Living in Bellaire, Houston

Evelyn's Park replaced a century-old plant nursery at Bellaire Boulevard and Newcastle with five acres of gardens and a curving stream, anchored by the Trevillion, a two-hundred-foot curved steel pergola that frames the park's entrance and great lawn. A natural playground built around reclaimed tree stumps and a ten-foot slide gives kids a climbing structure with real texture, and the Move One Place On sculpture tucks more than a hundred and fifty Alice in Wonderland details into its benches and figures, rewarding a slow, close look. Bellaire runs its own police and public-works departments across roughly three and a half square miles, a footprint compact enough that residents notice its edges. Streets throughout the city mix original one-story homes with larger rebuilt ones, shaded by pecan and oak trees that predate most of the construction happening around them. West along Bellaire Boulevard, past the city line, the road runs for several miles through Houston's Chinatown and Asiatown district, where Vietnamese, Chinese, Taiwanese, Korean, and Thai restaurants fill strip centers — a dining corridor Bellaire residents can reach without much of a drive.

Because the city covers so little ground, a full grocery run or a big-box shopping trip typically means driving past the city line into a neighboring area, since Bellaire was platted for houses rather than retail.

Evelyn's Park's pergola, gardens, and sculpture give the city a shared front yard, while its namesake boulevard stretches west into one of Houston's most varied restaurant scenes.