IronTiger

I'm not, by the way, being a fanboy, I'm addressing what is a huge issue in planning HSR. It's all politics, of course...

My290.com shows the PDFs with ROW for an HSR (or something) line. Japanese? What the heck are you talking about?

It's really not, especially if you're talking about going to Dallas. College Station has a major university with very powerful people that are going to push HSR, and before you bring up the doomed Amtrak route, that was using a very odd route that routed it through Corsicana (not Waco) before going to Dallas. (Frankly, I doubt you've ever even poked around the area with Google Earth, much less actually visited it in person)

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It should go northwest, as there's already ROW planned for it, and from there go to Austin/San Antonio, or to College Station/Dallas.

Gee, you think it's possible that the warnings are out of date? While Downtown isn't exactly a safe haven, it's better than Greenspoint. If we are discussing Greenspoint area at all, it's because of the airport, and then we should place a stop at the airport, not at Greenspoint.

Fascinating, I love these old Sanborn Fire Insurance-type maps that show everything in extremely detailed ways that showcase businesses that are completely forgotten today. There was a Weingarten next to it (undoubtedly one of the very first ones in the chain--the first one opened in 1901 in downtown Houston and the second around 1920), which now seems to be a parking garage.

At the new Wayside Road Walmart, the shoe department has already seen shoes so hot, they're BURNING UP!

[on Greenspoint] A few years back, I was at the Renaissance Festival with some friends of a friend. They lived in Greenspoint, and defended it, saying it wasn't bad as people made it out to be, though the mall WAS bad. [on commute to rail] As the bird flies, in Dallas, the airport is about 16 miles away from downtown (approximately). The light rail is 20 miles, with minimal street runnings but with several curves. In Houston, it's the same distance (approximately) but we don't have a lot of spare ROW to work with, so we'll have to do street running. Unless we add light rail down I-45. HSR, conversely, would use up even more right of way than light rail ever would, as you can't have at grade crossings or street running.

A vague, amorphous quote at best. Help millions of people do what? Have easy access to porn? Look at funny cat pictures? Play World of Warcraft in the comfort of their own home? Live more comfortable lives without actually doing anything? If you were to make a case for educational usage, make a case for having more Internet access in libraries, which they (mostly) do, and have been doing since the late 1990s.

Pardon me for asking, but didn't the HAIF logo used to have a thicker "h" in the blue rounded box? When was changed? Couldn't have been more than a few months ago.

Glad no one was hurt...those mini-railroads aren't terribly heavy and could've derailed.

Hardy Yards station shouldn't be the HSR destination. It could, however, be an awesome project when it's complete: "Hardy Yards" sounds like a great name for some sort of post-industrial, ultra-commercial, quasi-hip destination (like Dallas's "Mockingbird Station", or maybe even kind of like Times Square). Put lots of touristy "destination" restaurants, offices, flagship retail, etc. Well, of course it's not for locals, but it would be (if anything close to what I'm describing comes to reality) a definite destination and a way to disable anyone complaining that there's nothing to do in Houston.

Google Earth shows the new one in December 2002 and the parking lot completely paved over. The "newest" Safeways (Briarcrest, Kroger of the Villages, another Kroger) had brown brick and even had the neon interior with pictures of food. Even then, they weren't terribly large or upscale. With H-E-B Pantry and Food Lion building small, no-frills stores and competing on price, and upstream with Fiesta, Kroger, and Randall's building larger, modern, and upscale-leaning stores, and with AppleTree on a shoestring budget, it's surprising that AppleTree lasted as long as it did. A repaint of a 1960s/1970s era store wasn't fooling anybody. Remember, AppleTree as a small, independent grocer lasted three times longer than its original, larger incarnation did!

Further research shows that the Kroger that's there now was rebuilt and is not the original Safeway/AppleTree. Such a store was completely torn down and rebuilt between 1995 and 2002.

One thing I don't get, at the Target at Wayside/610 (later Auchan), there was a Weingarten there after the original "Target Foods" name expired (Lewis & Coker/Kmart Foods had a similar contract). That would put it about 2 miles away from the Weingarten at Gulfgate. The Target near Memorial City presumably had the same set-up (built at around the same time), and also co-existed with the Weingarten at the mall. Now, I know AppleTree and Kroger both had these "two stores within a mile or two" set-up, but did Weingarten really operate in close proximity? Meanwhile, none of the four Weingartens mentioned survived until Safeway, unless Safeway closed them prior to '88.

Gold Mine and Tilt were both common mall arcades.

Oh yeah, both stores in BCS were also branded as TETCO.

Wow, that's great, thanks! Unfortunately, I'm not in Houston very often, so that's why a few of the photos aren't mine. I was inspired to do this after the Interstate 10 right of way clearance photos page of yours, and I wanted to document 290--the highway I had known--before it changed forever.

Seems to be "Phoenix Events Center", but also shares address with the adjacent Phoenix Seafood Restaurant. Either way, it's at 15156 Bellaire Boulevard. That looks like it might've been one of the last ones built as Safeway and thus one of the largest and nicest stores in the chain. Probably one of the biggest problems in the chain was that some of their stores were real dumps. I don't think AppleTree kept that slogan after the 1993 bankruptcy, either. Omron Oilfield & Marine. The original building was presumably converted to office space, but you can kind of see it behind it. I did update the list with a few mentioned here and one more from the Chron.

UH-D isn't a branch campus, it's another university in the system. Besides, if it's really that much of an issue, then UH-D can move and change its name (it almost did change its name a few years back). UH-D didn't build the original building (the M & M Building, apparently)

That is a terrible idea. Though if you change "Huntsville" to Houston, cut out Tyler and Nacogdoches and replace Georgetown with Austin, then we've got it. A loop would be great: Houston-College Station-Austin-Fort Hood-Dallas-Houston.

Ah, along the South Loop? They haven't extended Kirby yet, though, and I'm still bothered that I never found out what that abandoned sign said.

Somerset Collection (a mall in Michigan) has a covered, climate-controlled skywalk (with People Movers) that's 800 feet. Besides, if you need a Houston example, the MD Anderson Cancer Center has a massive collection of skywalks and little shuttles that take people around those skywalks. One skywalk is 1400 feet.

Even if it follows most of the way, it doesn't necessarily have to travel at the same route as the railroad.