hermann Park, which extends ten or twelve blocks south of the hotel. We walked through the park on a couple of occasions (although we didn't see all of it by any means), and all the pictures we took in the park will be on this page. That it, except for the pictures we took in the McGovern Centennial Garden which, while technically part of Hermann Park, deserves its own page a bit later on.

A Description of Hermann Park

One of Houston's oldest public parks, Hermann Park was first envisioned as part of a comprehensive urban planning effort by the city of Houston in the early 1910s. Following the recommendation of a 1913 report which identified the then-rural area between Main Street and Brays Bayou as ideal for a large urban park, real estate investor and entrepreneur George H. Hermann, who owned most of the area and served on the city's parks board, bequeathed his estate in 1914 to Houston for use as a public green space. By 1916, famed landscape architect George Kessler had completed a master plan for the park which was gradually implemented throughout the following decades. Ultimately, Hermann Park became one of the clear expressions of the City Beautiful movement in Houston.

If you look at the map of the Museum District in Houston, you can also see the northern portion of Hermann Park. This map covers the part of the park that we actually walked through during our stay here.

Closest to the Hotel ZaZa (actually right across Main Street from the hotel) is the Mecom Fountain, and that was one place that we stopped a couple of times on our walks.

Just south of the hotel, across Hermann Drive, is an area where three or four monuments and smaller structures are located, and this small area, too, was one that we frequently walked by as it wasn't far from the hotel.

Further south, at the north end of a long reflecting pool, is the major equestrian statue in the park- a memorial to Texas legend Sam Houston (for whom the city is named). At the south end of this reflecting pool is the Pioneer Memorial Obelisk.

Just west of the reflecting pool is a relatively new area of the park, the Japanese Garden, and to the east of the reflecting pool is the Miller Outdoor Theatre.

You will notice that the McGovern Centennial Garden is in the northeast corner of the park, but I'm going to treat that garden as a separate destination, with its own page in this album.

To organize the pictures that we took in Hermann Park, I want to take a look at each of these park features in turn, and we'll begin with the Mecom Fountain.

The Mecom Fountain

The Mecom Fountain is a 1964 fountain designed by Eugene Werlin, located in the traffic circle at the intersection of Main and Montrose streets. It was presented to the City of Houston by John W. and Mary Mecom and was the largest in the city at the time it was completed.

The Mecom Fountain seen from the Southwest

In the nice view at left, you are looking at the fountain with the Hotel ZaZa in the background. Being in the middle of a fairly busy traffic circle, getting out to the fountains can be a little tricky, but we didn't really have much trouble getting out there and taking some closeup pictures.

Here are the best of our pictures of the fountain as we tried to get it from different perspectives:

(Click on Thumbnails to View)

With fountains, which are like monuments in motion, it takes a movie to do justice to the installation, so I did make one movie looking at them from the southern end. You can use the player below, right to watch that movie.

The Mecom Fountain (Mouseover Image Above for Video Controls)

The fountain is actually composed of three separate fountains, with the larger of the three in the center of the grouping. As it turned out, we only took one really good picture that shows all three individual fountain elements:

The Sam Houston Memorial

Beginning at the Mecom Fountain, there is a strip of parkland bordered by two roads that leads south; this area is typically the site of seasonal plantings. At the south end of this strip of parkland is a circular plot, and in the center stands the Sam Houston Statue.

The Sam Houston Statue

Sam Houston, also known as Sam Houston Monument, is an outdoor bronze sculpture of the Texas historical figure executed by the sculptor Enrico Cerracchio. The work is administered by the City of Houston's Municipal Arts Commission.

Sam Houston was designed by Cerracchio in 1924 and dedicated on August 16, 1925. The equestrian statue depicts Sam Houston atop his horse, wearing military attire and a long cape. He has a beard and points with his right arm. The bronze sculpture measures approximately 20 feet x 20 feet x 9 feet, and is set on a gray granite arch base that measures approximately 25 feet x 18 feet x 9 feet with a Lone Star on its keystone.

The statue's condition was deemed "treatment urgent" by the Smithsonian Institution's "Save Outdoor Sculpture!" program in March 1993, and this prompted the Arts Commission to look for private funding to rehabilitate the statue. It was cleaned and repaired in the late 1990s, but I can't find any reference to major restoration since then.

Both Fred and took pictures around the statue; one that I took shows the view looking north towards the Mecom Fountain. The statue stands at the north end of the reflecting pools that run further south into Hermann Park, and once we passed the statue we could look back and get nice pictures of Sam Houston and the reflecting pool. Here are three more views of the Sam Houston statue that we took from different angles:

I found a place to stand near the statue and then tried to use my camera to make a 360° panorama, but these are tricky to do, as you have to move the camera on the level and at a constant speed (neither too fast nor too slow). Panoramas of 100° or so are pretty easy, but beyond 180° they become quite difficult. After a few false starts, I decided to go the second route, and take a series of eight pictures covering an entire circle. Then, in "post production", I used software to merge them together. The result was a pretty neat panorama. It was pretty wide, of course, so I've put it in the scrollable window below:

The Pioneer Memorial Obelisk

The granite obelisk known as the Pioneer Memorial was erected in Hermann Park in 1936, the centennial of Texas independence. It stands as a proud vertical statement next to the horizontal reflection pool and McGovern Lake.

The Reflecting Pool and Pioneer Memorial

The memorial was created by Frank A. Teich, a German native who immigrated to the United States in 1878. A graduate of the University of Nuremburg who studied under the sculptor Johannes Schilling, Teich worked on many artistically and architecturally significant projects, including the Cook County Courthouse in Chicago and the Tarrant County Courthouse in Ft. Worth, the State Capitol in Austin, and, in Hermann Park, the Dick Dowling statue and the stone arch that supports the Sam Houston Monument. He operated a granite quarry and the Teich Monument Works in Llano County. He died January 27, 1939, and is buried in Llano.

(Click on Thumbnails to View)

At right are three more good views of the reflecting pool and the Pioneer Monument.

As it turned out, the obelisk had a plaque on its base, and if you would like to read it, just click here.

McGovern Lake

Just south of the Pioneer Memorial there is another rectangular reflecting pool (which you can see in one of the pictures above), and south of that is McGovern Lake.

Prudence and Jax, Guy, and Fred at McGovern Lake

McGovern Lake is an 8-acre lake here in Hermann Park, and the lake has been described as "the sparkling jewel that anchors the park and its surrounding attractions". It has three islands, two of which are designated for migratory birds. Visitors can fish at Bob's Fishing Pier or ride pedal boats.

The lake was expanded and restored during 1999–2001, and was reopened by Mayor Lee Brown in April 2001. The project cost $4 million. The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department restocked the lake, and fishing permits started being issued again in 2002. Species include bass and bluegill. Here are some more pictures of our group- and some lake residents:

(Click on Thumbnails to View)

The Japanese Garden

Another feature of Hermann Park, just a bit northwest of the Pioneer Monument, is the Japanese Garden. The Japanese Garden was developed in 1992 under the direction of Japanese garden architect, Ken Nakajima, along with the City of Houston Parks and Recreation Department.

Mr. Nakajima's challenge was to design a Japanese-style garden around existing tall pines and old oak trees, while creating a "serene and meditative state of mind" through the thoughtful placement of rocks and boulders, flowing water and appropriate plant material. The garden features traditional Japanese elements including an entry portal (Nagaya-Mon), a tea house donated by the Japanese government, a waterfall utilizing Texas pink granite, and plant material reflective of authentic gardens in Japan but suitable to Houston.

In 2006, the Hermann Park Conservancy and the Parks Department began a renovation of the garden under the direction of the Japanese landscape architect, Terunobu Nakai. New features including the Fanning Street entry gate and the dry stream garden were added in time to celebrate the garden's 25th anniversary in 2017.

(Click on Thumbnails to View)

At right are some more of the pictures we took here in the Japanese Garden.

Other Pictures from Hermann Park

As we wandered through Hermann Park on just about each day of our stay in Houston, we had an opportunity to take other pictures of some of the monuments and structures here.

The Houston Museum of Natural Science

The Houston Museum of Natural Science is a natural history museum located on the northern border of Hermann Park. The museum was established in 1909 by the Houston Museum and Scientific Society, an organization whose goals were to provide a free institution for the people of Houston focusing on education and science. Museum attendance totals over two million visitors each year. The museum complex consists of a central facility with four floors of natural science halls and exhibits, the Burke Baker Planetarium, the Cockrell Butterfly Center, and the Wortham Giant Screen Theatre (formerly known as the Wortham IMAX Theatre). The museum is one of the most popular in the United States and ranks just below New York City's American Museum of Natural History and Metropolitan Museum of Art and the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco in most attendance amongst non-Smithsonian museums. Much of the museum's popularity is attributed to its large number of special or guest exhibits.

The Sundial Fountain (Mouseover Image Above for Video Controls)

Just outside and to the right of the front of the museum is a really neat fountain, which is actually at the base of a large sundial. I thought that the fountain was pretty neat, and so I made a movie of it. You can use the player at right to have a look at the movie I made.

The initial museum organization was created in 1909 and the primary collection was acquired between 1914 and 1930; this included the acquisition of a major gem and mineral collection. The growing collection was first housed in Houston's city auditorium, then its central library, and then at a site in the Houston Zoo. The museum was officially renamed the Houston Museum of Natural Science in 1960, and its Hermann Park facility was completed in 1969.

By the 1980s, the museum's permanent displays included a dinosaur exhibit, a space museum, and exhibits on geology, biology, petroleum science, technology, and geography. In 1988, the Challenger Learning Center was opened in memory of the Space Shuttle Challenger crewmembers; the Wortham IMAX Theatre and offsite George Observatory were opened in 1989. When the number of visitors passed the million-per-year mark in 1990, the museum embarked on an expansion program that is still ongoing.

In June 2012, HMNS opened a new 230,000 square foot wing to house its paleontology hall, more than doubling the size of the original museum. The museum displays more than 60 large skeletons, putting it among the top three in the world by that measure. Included are four Tyrannosaurus rex and three large Quetzalcoatlus.

(Click on Thumbnails to View)

At left are some of the other photos that we took as we walked through Hermann Park- particularly in the area of the park near to the Hotel ZaZa. I hope you will take a look at them.

Hermann Park is an amazing place, and we could easily have spent two days just in the park and its various facilities. But we'd come for the Van Gogh exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts, so we didn't have the luxury of that much time.

You can use the links below to continue to another photo album page devoted to our Houston visit.

	The McGovern Centennial Gardens
	The Cullen Sculpture Garden and Glassell School
	Return to the Index Page for our Trip to Houston