msteele6

No doubt you are referring to the estate built by Col. Edward F. Simms c. 1910. There is some information on this estate somewhere on this site. He named the house "Wayside" thereby giving the name "Wayside" to the street on which it was located. As I recall, it was one of the first houses in the Houston area with a swimming pool. As a young person, I went past the house many times (probably on my way to Sears).

I happened to be in Hermann Park twice in the last three weeks. The first time, the statues weren't there, the second time they had magically appeared. It's odd, since I didn't realize that they were Chinese Zodiac figures, I assumed there was some hidden theme, and the only thing I could think of was the fact that 11 of the figures represent real animals that I could identify, the twelfth one is imaginary. It's sort of odd that the Chinese have one imaginary animal in their Zodiac, and furthermore, that imaginary animal seems to play an important role in Chinese mythology.

7200 Lawndale would have been almost exactly where the nursery that I remember would have been located, of course, that intersection has changed quite a bit since then with all of the street improvements and so forth. I'll have to ask my mother if she remembers the names "Alvin Japanese Nursery Co." or "Japanese Gardens".

You might very well have taken over that route from my brother. As I said, he threw the Press about the time of Hurricane Carla and that was in 1961, if memory serves. He threw all of Idylwood, bicycling over from behind the Tropicana Bowling alley.

I just noticed a post that said that the Weingarten's burned down. To my knowledge, Weingarten's never burned. I believe the poster is confusing this with the fact that a part of the AvaLawn center did burn down. I remember this well, it would have had to have been in the late '60's, maybe 1968?. I don't think that the whole center burned down, just a portion in the middle, the Haenel's grocery store on the end wasn't affected I don't believe, and I think that this was before the Leonard's store was there, the store I remember burning for sure was a liquor store that was in the center. Some acquaintances of mine appropriated the beer from that burned out store and the first drink I ever took was from that purloined stash. I still remember setting in the Weingarten's parking lot and watching the fire from across 75th street. I believe it was around, if not on, the 4th of July. At the time, I lived behind the Tropicana Bowling Lanes on Harwell.

One other thought about the area around the old watermelon stand. One of my first memories of the area was going with my mother to the washateria that was located catercorner from the stand. This would have been in the mid '50's. Behind that washateria there was a nursery, quite possibly owned by the same folks that owned the washateria. This land, I believe, would have had to have been incorporated into the Pentecostal Bible College and dorms that were located there until the '80's (early '90's?) that spread from behind Martini's Hardware over to Evergreen. I can still remember that way they stored those watermelons in a tank filled with ice and water and then sliced them and sold them to be eaten on the old wooden tables with a big dollop of salt.

I'm glad I stumbled on this old topic. For years I've been telling people that I remember when the Prince's on the Gulf Freeway was on the outbound side and another drive-In was on the inbound side of the freeway. At some point then, in the fifties, the two drive-ins switched sides of the freeway so that the Prince's was on the inbound side and the other drive-in was on the outbound side. Mostly, people, including my own mother, greeted this revelation with blank stares indicative of disbelief and I was beginning to doubt my own memories. Now, looking at posts #21 and #22 above I've finally found some evidence to confirm what I have known for all these years and have regained some degree of confidence in my own sanity (although most who know me will say the evidence is still insufficient). The posts, by roym, list the addresses of the 1957 Prince's as 2112 Cullen and the 1964 Prince's as 1951 Cullen and that dovetails exactly with my memories, the addresses are exactly opposite each other on the Gulf Freeway and the Prince's wound up on the inbound side. The explanation I had heard for this unusual move was as follows, the drive-in on the inbound side had been for a clintele that was predominantly black whereas the Prince's location was predominantly white (remember, this was 1950's Houston), as the area on the outbound side became more and more a black enclave, the switch was engineered. I read somehere further down in the thread about a drive-in called Ritzee's, I believe that this might have been the name of the predominantly black drive-in.

I grew up on the other side of the cemetery but knew several families that lived in Idylwood (Myers, Andersons). A couple of houses to the left was a house that was built by an architect (Andersons, you probably knew them) that was actually outside of Idylwood's boundaries and on a piece of land that flooded. It was a beautiful house but eventually had to be condemned because of the drainage issues (at least that was what I was told). As an aside, my brother used to throw the Press in that neighborhood when I was a kid and I can still remember visiting the neighborhood after hurricane Carla, the mud had advanced far into the neighborhood. At this time several houses on MacGregor have been condemned and their lots incorporated into park like areas along the bayou. The whole area has actually become more attractive due to these changes. And yes, I remember the derrick like structure in the office park, always meant to climb it but never got the chance.

Here is a picture of the home in the original post of the thread. The car in front of the house is a Venus, a Houston made fiberglass bodied automobile from the 1950's. The picture showed up in a newspaper article about the car, it didn't say where it was photographed, but being very familiar with the Idylwood neighborhood I immediately recognized the house.

5th Gen, Forget the roosters, the real noisemakers in Garden Villas are the peacocks, there must be at least 100 of them and they can really make the noise. The sound exactly like a woman crying.

Forget the bowling alley, there was actually an auditorium under the mall accessed by way of the stairs that led to the mall offices. On Saturday mornings they would show free movies (the only one I remember was a "Frances the talking mule" movie that starred Donald O'Connor. The idea was that parents could drop their children off while they were shopping. When the mall first opened, it wasn't covered (believe me, I don't forget walking around in Houston's heat even 50 years after the fact, Sharpstown had the distinction of being the first enclosed mall in Houston). In various place in the mall there were large "maps" made up of colored plastic blocks indicating the various stores with a key giving the store name. Attached to these maps were holders for paper copies of the map which you could take as a reference. When the mall was built, I can still remember the giant pile of dirt that was built up and on top of which the actual mall was built, the "basements" weren't actually dug down, dirt was actually piled up around the ground floor construction (including the delivery tunnels at two ends of the mall, to give an impression of basements. As far as Palms Center, I can remember going to it for a while before Gulfgate was built with my most vivid memory being of the toy store right next to the J.C. Penney. Of course we frequently ate at the Thornhills Cafeteria where there was a conveyor belt that ran through the dining area that you were supposed to put your trays and dishes on when you were finished, these would be carried back to the dish washing area. Anyone interested in seeing how the mall looked in 1957 from the air can visit a website called "Historic Aerials" and see aerial views of Houston at various times over the last 50 years.

Yeah, Ballatori's was right across from the bakery on Leland. The bakery building is now the City of Houston Water Department if I'm not mistaken.

Likely the elementary school was Park Place Elementary. It's not actually on Joplin, the address is on Park Place, however, the school has a large frontage on Joplin.

I watched as Gulfgate was being built in the fifties (as a small child) and I still remember that a huge hill was built up first, on flat ground, I assume that the underground portion of the mall (the store rooms, basements, the auditorium, etc.) were constructed, and then the stores proper were constructed on top of the finished basement construction. Very few buildings in Houston were constructed with basements (the old Sears on Harrisburg comes to mind) and I guess that this method of construction was chosen in order to provide stores with basement storerooms without having to actually excavate. By the way, there were at least two truck entrances that allowed for deliveries to be made under the mall, one on the 610 Loop side and one beneath Joske's. The main impression of the mall under construction was of the enormous man made hill.

That was the old AvaLawn (I believe that was the spelling) theater. It was demolished last year if memory serves. To its left was a doctor's office and other small businesses and to the left of them the Chuck Shack, to the right was the old Mading's Drug Store (then Mading-Dugan, then Rexall, then Eckerd and now a vision center(?)).

Offenhauser was (is?) a metal fabricating company. It would not surprise me to learn that the sculptural frieze on their building was manufactured by the company itself. They do very specialized fabricating e.g. archtectural metal for handrail and stairs etc. I happen to know this because in another life I was the QC manager for a pressure vessel manufacturer and we had them form a steel conical section for one of our vessels. The company was related to (maybe identical with) the company that made the engine blocks for Indy racers in the '50's '60's (?). These were the famous Offy engines that dominated the Indianapolis 500 for a long time.

Just a few reminiscences about the area around the old watermelon stand at the intersection of Evergreen, Griggs, and Lawndale. First off, the Wahoo bar. When I was young it was a convenience store called the U Toot We Tote, the idea being that they would take your order and bring the groceries to your car, that didn't last long and it finally transformed into the Wahoo. The bar was owned by the brother (I think) of Bert Wheeler, who owned a liquor store right next door. Spent many evenings in the bar in the late '60's early '70's. The bar further down (across from Martini's Hardware was called the Souvenir. It was owned and run by a man and his wife, the Palumbo's, I think they had some connection to the Longshoreman's union because there were always sailors in the bar (usually arriving and leaving by taxi). The first grocery store I remember at the intersection of 75th and Lawndale was Piggly Wiggly's it morphed into a Weingartens and I believe a Fiesta. There was a drug store at the same corner, started out as a Madings, then as Mading Dugan's and then maybe a Rexall. The little shopping center was called the AvaLawn and I think that the theater was also originally called the AvaLawn. Finally, two places that haven't been mentioned in the area were the Lawndale Cue club in the two story building near where the Barber College is now, and Haenel's Grocery, which was right across the street at the far end of the AvaLawn center from the old Mading's. The bars on Bowie included the Bowie street Ice House (another locus of my mis-spent youth in the '80's). It's still there and I believe that there are poker machines there, although I haven't been there in 15 years. Broadway Baptist Church (and school) were one house over from the Bowie Street Ice House. I went to school there in the '60's and walked home down the railroad tracks on Griggs often after getting my hair cut in the two story building at the corner of Evergreen and Bowie by the lady that ran a barber shop on the first floor of the building.