mollusk

Those aren't the sort of markets that would justify a 787, are they? 

Is that a hazmat warning taped to the window below the stack o' mattresses? 

Is Central Market Square too confusing? A little more upscale grocery experience for the high end residential units that sit above.

It's a bit confusing.  But Central Market, Market Square is a bit repetitive and redundant. 

It's going to be interesting to see how this turns out.  Sometimes 26 sounds a whole lot like the national component, sometimes it sounds more like a product of Houston - a city that hasn't had a majority of anything for a while, and is often quite comfortable with things like what I call "collision cuisine" - like freshly house made banh mi with freshly house made churros for dessert.  On the same menu.  That offers beignets, croissants, and boudin kolaches at breakfast.  

I'm catching all kinds of destruction today.... The wrecking ball in action...

They are dropping it from about 15 feet

Hypnotic, ain't it?

For those interested in the allegations....

Court pleadings are routinely a repository of turgid prose.  However, saying another building of roughly the same mass as the two adjacent buildings is out of character with the neighborhood is just a hoot - as is complaining about a residential health facility next door, when there's another one in the next block.

It's interesting that one the plaintiffs' lawyers signed the verification.  While you can get away with it in state court, it's a bad practice.  In Federal court it will often get you and your firm disqualified, because by signing the verification you just made yourself into a material fact witness.

I feel like the lot in front of Frank's Pizza would be a prime spot for our version of a space needle or some sort of monumental building

The building that was slated for that lot, international tower, would be a monumental building.

hmmmmmmm... 

how about scaling up the Market Square clock tower to take up that entire block?

(**cue:  music from Jaws)

yep, take out pierce elevated,  you still have greyhound, you still have that other bus station (El Expreso), you still have all the homeless that congregate around St Johns and St Josephs. 

That may be a decent current evaluation, but it overlooks the timeline.  For roughly 20 years after the Pierce was built the Greyhound station was across from Union Station (the painted sign on an adjacent building was even visible until it was recently torn down for the two block wrap), and Trailways was where the Four Seasons is now (or thereabouts).  El Expreso didn't even exist, at least not there.  Back In The Day the homeless were routinely gathered and locked up.  Also, even though I am perhaps bolder than the average bear, under the Pierce and 59/69 elevated freeways is icky, even for me.  It's dark and there's bird dooky all over the place - that's way too much for the typical delicate flower who gets skeert of poor folks.

Idk how you expect METRO to deal with the general mobility payments thing.  Those are absolutely essential dollars and no other major city in this country has anything like general mobility payments. 

 

METRO has proposed numerous comprehensive transit plans over the decades, METRO was extremely well run back in the 1980s with Alan Kiepper at the helm.  Of course when he tried to complete the system with a state of the art heavy rail system classic Houston politics/uninformed voters got in the way. 

 

When many powerful politicians are against you and you are starved of funding, it's very difficult to be successful. 

Precisely.  

The "general mobility payments" are nothing more than a ruse with a nifty sounding name that has zilch to do with its actual effect, that was put in place to break a program that a certain now sainted mayor didn't like - a page right out of the playbook of another now sainted politician whose actual record barely resembles the hagiography.  I wouldn't have as big a problem with it if there were an actual, functioning program of repairing and upgrading roads that the busses currently beat the living daylights out of.  (as just one of many examples, Westheimer, anyone?)

The bigger problem is that the "general mobility payments" really function as an increase in the City of Houston tax rate without all the messiness that an acknowledged tax rate increase would have incurred at the time - and the city is now pretty accustomed to having that pool o' money.

No accounting for taste, I guess... but that building was mostly a parking garage before it was torn down.  It was the literal and spiritual predecessor of 601 Travis, right down to housing a parking garage, Texas Commerce Bank's backroom operations, and a private club up top.  Skanska's predecessor was having trouble giving away offices in there.

METRO is a textbook example of how political officials do away with an agency by starving it of funds and turning its leadership into a clown show, and then saying "looky looky - this is a clown show!!!  Let's kill it!!!"  Another example, FEMA... a very effective agency before 2000, and which had been chaired for a few years by a guy who did horse shows when Katrina showed up.  More recently, it's back to being something that just isn't heard of much, because it's back to doing its job rather than being a parking place for gormless campaign donors.

METRO still has some powerful folks who have an investment in it not working (***cough cough Culberson cough***).  Plus, it's way easier to break something than to put it back together.

Deed restrictions have been Houston's Plan A for land use restrictions for the last 100 years, give or take.  While I haven't looked at what we'll call the Lamar Weslayan restrictions in particular, most well drafted sets I've seen included provisions for renewal.  That's how they get around the thing that confuses the living dickens out of law students called the "Rule Against Perpetuities," which prevents someone from clamping down a permanent restriction on land use.

Put differently, deed restrictions are how River Oaks has maintained its character for much longer than Lamar Weslayan was there.

I agree with Montrose.  Along with us looking a lot like Dallas and Atlanta in having several high rise commercial areas in a zoned city, I'd add LA and Denver just off the top of my head.  

Greenway Plaza WAS a neighborhood of fairly nice, Wally-and-the-Beav single family homes, of similar size and quality to whatever remains of Afton Oaks's original stock.  Century Development bought up the whole shootin' match, complete with the occasional holdout - so, yeah, zoning just wouldn't have been a thing for them.  

Regarding Midtown not going high rise:  Offhand, I think the Pierce Elevated did a lot to keep that from happening.  It may not physically interrupt the streets running north - south, but it sure is one giant psychological dividing line.  Also, keep in mind that Houston of the early '60s was about the size of Austin now.

ehhhh... Gulfton was pretty sketch even when new.  Where else could you rent an apartment and get a new video recorder?

Careful Weatherman. Kitty's got claws.

That's right.  Besides, everyone KNOWS that Southwest can't be a REAL airline because they don't offer first class service on 787s to Melbourne (Florida OR Australia).

Betonpumpe.

It sounds so much better in German.

From Gizmodo:

Frei Otto, architect behind some of the most important structures and engineering ideas of the last century, has died just two weeks before he was to receive the Pritzker Prize—the award that people often describe as the Nobel Prize for architecture.

http://gizmodo.com/the-best-of-frei-otto-the-architect-who-engineered-the-1690783540#

While there's certainly more than a bit of a cool factor in repurposing those temptingly large roofs, I suspect that the cost of re-engineering and reinforcing them to hold up something as heavy as a train is prohibitive.  Engineers, please feel free to run some calculations and chime in. 

There is one of those concrete pumper arms now on the garage side. I don't know what they're called...sorry but here's the link.

http://oxblue.com/open/Hines/609Main

In a burst of non-creativity, the device is commonly called a "concrete pump" or "concrete pumper."

Sorry, that's the best I could do to avoid sounding snarky at the end of a day filled with some of my least favorite job duties.  Please bear with.    

(note to self... do not feed trolls today...) 

Wouldn't it more properly be NCC 1701-Q?

Are there any other good spots in downtown that could work for the HSR station?

Other than the two that are frequently mentioned, not really.  Northwest Mall isn't downtown, although as a station location it has its merits with the utility ROW routing.  It would also require a bit of a dice roll with regard to how much complementary redevelopment would come into being nearby, and how long it would take.

Maybe if they go through with the downtown highway rework, the Pierce Elevated? It's next to the bus station, could reuse infrastructure...I mean, it's probably not what will end up happening, but it's an idea.

The problem with going down towards Midtown is that other than somehow routing on the Pierce Elevated, it would require buying up a lot of expensive land for right of way.  That, and it pretty much would require going back over the same ROW to expand to the east or west, and even more expensive land purchases for going towards Galveston.

If the Chron building is included in the mix, then so should the parking lot that's tagged for Stream/Essex, and the Chron's parking garage adjacent to Hogg Palace.

And let's not forget the entire Post Office tract right across the bayou.

What did the HEB Pantry in the Heights used to be prior to 1997?

Moore's (IIRC), a one off grocery store.  It made the Pantry look luxurious and roomy - partially because of a giant wall that mostly cut off the larger part of the store in back.

It sure doesn't have a lot of windows for a residential high rise. I don't get it. All those views wasted with closets and baths likley on exterior walls. Oh, the humanity.

Not quite the waste of views of The Mercer.