Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Some days, Remi Ellison barely has time to eat amid the bustle at WOW African Hair Braiding, as a steady stream of customers demands her constant attention.

With an eye for detail, the owner of the southwest Houston salon bounces back and forth between a half-dozen customers, ensuring everyone is getting their hair braided properly.

Ellison can get so engrossed in the work that she skips meals, though she doesn’t mind. To her, braiding hair is “food for the soul,” sustaining her throughout 12-hour days.

“I can stay a whole day from morning ‘til night, until the last customer, before you see me asking for even water,” Ellison said on a recent Wednesday between appointments.

In recent years, Ellison’s love of her craft has bumped up against the realities of where her business is located: the Bissonnet Track. For the past five years, WOW has operated out of a run-of-the-mill strip mall inside the one-mile loop that makes up the track, a stretch synonymous for decades with sex trafficking, prostitution and drug dealing.

But over the last several months, Ellison has noticed a dramatic change in the area, the result of Houston city officials taking a simple yet effective step in June — closing two roads in the Track at night — to choke off demand for illicit activity. Gone are the scantily clad sex workers loitering outside Ellison’s business, the slow-moving cars with tinted windows, the used condoms littering the parking lot.

For Ellison and her employees, the revitalization has lifted the burden of navigating such a challenging environment — and conversations with neighboring businesses reveal the same relief, she said.

“The place is looking decent now, the area is looking decent,” Ellison said. “You can walk from the first (end of) Bissonnet to the last Bissonnet, and you feel like, ‘Oh, this is a new state or a new environment.”’

The turnaround follows various failed efforts by city leaders to combat sex trafficking and prostitution in the Track. Police have increased patrols, affixed flyers to poles outlining penalties for prostitution, and tried to ban 80 suspected sex workers, pimps and johns from the area — all to no avail.

But the road closures have proven unexpectedly effective, preventing johns from soliciting sex acts on side streets in the Track, said Reece Hardy, commander of the Houston Police Department’s west side patrol division.

‘Just praying to God’

Ellison, 53, learned to braid from her mother. She took to the practice enthusiastically, and her talents soon became evident to her family and friends. Growing up in Nigeria, her free time consisted largely of braiding her school classmates’ hair.

Ellison moved to Houston in 2016 and started working in hair salons to make ends meet. She dreamed of opening her own salon, and three years later, she and her husband, Charles, did just that. Succulent plants lining shelves and windows greet customers in the small space on Centre Parkway, with extensions of almost every color lining a wall toward the back of the salon.

When the Ellisons first moved in, they knew nothing about the area’s history or potential impact on their business.

“I just knew that I lived close to Bissonnet,” said Ellison, whose home sits a few miles west of WOW. “But I didn’t know anything about the nights.”

For much of the 1980s and 1990s, Bissonnet Street on the west side of Houston thrived as a commercial corridor, anchored by the Westwood Mall. But when the mall closed near the turn of the century, many businesses moved or closed. (The mall has since been refashioned into the Southwest Corporate Center.)

Decreased investment and vacant buildings fostered an environment for illegal activity. Over time, the area began attracting people far and wide looking for sex work or to solicit sex workers, resulting in the Bissonnet Track moniker.

The Track still features a few dozen businesses that reflect one of Houston’s most multicultural neighborhoods: African eateries, Salvadoran and Filipino restaurants, an Islamic book store, a Hispanic church, auto repair shops and banquet halls. But many have struggled to thrive in the Track, surrounded by illegal activity and weighed down by the area’s reputation.

The Ellisons managed to build a loyal client base, with customers traveling from as far away as California and New York. Some patrons sit up to eight hours for box braids, cornrow braids, Senegalese twists and other styles.

Yet the dangerous surroundings required them to take desperate steps to protect customers and themselves. They usually locked the front door during business hours, walked some customers to their cars and took children to a back room, away from the windows, to get their hair braided. When Remi worked late, she frequently called Charles to pick her up, fearful of unfamiliar cars circling the area.

As they worked to establish WOW, the Ellisons wondered whether the stigma of the area hurt their ability to attract customers. They ultimately decided to focus on what they could control: the quality of their work.

“For the first two or three years, we were just praying to God to keep all our clients safe,” Ellison said.

‘A completely different street’

As the Ellisons fought to build their business, officials from multiple government agencies — including City Hall, Houston Police, Harris County Sheriff’s Office, the local constable’s office, METRO and Alief Independent School District — were brainstorming ways to address the problems.

For Houston City Councilmember Edward Pollard, a letter sent to him from students at nearby Best Elementary School describing what they saw outside their building galvanized his desire to act.

In 2020, law enforcement agencies agreed to patrol the area more frequently. The strategy worked for a bit, Pollard said, but the agencies soon shifted resources elsewhere.

Pollard then worked with the county to install signs around the area reminding people of a law passed in 2021 that changed solicitation of prostitution from a misdemeanor to a felony charge. The signs had some effect, but they ultimately contributed to stigmatizing the area, Pollard said.

Recognizing that much of the illegal activity was taking place on side roads off Bissonnet Street, Houston police decided barricading two of those roads — Centre Parkway and Plainfield Street — was the best use of resources.

“If you go down Bissonnet now and over the past several months, it looks like a completely different street,” Pollard said. “You don’t see the in-your-face illicit or explicit women with certain clothes on, walking the street. You don’t see men in cars stopping to engage with them. They’re just not there anymore.”

The safer environment has reinvigorated the Ellisons, who hope to introduce more styles and massage chairs in the new year.

On the recent Wednesday, stylist Hope Erinle applied styling gel to Nelson Ofarrill’s hair as she sectioned it into boxes for braiding. “Beauty is pain,” Ofarrill said with a grimace as Erinle tightened the twist in her hand.

Next to him, Mariola Nchama applied mousse to Onome Arusiuka’s finished braids, while another stylist began to rebraid Nicol Soto’s hair.

Soto has been coming to WOW for years, saying her braids keep longer than those she got elsewhere. She’s familiar with the reputation of the Bissonnet area, but she tried to put it in the back of her mind when visiting the salon.

Local anti-trafficking advocates have applauded the clean-up of the Track, but they warn sex activity will only move elsewhere without continued efforts to get workers off the streets.

Kathy Griffin, a former sex worker and director of human trafficking services at the Harris County Constable’s Office Precinct 1, said some illicit activity has moved to Airline Drive on the city’s north side. Some sex trafficking, meanwhile, has moved onto social media, dating sites and apps, Griffin said.

More change is coming to the Track, too. In the coming weeks, city officials will install swinging gates that take the place of barricades placed by police each night since June.

Remi Ellison hopes the road closures will reduce the stigma around her business’ neighborhood, leading to increased investment and more customers.

“We want people to know that it’s not the same Bissonnet as they used to know,” Ellison said. “Now, it’s a different story. I think I’ve enjoyed the last six months.”

Republish This Story

Republish our articles for free, online or in print.