MENIL COLLECTION AT 25

The Menil Collection celebrates its 25th anniversary today. OffCite recalls how revolutionary John and Dominique were to the Houston community before the collection was even built! I lived less than a block from the Menil, and it was my oasis from the dog eat dog of Houston life.

Before they brushed their great gray wings across an otherwise ordinary neighborhood of bungalows in lower Montrose, before their place in Houston’s history felt as ordained as the live oaks, and before Houstonians began trading stories about sightings of a thin and ethereal woman seated in front of her museum’s great paintings, there was simply a couple: John and Dominique de Menil. A pair of émigrés who fled France after the Nazi invasion with their three small children in tow. A couple whose wealth, a prominent Houstonian once told Grace Glueck for a May 18, 1986, New York Times Magazine article, was “really peanuts,” when measured on the same scales as Houston’s old oil aristocracies. A couple whose story is as much about Houston’s coming of age during a time of social upheaval as it is about their pushing a cadre of visionaries to accomplish the extraordinary wherever an institution gave them the space and freedom to act. To recall just a few of the details of this story is as much an elegy as it is a celebration.

Houston: No more moderately priced rentals in Montrose?

From 1986 to 2000, I lived in Richmont Square apartment complex in the Montrose area of Houston, close to the University of St Thomas. The property is owned by the Menil Foundation - Dominque de Menil placed her fantastic art collection in the Menil Museum, on Sul Ross, just behind Richmont Square. Rice, University of Houston, St Thomas students and Texas Medical Center staff lived there amid amazingly tall live oaks. The site had been previously owned by an order of Roman Catholic nuns who stipulated that the trees not be cut down, when they sold the property.

Now the foundation plans to demolish the 495 unit complex to replace it with...who knows what. Good-bye reasonable rents in the near-town!?

... its board has already approved a master plan that would clear much of the area for galleries, sculptures and program-related buildings.

However, the details on exactly what would replace Richmont Square remain part of “a flexible plan” that will likely not be implemented for “five or 10 years, even longer,” according to Vance Muse, communications director for Menil.

“We now have to decide how to implement it, emphasizing careful growth,” Muse said.

In its current form, the approved master plan for the Menil-owned area, adjacent to Richmond Avenue, calls for dense residential use and commercial development.

Will the character of an already changing character of the Montrose be changed for ever?

“We’d like to keep it bohemian, if at all possible,” he said. “There has always been a commitment (by Menil) to offering a break.”

If not, Richmont Square would join the ranks of other large, moderately priced rental properties in the area that have been replaced in recent years by more expensive dwellings — or by nothing at all.

Related Posts on Richmont Square and the Menil:

• Chipperfield Sculpts the New Menil: Goodbye, Richmont Square
• The Menil Looks at Richmond
• What the New Collection of Menil Collections Might Look Like

Photo of Richmont Square parking lot courtesy River Oaks Examiner; photo of the Menil courtesy of the Menil Museum.