HOUSTON — Inside the airport that bears his name, George Herbert Walker Bush looks, at a distance, as if he’s wearing a cape.

An 8-foot-tall bronze statue at the Houston airport shows Mr. Bush, who died at his home here on Friday, standing tall and chisel-chinned against an invisible wind. Up close, the real image comes into focus. The cape is actually his coat, thrown over his shoulder. A man with superhero status in this city, who survived war and political turmoil, resembles not Superman but Clark Kent.

Mr. Bush and Houston — both a little quirky, a little square, a little misunderstood — were a natural fit. The former president was an apolitical Lone Star Yankee, revered for long ago helping to give an international gravitas to a city where he lived off and on since the 1950s and spent his post-White House years. He was born in Milton, Mass., and raised in Greenwich, Conn., but few in Houston ever had the nerve to hold it against him, because just about everybody in Houston came there from somewhere else, too.

[Read the obituary of George H.W. Bush.]

Mr. Bush was the most senior local booster in the city, known nearly as much for being the former chairman of the Harris County Republican Party (in 1963) and a congressman (until 1971) as for being president. One of his last local acts showed his evenhandedness in these partisan times. In June, Mr. Bush wrote a letter to the mayor of Houston, supporting the city’s bid to host the 2020 Democratic National Convention.