Houston SLAB Holiday Went From a Brewery Day Party to a City-Honored Tradition

On a hot, rainy Sunday in June 2019, dozens of slabs filled the outdoor lot at 8th Wonder Brewery in East Downtown Houston. Vintage Cadillacs and Oldsmobiles sat next to newer Pontiacs and Buicks, all on swangas, trunks up, systems loud enough that the local rap acts on stage had real competition. People crowded into whatever shade they could find. It was the fifth annual Houston SLAB Holiday Car Show & Concert, and by then it had become one of the fixed dates on the city's slab calendar.

Texas Highways, in its 2021 look at slab culture, called the Houston Slab Holiday Car Show at Wonder Brewery the most popular event of its kind and said it takes place every June. For a culture that spent decades living in parking lots, park loops and side streets, that is a real shift.

A day party gets a city's blessing

The show's path to respectability went through City Hall. According to a 2018 report from Houston's 97.9 The Box, republished by Black America Web, what had been an unofficial Slab Holiday day party at 8th Wonder Brewery turned into an official Slab Holiday on Sunday, June 24, 2018. The City of Houston commended the organizers for their commitment to community involvement and for their impact on Houston's culture. Two days later, the same week, the city honored Brad "Scarface" Jordan with his own day. Slabs and one of the city's rap pillars got official recognition in the same week.

The station's write-up described the culture's touchstones in a single breath: old schools, candy paint, the fifth wheel, the popping trunk and hanging out at MacGregor Park. It is a good checklist for anyone headed to the show for the first time.

The brewery lot had already been a slab gathering spot before then. ABC13 posted video in 2017 of slab owners showing off their cars at 8th Wonder Brewery.

What the 2019 show looked like

The Houston Chronicle covered the 2019 edition with a reporter and a staff photographer, and their work gives the clearest picture of what the show is like. Event organizer Steve Walker told the Chronicle some people traveled from the East Coast and even the United Kingdom to attend. Rapper Paul Wall made what the paper called his annual appearance, and Jerrel "Harbody Kiotti" Brown from 97.9 The Box hosted.

The cars covered the whole history of the style. Chronicle photographer Yi-Chin Lee's gallery from that day includes Joseph "King of Kings" Deboest's 1975 Cadillac Eldorado, a Cadillac Biarritz, a pink Cadillac, a 1986 Chevrolet Caprice, a 1982 Buick Riviera brought down from Bryan-College Station, a 1992 Cadillac Brougham and newer Buick Park Avenues. A 2012 Camaro from Baton Rouge showed up with, by its owner's count, 10 televisions, a PlayStation 4 and 48 speakers.

The quieter stories were there too. Katy's Carzavier Mosley brought a 1984 Eldorado he spent more than three years and about $40,000 rebuilding, dedicated to his late sister. "Typically, a slab comes out on days like this," Mosley told the Chronicle, listing car shows, holidays and sunny days as the times to ride.

Color is the club

One detail first-timers notice right away: some cars park together in matching colors. Walker explained it to the Chronicle. Cars grouped by color represent owners who might be friends or come from the same neighborhood. "They chose a particular color as a group and they stuck with it," he said.

Those are slab lines, social clubs made up of people who drive cars of the same color, as Texas Highways described them. The history behind the colors is not always friendly. Hagerty's 2021 feature on the scene reported that in the late 1990s, when original Cragar wheels were scarce and dangerous to own, riders began traveling in packs and painting their cars the same color so their affiliation was obvious. As replica wheels became available and more people outside that world started building slabs, Hagerty wrote, owners got careful to choose colors that were neutral or tied to a general region rather than a gang.

At a show like SLAB Holiday, that history shows up as a row of matching candy red Cadillacs or a line of purple, parked together, owners standing in front of them. It reads as pride now. It is still worth knowing where it came from.

How it fits the slab calendar

SLAB Holiday is one stop in a year that has grown a lot of them. Texas Highways credited Chad Cartwright, who launched the slab website rollin84z.com in 2003 and Slab Ridaz magazine in 2009, with helping start slab parades and shows alongside builders like Kevin "Meyagi" Mitchell and B.G. Porter. The magazine also pointed to the 2013 Houston Slab Parade and Family Festival, organized with the Houston Museum of African American Culture and the Houston Arts Alliance, as a turning point in how the city saw the cars. On most weekends, it reported, slabs gather at MacGregor Park in Third Ward.

The June show at 8th Wonder sits in the middle of all that. It is a brewery lot, a stage, a few hundred people, a rap act or two and a long line of cars that took years to build. For anyone curious about the scene, it is the easiest place to see a lot of it at once, and to ask the owners directly. Bring water, expect heat and maybe rain, and do not lean on the paint.