Most downtown walking tours are highlight reels: a few grand old buildings, a founding date, a photo opportunity. The Beaumont Heritage Society's new tour, called Crosswalks, was built to do something harder. Launched this month and running every Friday and Saturday through Halloween, the roughly one-mile walk traces downtown Beaumont's actual booms and busts, from the Spindletop-era optimism that filled the Crosby House to Ben Rogers' ill-fated Hilton Hotel a few decades later.

What sets it apart is what organizers chose not to leave out. The tour examines the forces that actually shaped downtown's core, including landmark asbestos litigation, racial segregation, and the outsized influence of the Sun Oil Company on how the district grew and, later, how it stalled. None of that is comfortable material for a Saturday evening tour. All of it is true, and all of it is part of why the streets look the way they do now.

Organizers describe the tour as an opening for a bigger conversation, not a closing argument. It asks people walking those same sidewalks to consider not just why downtown looks the way it does, but what it should look like going forward, treating that as an open question rather than one already settled by history.

There is a version of civic pride that only wants the highlight reel. Crosswalks bets that Beaumont residents can handle more than that, and that a downtown worth caring about is one whose full story gets told, including the parts that never made it onto a postcard.

Tours run Fridays and Saturdays at 5:15 p.m. through October 31.

Tickets are $20 at beaumontheritage.org, with proceeds supporting the Beaumont Heritage Society and the John Jay French Museum.