Frank Lloyd Wright toured a brand new Houston hotel in 1949 and reportedly summed up his entire opinion in one word: why.
The hotel was the Shamrock, built by a wildcat oilman named Glenn McCarthy who had already been told twice in his life that he was a fool, once when he went into the oil business in 1933, and again when he announced he was building an eighteen story, eleven hundred room resort three miles south of downtown Houston, in the middle of nothing. McCarthy's answer to the doubters was simple: he'd been called a fool before, and he'd made himself a millionaire by the age of twenty six anyway.
The Shamrock opened on St. Patrick's Day, 1949, with fifty thousand people crowding the streets outside just to watch the celebrities arrive. Every public room inside was decorated in one of sixty three different shades of green. The pool out back was big enough to host waterskiing exhibitions and Olympic diving trials, one hundred sixty five feet long, holding a hundred and seventy seven thousand gallons of water. The Cork Club, the hotel's private lounge, became the place where Houston oilmen closed deals and, more than once, threw punches. Frank Sinatra performed there. In 1965, a Trader Vic's opened inside the hotel, and for a generation of Houstonians, that tiki bar was the closest thing the city had to a trip to the South Pacific without leaving Main Street.
None of it was enough to keep the Shamrock profitable. Its size and its distance from downtown Houston worked against it for decades, and by 1985 the struggling hotel was sold to the Texas Medical Center. On St. Patrick's Day 1986, employees who had worked there since opening night in 1949 attended one last party in the Emerald Room. Three thousand people, including Glenn McCarthy himself, showed up to protest the hotel's demolition.
It didn't matter. The Shamrock came down in June of 1987.
Today the only piece of the original Shamrock still standing is its parking garage. A high school for health professions sits where the pool used to hold Olympic trials. The china, the chandeliers, and the Trader Vic's tiki mugs are scattered now, sitting in private collections and museum archives around Houston.
Frank Lloyd Wright asked why anyone would build something like the Shamrock. For thirty eight years, Houston had its answer every single day. Then it didn't.