IronTiger

It looks like it was closed between 2006 and 2009 with the pavement being torn out in 2010.

FWIW, I never figured out where this thing was, and even in the 2002 shot, I don't see the left-hand exit. This is because a) the HOV lane is there, although the HOV lane was installed at some point after '78 even if the HOV lane wasn't there, there should be inner shoulders there anyway, and I see no place where the left-hand enter/exit COULD come up. Do you have an approximate location?

Alexan Silber is a large, dense upscale apartment building that replaced the leftover land from a large 1970s-era Holiday Inn that was demolished in the widening. Actually, I read that the Holiday Inn wasn't actually too much in harms way (parking lot clipped, but the majority of the building was safe) but torn down in a land swap. EDIT: Yes, the land also covers the old car dealership, which I clearly see on the map now.

All I can find is "To authorize the Secretary of the Interior to acquire land to operate a visitor center for Joshua Tree National Park, and for other purposes." for the bill it refers to. I think seeing the actual bill wording would be necessary before jumping to any conclusions.

However, in reading, while Riverside Terrace was once the white Jewish center of the neighborhood, today, that people group now resides in Meyerland. Clearly Meyerland did take aim at Riverside Terrace and was instrumental in altering the demographics.

While "mongrel neighborhoods" seems like veiled racism (and I'm not denying that there may be a bit of that), I don't think that, especially if you consider that Riverside Terrace didn't have anyone that wasn't white living in it prior to '52 (if I recall correctly, the major demographic shifts happened after the 288 clearance), and the fact that they say "stately magnificent homes", which they wouldn't if they thought that poorly of the "mongrel neighborhoods".

If frontage roads promote commercial growth, I think that would be a plus for the city rather than a minus. As commercial taxes tend to have a higher pay-out than residential (unless I'm completely wrong about that), encouraging commercial use along freeways will drive a good tax base even higher, instead of the inverse, where residential use could see land value DROP because of freeway proximity.

So then, they're configuring it to be every other freeway in the Houston freeway system, frontage roads, two stoplights, turnarounds on the frontages? Boo. I mean, Barker Cypress at 290, for instance, always had the wide "cloverleaf" turn-outs so you didn't need to stop if you were on the frontage road, but the reconfiguration now allows you, if you were going to turn south on Barker Cypress lets you make a cloverleaf directly onto (or directly off) Barker Cypress without dealing with the frontage roads, which are already lined with commercial link. When they widened the freeway in Conroe, for areas where the frontage road stretched out wide enough for its stoplights, they actually ended up keeping the frontage road "bypass" (north 336 and Interstate 45), though where ROW wasn't there, they didn't have it. Additionally, with the exception of ONE place in Conroe, I can't find a highway reconstruction project in Houston where they forced the frontage roads or the cross-street to stop where they hadn't before. The alternative to frontage roads in a lot of cases is an unwieldily set-up where the exits and entrances directly connect to the road going over or under the highway and have ANOTHER stop with a two-way road that paralleled the freeway that didn't cross it. This was one of the problems of the old Katy Freeway pre-reconstruction, there was the westbound frontage road, then across the railroad was ANOTHER intersection where Old Katy Road went. Even without the railroad, the additional pseudo-frontage road must have been frustrating.

How long have you had this site? Like, this link refers to a highway that was eventually built out around 2005...

Some of those are kind of bad examples--New Orleans and SF have true heritage trolleys and have been there for years and years, and Memphis is kind of weird because although they run trolleys on it and it is a true trolley (overhead wire system, single car), those tracks are shared with the railroad grid, and in theory, a real freight train could come roaring down the streets of Memphis, assuming it's able to make the incredibly tight turns only a slow, single-car trolley could do easily.

Although I tend not to support closing roads, that segment of MacGregor can go as it won't create any discontinuous segments between the road itself (except for one part and that would be renamed), it was already off the grid anyway (road grid), and in 2009 (about) they closed the westbound part of MacGregor that went all those trees and turned it into a trail, so instead of MacGregor being a long meandering jog through the park, it became a boring four lane road. There's also the fact that closing doesn't force you to detour awkwardly.

WHAT is that building advertising?

I think that my planned location is fine as it is (it isn't really that far away from the current location, and especially not in relative senses), but it's all the infrastructure built up. And as much as the "park off-site" thing may sound great in theory, there's two problems: 1) People will still end up trying to circle around the park area trying to find parking, or may get lost trying to find the off-site parking. 2) Shuttles won't work all that well unless they have a dedicated ROW (like Disney World). However, there's a few more crazier ideas I thought up: Dig up the existing parking lot in phases for an underground parking deck (continuous) that links the parking garage across Hermann Park Drive. A ramp will lead up to the zoo, which uses the old space for expansion space. Permanently close MacGregor Way between Almeda and Cambridge, renaming the last segment (between Cambridge and Holcombe) as Braeswood. This lets the park directly interface with the bayou. A parking garage at Holcombe and Almeda is built with a new dedicated shuttleway going back to the zoo.

To be honest, it kinda looks like they have already at this point...

That's too bad. Perhaps a new group can pick it up and get new sponsors?

The problem with off-site shuttles, especially if they're too far away, is that visitors won't find it (remember: out of towners go there too) and end up circling around the Hermann Park area anyway. A little forethought could even bring parking around the South Loop area and taking the light rail back up, but most people don't have that forethought.

I've never had a blowout yet, but I hope it isn't where speeds are fast, I'm not on the immediate right lane, or there's no clearance on the other side (shoulders are good, sharp drop-offs/bridges are bad). Close encounters I've never had but no serious "I'm f'd!" moments like the unfortunate situation in the dashcam video below:

I caught a glimpse of the Sam Houston Coliseum in the opening shot, too. I enjoyed the video...but is the rest of it lost?

Once that kudzu-like stuff starts growing on the brick, it will actually destroy the concrete that keeps the bricks together. I think it would be nice for a family to move in and fix up the home to make it a rather nice place to live.

Well, Baymont and Park Inn are not common ownership, and given the age of it, I'm guessing it used to be something more interesting.

And so now we come full circle back to why my parents (my mother, actually) never liked it. I knew that Houston was pretty bad in terms of pollution and other stuff (but then again, so was the rest of the country) and the recession did hurt and hurt bad, but I was trying to figure out if it was a legitimate concern or just a bad reputation. I mean, I agree with Subdude in no one actively disliking Houston, it never got to Detroit/Philadelphia/New Orleans/Cleveland-levels of bad reputation but it wasn't worth liking a lot either. After all, we're only just now reading articles that say "Hey, maybe Houston isn't so bad after all!" I'm not here to say my life would've been better or worse if I grew up in Houston, and it's possible that I'll move to Houston myself in 2015 after I graduate. It could happen. As for my uncle in Baytown, around that same time, he moved out of Baytown to Baton Rouge and continued to work for Exxon (and later, ExxonMobil) until he retired at which point he moved back to Texas (but not in Houston area).

Has that ever been very convincing and didn't come off as a bit tacky at best?

When going with someone to pick someone else up from the airport, I passed by two hotels, which is of course nothing spectacular but something else piqued my interest: they were connected by an enclosed bridge, with one being Park Inn by Radisson and the other Baymont Inn & Suites. This connection has been intact since the 1980s (the Park Inn was built in the 1970s). It's more than likely that these things have changed names over the years, but is there any story behind as to why these two hotels are connected? Is the bridge still open and they just left it like that? Were they originally one name? There has to be a good story behind this. Does anyone know?

I found a few references to Tang City, including "having two tenants at its peak" and this 1986 article which states the following: I'm guessing the three were the best it got. And of course, another failed 1980s thing was Continental Plaza, a subdivision that never developed and is now a scary grid of deteriorated roads and other stuff.

See, that's a problem--while my parents could've moved to a cheap home in that era, the neighborhoods were so much in flux that it would be unknown if they were moving to a cheap place that would spring back to life or a neighborhood that would continue to deteriorate. Lots of trendy 1980s neighborhoods went on the market for cheap and just got worse.