Westbury Plumber — Five Thousand Homes, One Vintage of Pipe

Westbury is what post-war Houston looked like when it decided to build at scale. Ira Berne, a New York developer who named the place after Westbury on Long Island, started putting it together in the mid-1950s on open land south of Meyerland — including ground that had been the old Sam Houston Airport off South Main. What came out of it was around 5,000 single-family homes, later joined by roughly 3,500 apartment and townhome units: Houston's largest subdivision of its era, laid out in sections — Westbury 1 through 5, Parkwest 1 through 3, and Westbury South — between Bob White Road, South Main, and South Post Oak. Berne had ambitions beyond houses. In 1960 he built Westbury Square at Chimney Rock and West Bellfort, twenty-four acres of clustered shops and second-floor apartments modeled on the Italian piazzas he had walked through in Europe — a genuinely strange and wonderful thing to find in southwest Houston, and remembered fondly long after it came down. Westbury High School opened in the fall of 1961 with 813 students. On the west side of the neighborhood, the Willow Waterhole Greenspace now covers about 290 acres of detention basins and trails. Westbury sits mostly in 77035 and 77096, with the western edge running into 77071. The plumbing consequence of building 5,000 homes in a few short years is simple: the same crews put the same materials in the ground on the same schedule. The cast iron drain lines under Westbury slabs are all roughly the same age and were all installed the same way, so they reach the end of their service life in waves. When we replace a sewer line on one Westbury street, it is rarely the last one we replace on that street.