The Montrose was unique as cruising area and "entertainment" district before many of today's other (typically Sun Belt) cities' became popular. What do we have in today's "entertainment districts" such as Houston's downtown, Rice Village and such as well as The Sunset Strip, West Hollywood in L.A., Deep Ellum up in Big D, the GasLamp in San Diego, Tempe's entertainment drag, Sundance Square in Ft. Worth, etc.? They are full of clubs, bars and whatnot but when you walk those streets in general, there is a purpose to the pedestrianism, namely the destination. One does not see throngs of people simply sitting just for the sake of it, you know, parking their butts on sidewalks or doorways. Well, yeah, you see passed-out bums and panhandlers on Hollywood sidewalks but...that was about the famous nightclubs. That was the unique thing about The Montrose in the 1980s. Surely it was a pain in the ass every nocturnal weekend for its residents when masses of folks from the suburbs and other Texas cities/towns cruised on in for the drag shows, new wave clubs, tattoo parlors, fights and such. However it was the streetlife cruisers really went for. Indeed, all that was something to look back on. The 1980s Montrose was not a prepackaged entertainment district that we increasingly know of today but a true nocturnal repository of street life. People were just sitting or standing on the sidewalks and boutique/home porches just for the purpose of gawking! This was a genuine urban carnival in the purest sense. Yeah, there were clubs and eateries in the 1980s but they were not necessarily the primary purpose of "cruising the Montrose." It was for the people themselves, the scoping of each other. For meeting, for greeting, for fighting and for conducting unsavory transactions of one sort or another, it was all there. I remember in my teens cruising the 80s Montrose, seeing fellow high school mates, greeting them with Schaefer beer from coolers...tossing them across the lane, running out of the gridlocked car and finding somewhere to relieve myself then going back the car since it only moved two feet since leaving it. The most noteworthy was when some buddies and I went to some heavy metal show, some club now long defunct, and our car got towed! We wandered all over, even making our way to some hotel in downtown Houston. I remember Westheimer that night so full of nightly pesdestrians...looking for something, looking for someone (or someones). I think of an old song by the British hard rock group, UFO, called "Out in the Streets." As late as 1988, cruising was just there in the Montrose. Untamed, raw but purely pedestrian color in the night. Then one night that year, one hundred or so Houston Police officers put a permanent close to that era. I know what it was like in Clearwater Beach, Florida in the 1980s, the Tampa Bay area's cruising spot. It was quite more tame and conservative...and Mandalay Boulevard did not offer that unique sidewalk Montrose intimacy. I didn't know what Westwood Village in L.A. was like in the 1980s but in pictures it looked like the typical destination entertainment district and not the sidewalk folding chair that was known as Lower Westheimer. The rambunctious Montrose of yesteryear, it can thus be offered, was a unique phenomenon as far as Sun Belt cities' wild zones of the 1980s are concerned.