Urban Explorations: A Ship Channel Massage Parlor....
....In ruins along with almost everything else on Clinton Drive
Behold the ruins of P-H Spa, a massage parlor that once operated on Clinton Drive, over by the Ship Channel.
Long ago, Clinton was where you might take more adventurous visitors to Houston, bustling as it was by day and by night with two-fisted, rice beer-soaked bars with names like the Cesspool, the Worker’s Bar, the Seafarer’s Retreat, the Mermaid Café, Tater’s Last Chance and Dottie’s Snug Harbor.
In those days, it could take a week to unload a cargo ship, and for much of that time, sailors were free to roam the port, dine in the restaurants, carouse in the bars, and find companionship where they may. The same went for the thousands of shore-based workers – the mechanics, channel pilots, stevedores, and tug boat crews.
Songwriter Rodney Crowell, who grew up nearby, remembered the area’s heyday in an email interview with journalist Chet Flippo.
“Hallowed be The Houston Ship Channel…fifty miles of salt marsh bayou turned world’s longest deep water shipping lane, host waterway to the most sludge-pumping, poisonous gas-spewing paper mills, chemical plants and oil refineries in the Western Hemisphere. The Houston Ship Channel on whose creosote-soaked banks new-monied oil-boom tycoons rub chafed elbows with Mexican drag-line operators and Coonass pile-drivers in a payday Friday winner-takes-all beer and whiskey-chugging contest. Piss on Enron, Houston’s heart and soul is over on the East Side where New Orleans rhythm, Fort Worth blues and Nashville heartbreak once spilled out of it’s honkytonk and icehouse juke boxes onto an endless sea of oyster-shell parking lots. That’s right cat-daddy, Houston Texas, land of hot toddies, cold watermelon and lying sons-of-bitches who’d rather gut you with a Barlow knife than listen to a sappy song.”
Today, most of the people are gone, while only the chemical plants and oil refineries remain, along with their attendant sludge and poisonous gases. And even those are a ways out of town. Containerized shipping eliminated stevedore jobs by the thousands, and now ships can be loaded and unloaded in a fraction of the the time it once took, leaving little time for sailors to wet their whistles on shore. And that time dwindled to zero post-9/11, when pretty much all foreign sailors were forbidden from coming ashore at all.
So — no more sailors and precious few dockers.
The Press’s Josh Harkinson explored the area’s economic demise in a 2004 article. He talked to Hoa Tran, the owner of Clinton Drive’s Hong Kong Restaurant Seamen Nightclub. She remembered that at one time her dance floor would be packed nightly with hundreds of Chinese, Filipino and Scandinavian sailors, but those days were long gone by then. She closed down not long afterward, and IIRC, the Tex-Mex joint that went in afterward met the same fate.
Perpendicular to Clinton runs McCarty. Though it still rumbles with an incessant convoy of big rigs headed to and from the docks, most of its colorful nightlife is also gone.
“Two souvenir shops sold T-shirts and Texas ashtrays to crowds of sailors with time and cash to burn. Every night, the Harbor Lights Night Club offered some of the best live country-western music in town. Ship captains mingled with visitors like Yogi Berra, Howard Hughes and Elvis. ‘When you go to Westheimer now, the Port of Houston used to be like that,’ says club owner John Kontominas. "’And they changed it.’"
The upshot of all of this was that the belly dancers at places like the famous Athens Bar and Grill, who once entertained entire crews of horny, ouzo-soaked Greeks a month a-sea from Piraeus, would have to find another place to shake their tail-feathers. And so on, all up and down Clinton.
In 2007, the only bar David Beebe and I could find open was an extremely shady cantina.
About noon, what looked like a mirage hove into view – a mauve wood-frame building, with a tall privacy fence enclosing a good-sized back yard. We were speculating about its purpose all the way up to the door. Was it a modeling studio? A Mexican gay bar?
A hand-painted sign in the oyster shell parking lot proclaimed that “Parkin” here was $2, which should have been a clue. The sign over the door said it was a tavern. “We’ve got to soak up some of this culture,” Beebe said. “First round’s on me.”
I was thirsty and nervous in more or less equal measure. In we went, me with vastly more misgivings than Beebe.
It was a tiny joint. A TV on the bar beamed a telenovela at the denizens of the place, which included a plump, thirtysomething barmaid, an older Mexican man, two younger guys, and a table of girls who looked to be in their teens. A Mexican flag was festooned on a wall behind the bar, and several posters on another were from the State Department of Health. In Spanish, they dwelled on the theme of “Are you sure she’s 18?”
Beebe ordered two Buds and slapped a ten on the bar. The barmaid pushed a mere two bucks back. Beebe laughed and told her to keep it. The two young guys left the bar, looking sheepish.
“Four bucks for a Bud?” Beebe laughed. “Something tells me there’s more to this place than meets the eye.”
Nobody talked to us. We drank our beers fast and left. The two young guys were still in the parking lot, and they went back in the bar before the door had even closed behind us.
So yeah, one of those human trafficking type joints. Which this wrecked “spa” had also been found to be on several occasions. After numerous vice squad raids and as many grand re-openings, Harris County took a different tack and sued the building’s owner for allowing a cathouse on the premises.
Around 2014, I looked into the ownership of dozens of such establishments, and the results were pretty mindblowing. Doctors, lawyers, pillars of churches and communities out in places like Tanglewood and Memorial — these eminently respectable landlords were in actual fact pimps profiting from the international sex trade. (Sadly, the outlet where I then worked found my reporting a little too spicy for publication.)
P-H Spa was shuttered in 2015. Here is what it looked like inside three years later.
Who knows what happened to the girls who worked and lived there. Already by then they were just a few more ghosts of Clinton Drive.
I used to be one of those girls but I got canceled.
Hey, don't tell the developers of "tall-skinnies"