IronTiger

Well, it seems to me that the "skinny yellow building" part wasn't altered all that much. Honestly, it looks like they just repainted it.

Two other former JITBs include one in Seabrook and one in Memorial City. There's also an old KFC at a gas station off 59 downtown.

Well, unless we want to strip out the light rail, any parkway-ing of Harrisburg should've been done a decade ago or more. Wayside isn't a bad candidate for conversion today: it's got a lot of the infrastructure in place. An underpass at Lawndale and the railroads, then all we need is an underpass at Harrisburg and some construction to prevent left turns and people jumping straight across the road. Maybe depress two lanes and keep the other two lanes open as local traffic lanes? That's the biggest issue I see, but when you do that you have a clear path from I-10 to I-45. Almeda Road seems like a good candidate too, take a lot of pressure off of 288.

Well, as suggested before, the TETCO stores do seem to be converting--there are Slurpee machines locally and other 7-Eleven products but no Slurpee cups (while holding less thanks to regular drink cups, they're dirt-cheap because they charge as fountain drinks). It's definitely still on. Of course, some Speedy Stop signs I've seen (Highway 6 and 290 the last time I checked) haven't converted to TETCO for whatever reason. Probably why they're waiting for the full conversion is it also involves swapping out brands on the canopies and pumps nowadays, not just new signage on the convenience stores.

I found it. It's 175 Dyna. Gotta remove the Hartz Chicken Buffet from the list...

Wow, thanks! I recently made an update, based on a few messages from Urbannizer and purpledevil...probably will need a few more weeks to digest all this. Added: Pizza Inn, Luby's, and Long John Silver's.

I remember when I discussed using at least one of the bayous for tubing, and I just got laughed at. It was the tail end of the old HAIF crew.

Reading "Houston Freeways" indicates that the name of Crosby Freeway was Northeast Freeway, and was to be complete by the 1980s, but budget cuts put it on ice and it renamed in 1987. To date, there are STILL parts of it not done, and a major part of it was done in the last 5-10 years.

Well, there are a lot less houses than there used to be the 1970s for sure (Woodland West Drive, most of those houses were probably cleared due to flooding concerns) though the 1950s does show a somewhat different grid of roads. These however, I believe were unpaved ranch roads (no houses, probably oil wells). Any bridges across the bayou were wiped out when the bayous were rerouted and clear cut at an unknown date between the '40s and the '70s.

Yes, I should've included an addendum for rather corrupt areas--I was well aware, of say, Louisiana and Huey Long...

TxDOT said that tunneling isn't an option for replacing Pierce Elevated...one of my plans involve tunneling new southbound lanes and leaving the Pierce structure intact, while restriping the old Pierce to have inner and outer shoulders plus a bike path/pede with another lane (or two). The Pierce definitely needs a facelift: Shepherd under 59 has no lights at all!

Either way, roads are never named after politicians unless they're well-liked by the area/nation as a whole. While I think Culberson gets more hate than he actually deserves, rest assured, he'll never get a road or a highway named after him. On the issue of Ronald Reagan Highway, how far should the N/S/E/W designations actually extend? Should/does the East Freeway remain that name out to Beaumont? Should the Northwest Freeway designation terminate at Hempstead officially? I like the naming scheme for the highways, they're simple, they're to the point, and they're a description of where they go. Gulf. East Texas. Northwest. Katy. South.

I don't want this to be a Pierce Elevated hijack, and I still stand by the quote in the original paragraph, bolded for emphasis: What's made the most sense in this discussion is trying to figure out where parkways would still work. On that related subject, I think given the amount of ROW the light rail took up, Harrisburg Blvd. could've been a viable route for a parkway and could maintain most (if not all) of its businesses. That's what could've been a compromise plan for 225.

Unfortunately, parkways aren't designed for high traffic flows like freeways are supposed to carry. Hell, the Pierce Elevated is over capacity as it is. The idea of road networks are supposed to make things flow better, not worse.

Nope, not me. Speaking of which, I need to scan more of "Houston Today" and post 'em. Houston's World Trade Center was actually, I read, the first building named as such, and was later The Inn at the Ballpark, which is now a Westin.

One more for the update list again...thanks for the old Taco Bell locations...I'm going to work on a batch before uploading the new ones.

Sorry, but Montrose's right. There's a disproportionate amount of idealism vs. practicality in the Pierce Elevated threads, and a widened parkway/boulevard will still divide the neighborhoods all while wasting money on the late 1990s rebuild and dismantling it (plus adding capacity to try to fix that), not to mention the service interruptions on METRORail while all that is done. The only way that I could see a proposal like that working is waiting another 20 years to put Pierce up for replacement or making a local Harris County/Houston agency foot a good part of the bill.

Well, in another thread, I proposed tunneling new southbound lanes under the Pierce while fixing up the Pierce (better lighting, perhaps a bike path, inner shoulders), because part of the problem is gridlock. It also keeps the infrastructure. The most dangerous suggestion on that page (et. al.) is the land values bit. Now, I'm denying if land values will raise if the Pierce is torn down, but betting on land values like that is a risky move...just ask Six Flags. That "highly valuable land" is still empty nearly a decade later even during a boom!

Link updated. This time, I'm expanding it to all sorts of other fast food locations in Texas...old Burger Kings and Wendy's too (plus others). Check it out!

No, but you don't have the plastic option. I went to Trader Joe's Friday and got the goods (candied ginger, chocolate covered espresso beans, and the much-vaunted cookie butter) and have it all in a paper bag with handles.

EDIT: Made mention of the original Fannin/Main McDonald's (no address) and I also added a non-Houston one. Any ideas?

I'm not wholly against the naming infrastructure after politicians, but it should be after they're dead. Lots of things were named after Roosevelt, Lincoln, Washington, or Kennedy, but not before they were long passed out of the world of the living.

Well, we already knew Randalls was closing there, and of course, when I started this thread, no one could've guessed the Safeway/Albertsons merger, which will undoubtedly change the landscape of the future of the store in Houston. Will it save it? Who knows.

OK...this is in the Offtopic section because it doesn't involve EXCLUSIVELY Houston, but one of my newest ideas (well, I actually wrote part of this a long time ago but it never got off the ground) is compiling a list of former McDonald's (not demolished/rebuilt, actually closed, or at least moved) in Texas. Inspired off of a similar Michigan attempt, my list tends to focus in College Station or Houston. This includes old Wal-Mart locations (I got the old Auchan) or mall locations (I got the Baybrook Sears too) or in any university (lost on that one). While there are a few real McDonald's that outright close (like the example on Main), most are leased and tucked away in gas stations and others. Right now, it has a few locations but is an incredibly simple HTML that will load on the slowest of connections, but I hope to make it prettier soon. http://carbon-izer.s3.amazonaws.com/projects/former/fff.html Do you have any locations in Texas that I'm missing?

Isn't that an application of the "guerilla sidewalk" movement which I know I've seen on HAIF? (The thread shouldn't be hard to pull out)