![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Tim-Walker-age-24-in-his-workshop-1000x604.jpg\" "\\"Courtesy")
A young Tim Walker at work crafting a neon piece. His family estimates he may have been about 24 years old in these photos.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\tA young Tim Walker at work crafting a neon piece. His family estimates he may have been about 24 years old in these photos.<\/p>\n
For more than 40 years, the drive down West Alabama Street in Montrose featured a small but eyecatching shop. Passing by at night you might catch the glowing green outline of the Houston skyline, a row of vibrant pink flamingos or the silhouette of a woman in a bright red swimsuit \u2013 frozen mid-dive. <\/p>\n
It was called the Neon Gallery<\/a> and early on in its tenure became a staple of the neighborhood. <\/p>\n Sign up for the Hello, Houston!<\/a> daily newsletter to get local reports like this delivered directly to your inbox.<\/p>\n Each piece was carefully crafted by longtime Houstonian and self-taught neon artist Tim Walker. Before customers would collect their orders he would hang them in the window for the neighborhood to enjoy. He sculpted the pieces through a complex process by using extreme heat to bend glass tubes and then precisely filling the tubes with neon gas. <\/p>\n His daughter, Bronwyn Walker, spent years growing up in the gallery and says she loved watching her father work in the back, blaring \u201880s music and getting lost in his craft.<\/p>\n Click here for more inDepth features.<\/a><\/p>\n “He would just blast really fun music and, like, get in \u2013 I don’t know if he would call it this \u2013 but get into, like, his flow state and just do his thing,” Bronwyn said. <\/p>\n Jeff Davison, a fellow neon artist and close friend to Tim Walker, says he was in a league of his own.<\/p>\n “Nobody better,” Davison said. “He could just make the neon dance inside of itself.”<\/p>\n Walker was well known for his talent. When Houston native and global pop star Beyonce Knowles needed custom neon pieces for a music video she was producing and filming in the city, Walker was the man her team called. <\/p>\n But last fall, the shop went dark. Now when Davison passes by, the familiar glow is gone and the gallery blends into the rest of the block. <\/p>\n “I don’t really notice it much,” Davison said. “You know, we still look for Tim. He’s not there.”<\/p>\n Walker died at age 63 last summer in the deadly Texas Hill Country flooding. His family explored options for keeping the gallery open and looked to hire other artists who might be able to carry on Walker’s work.<\/p>\n But after two months, they decided to permanently close. <\/p>\n “The reality is nobody could really do what he did,” Bronwyn said. <\/p>\n “I think he’d be at peace”<\/p>\n On July 4, 2025, when the Guadalupe River began to flood the Hill Country, the Walker family and some friends were asleep in their river home in Hunt, Texas. At about 3 a.m., the rain pelted hard onto their tin roof, waking Bronwyn. She says within minutes, others in the house were awake and escaping through a single window they’d broken open. <\/p>\n Their pillows, lamps and furniture were all floating around them. <\/p>\n “It was almost like an optical illusion looking out the window because it was so dark and so rainy it took us a while to understand that our windows were underwater,” Bronwyn said.<\/p>\n RELATED: Life after the flood: How a Houston father\u2019s loss spurred a quest to protect others<\/a><\/p>\n Moments after they escaped, Bronwyn says she heard the house implode. For hours they battled the deadly flood waters, with some clinging to trees and others stranded on roof tops. Slowly, Bronwyn, her son Walker, her brother Stewart and mother Suzette were rescued.<\/p>\n Tim was still missing. Stewart immediately joined ground search operations. Bronwyn spent her time calling hospitals, morgues and shelters, desperate for news. <\/p>\n On July 8, four long days after the flooding began, the Walker family received a call that Tim’s body had been found. <\/p>\n “We didn’t know how he’d be identified,” Bronwyn said. “But we thought that he had his wedding ring on and he did. We have it. My mom has it.”<\/p>\n For Bronwyn, the past year has been complicated as she grapples with grief and survivor\u2019s guilt.<\/p>\n “Although I was devastated at the loss of my dad, I was genuinely surprised to be alive and so it was balancing the seesaw of your emotions,” Bronwyn said. “I think he would be at peace with how everything happened. I think he would prefer that it was him who passed over anyone else in the home.”<\/p>\n “Extraordinary and unique talent” <\/p>\n Bronwyn describes her father as a generous and creative man who could fix anything. A man who loved drawing, designing and working with his hands. Fittingly, he was self-taught. <\/p>\n “What he didn’t like to do was go to school so he spent like a semester at [University of Houston] and was like, \u2018Pass. No thank you,'” Bronwyn said. <\/p>\n That sentiment was echoed by Walker himself in an interview with <\/a>Houston Public Media<\/a> in 2014. <\/p>\n “College was not for me,” he said at the time. “I took some advice from my father that said, \u2018Pick something you love and be better than anybody else.’ “<\/p>\n Walker opened his shop in 1983 at 21 years old. He first took his designs to professionals to be constructed through a process called fabricating neon. He watched for about a year before deciding to tackle the craft himself. <\/p>\n The work is as technical as it is artistic. It involves heating, bending and shaping glass tubes at temperatures of roughly 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit before carefully filling them with neon gas to create the signature vibrant glow of the pieces. Bronwyn says her father’s arms and hands frequently had burns. <\/p>\n Expertise in the art form is increasingly rare. <\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/The-Neon-Gallery-in-the-90s-1000x679.jpg\" "\\"Courtesy")
The Neon Gallery photographed in the early 1990s. Before clients picked up commissioned works, Tim Walker would hang the pieces in the windows for the neighborhood to enjoy.<\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Goode-Co-Delivery-Truck-1000x667.jpg\" "\\"Courtesy")
The Goode Co. Seafood restaurant was an early client of Tim Walker\u2019s.<\/p>\n
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