Although written like the Texan city Houston, the pronunciation of this major thoroughfare a bit different. It is pronounced house-ton, not hugh-ston, because it was named after planter and lawyer William Houstoun, while the city in Texas was named after politician and soldier Sam Houston. William Houstoun was from Georgia and moved to New York at the end of the 18th century when he married a lady from a prominent New York family.
Houston Street may not have all the necessary characteristics to make it an attractive or historically renowned street, but it does carry out an important function in downtown Manhattan: it is the only bidirectional street between Soho and 14th Street that can get you crosstown from the East River in the east to the Hudson River in the west without any traffic, no matter what time of day.
Houston Street is lined with late 19th and early 20th century buildings, the most famous of which is the red Romanesque Revival style Puck Building on the corner of Lafayette Street. It is called Puck because it displays two gilded statues of the character Puck from Shakespeare's play Midsummer's Night Dream - one over the entrance and the other on the northeast corner.
On the corner of Houston and Mercer Streets stands the famous Angelika Film Center, one of the last movie theaters in the city to feature independent and foreign films. It is popular among NYU film students and often organizes retrospectives of films by New York directors.