A high-flying reader sends this mid-March progress shot of the segment of Cypress’s Towne Lake development known as The Crossing. The other major crossing planned for nearby — a continuation of Towne Lake Pkwy. over the less-holy water feature under construction to the south and east, as shown in this selection from the development’s master plan — looks to still be in the works. The parkway will eventually connect all the way down to the Kroger just south of Tuckerton Rd.Â
The site also seems to have resolved some of its earlier crises of purpose: Originally the land just north of David Anthony Middle School was labeled as a potential church, but developer Caldwell Companies appears to have opted for the secular route since the 2013 version below was published:
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- About [Towne Lake]
- Previously on Swamplot:Â The Big New Kroger in Northwest Houston
Images: Jason Tinder (photo), Towne Lake (maps)
What happened to separation of Church and Estate?
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Which cross is it, Catholic? Protestant? Greek Orthodox? If you float in it in a prostrate manner like Jebus, would that be blasphemy?
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Do I see a small island in the lake in the shape of an islamic crescent? If so, I demand an island that’s shaped like Flying Spaghetti Monster, for only HE can explain gravity through Intelligent Falling.
So is that really supposed to be a cross used as a religious symbol in the lake? As in, officially for real?
Looks like the perfect place for a UFO suicide cult.
Dammit, Commonsense did it first and better than I woulda.
There’s a definite theme. Some of the street names adjacent to that portion of the lake: Glory Vista Lane, Shepherds Valley Ln, Living Water Ln.
@commonsense – this isn’t the government you moron – there is no requirement. To my more libertarian views, if people don’t like the symbolism or street names then don’t move there.
Ahhh, the pleasures of life in a free society. If you don’t like a lake in the shape of a cross, buy somewhere else. If you want a lake shaped like an Islamic crescent in the middle of a subdivision, go ahead and build it. Who’s to stop you? These developers obviously have conviction (as well as cojones) but it seems to be working out okay for them.
Also worth noting that most European cities have a large building smack dab in the center that presents the shape of a cross to the sky, and these tend to be the most visited and cared for buildings over there, despite the usual ire about matters of faith.
I was raised Catholic at Assumption church and was even an alter server and I definitely wouldn’t buy into that place. I can’t force myself to be judgmental enough. Visiting my mom is enough.
@Gary Deller, @Mike, ya’ll obviously missed the pun of State and Estate. Of course it’s a private property and anything goes, but anything goes is not immune from ridicule and incessant mocking.
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The European cities do have churches in their central districts but they are generally treated as museum pieces and not a sign of any literal belief in a ceiling cat. In fact in today’s Europe which is secular and at least 70% atheist or agnostic according to recent surveys, a candidate that professes his faith too much, is un-electable. It is laughable and sad that our great state of Texas in fact REQUIRES a belief in a ceiling cat to hold public office. The said law would fall apart in the SCOTUS faster than an idea of a virgin birth at an OBGYN convention but sadly it hasn’t been challenged just yet.
Gary-wouldn’t your views also allow Common his without the need for the “moron” jab. Reference the writer, make your point. No need for the hate man.
I dunno, whether religious or not you’re going to be on your hands and knees begging for mercy to someone’s cat every day before you start your commute.
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What’s the drive time to the energy corridor or downtown from out here in rush hour?
The only way I’d consider purchasing land in the neighborhood would be if that lake turned into drinkable wine periodically.
Seriously though, does anyone find this development really freaking weird?
Ceiling Cat…. really? Made me laugh
Caldwell Companies, is know for being jesus freaks. They start many of their meetings with a prayer. I like the overall development but I would dont know if I would have put an “X” in a lake. My have people looking for gold there.
@joel, no kidding. I have to laugh at their description of their location: “Towne Lake is centrally located in the Cy-Fair area of Northwest Houston.” Central to what? Oh wait, I just checked the map, and they’re not too far from the center of “downtown Cypress”.
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And if you think 290 has been under construction for a very long time, you’re not imagining things. Some segments will hit their fifth anniversary next month. Another fine Williams Brothers production. http://www.my290.com/construction-updates.html
The Crossing Pool needs geysers at each end of the cross’s crossing bit: Stigmata Sprays. With red light accents at night and on Holy Days.
smgdh …this sorta thing happens only in the south. immediately, you know a resident’s political makeup & intellectual breadth …good for the telemarketers.
“Ceiling cat” — Ha!
And why did this holy developer feel the need to scrape every living thing off the face of that piece of Earth, in order to create this suburban New Jerusalem?
So let me get this straight. Developers make a big huge cross symbol shaped storm water detention pond as a proclamation of their faith. Presumably hoping some person looking out an airplane window will see it and instantly be converted over / evangelized. Then instead of donating the area set aside for a church (a la 2013 plan) where people might actually gather in fellowship and perhaps do some social good, the developers cashed in and made it residential.
What about that whole “Give away your riches to the poor and follow me.” parable did they miss?
Perhaps there is still time to change the cross symbol into a dollar sign.
Actually commonsense, I think this cross is immune from ridicule and incessant mocking. Just like all the crosses in Europe. But do keep going…
Despite everything you read, as evidenced by all these comments, people still care about religion.
@Mike, I suppose the cross itself, an inanimate object representing a medieval torture device is immune from ridicule, but the hordes of glassed faced gullibles that actually believe in fairy tales are ripe for the picking. These are the people that genuinely believe that hurricane Ike hit Houston BECAUSE someone somewhere had coitus in an unapproved manner.
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@Gisgi, yes people still care about religion, but that’s a logical fallacy of Ad Populum, just because a lot of people believe it, it does not make it true.
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Not all ideas carry the same validity, hence deserve ridicule. Implying religion is a valid and equal opinion to science is like saying opinion of children being brought by storks or found in cabbage patches is equal to that of sexual reproduction and gestation.
The cross is a medieval torture device? I thought it was a Roman (i.e. ancient) execution device. Learn something new on Swamplot every day.
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Who said anything about religion and science? They have different functions. Science gives us knowledge of the natural world, but no moral or supernatural insight. With science alone, you end up with things like eugenics. Nor is there any scientific (i.e. purely physical) basis for human rights. But this whole science vs. religion pissing contest is kind of a high school-level argument. They’re different.
@ commonsense:
Please respect others who hold religious beliefs, this forum is supposed to be about real estate. I’m sorry your views are formed by silly stereotypes rather than actual people of faith in our community.
@Mike, you are correct, the cross has been used to execute people well before it was used to torture people in the middle ages, and centuries before it was used to abuse children in 21st century.
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Supernatural insight? As in ghosts and goblins?
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You are presenting an Argument from Morality, and it’s is also a fallacy. Morality has always existed before any modern religions existed, it’s a requirement for social groups to survive and is evolutionary in nature. I also don’t remember a tribe of Jews wandering the desert killing, adultering, stealing, etc. UNTIL someone dropped 10 commandments on them.
The opposite can be argued as true: a religious person is ONLY moral because of a perceived punishment after death, not because he genuinely believes in morality. It is also self evident that religion is the direct cause of 90% of wars even to this day. Religion providing morality is factually wrong.
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The science vs. religion is a more pertinent argument today than at any time. We’re about to send man to Mars, and Kansas wants to teach Creationism in school. We can genetically engineer plants to feed every human on the planet and eliminate hunger, yet Mississippi passes laws to stop selling cakes to gay weddings. We’re curing deadly diseases at unprecedented rates, yet the pope says using condoms is worse than getting aids in Africa. Until the bible is put on the shelf next to Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings where it belongs, the argument must continue.
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To keep the subject on real estate, Tax the Churches, it’s a violation of the establishment clause to exempt churches from property taxes.
@Justin Timbergrove, no, one must not respect silly superstitions for the sake or respect. It simply does not earn or deserve respect. Reference the above analogy I made about babies coming from storks vs. sexual biology. The fact that the “religious community” does good things once in a while does not negate the plethora of terrible, violent, and hateful things that it does as a matter of daily course.
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I would not be so rude if religious people didn’t vote on laws that affect other people, or made life decisions that affect those around them based on throroughly debunked mythology and hysteria.
Wow commonsense, there is something either factually or logically wrong with almost every sentence of your last post. I don’t even know where to begin. I guess the major issue is morality… to be clear, I never said that religion is the only source of morality. All I said was that science does not give moral insight. You’ve got to respond to what I’m actually saying, not create strawmen to make things easier.
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Case in point – eugenics. Go back before WWII, and scientists at every level, from the most elite universities down to school textbook writers, were wholehearted eugenicists. Because science does not see the supernatural – it does not see humans as anything more than complex arrangements of atoms and molecules – there is nothing to stop the most horrid atrocities. And there is STILL nothing in science to say that eugenics is wrong, but the world was morally revulsed enough to put a halt to it.
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Meanwhile, our modern doctrines of human rights grew out of religious ideas – the pioneering 17th century thinkers on human rights all used religious arguments (Grotius, Pufendorf, Locke, etc.). Thanks, religion.
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As for it being “self evident that religion is the direct cause of 90% of wars,” I seem to remember the worst atrocities of the 20th century being carried out by atheist regimes (Soviet Union, communist China, etc.). Hmmmm…
@Mike, nice try.
Eugenics was in large part a racist and racialist movement trying to justify themselves by at the time not very well understood science of genetics. Big proponents of eugenics were Methodists, Presbuterians, and Episcopalians and in large part embraced by the religious establishment to promote the wildly discriminatory and racist biblical writings. It has also been dismissed by scientist as impractical and dangerous in the long run because it may produce shallow gene pool, much like pure bred dogs have much higher occurence of genetic diseases.
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I can reference a dozen secular philosophers who promoted ethics without any religious requirement or even knowledge (some existed well before the current fables) and dozens of biologists and sociologists that can demonstrate that morality is in fact a social construct required by biology for survival of the species. A simple example would be the animals, they have no Abrahamic moral yet they do not kill for no reason and almost all strive in complex social groups with arguably better results than humans.
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Stalin and Mao did not kill anyone BECAUSE of atheism, they killed them for political and incompetence reasons. Millions more have died and continue to die every day all over the world SPECIFICALLY BECAUSE of religion, usually for having the ‘wrong one’. Additionally although Stalin was atheist he copied his actions from the old Tzars (who take power from religion) and promoted the idea of him being more than just a man but a type of diety, much like North Korean leaders.
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As my favorite writer, Christopher Hitchens, said – “Religion Poisons Everything”
…and with Hitch being evoked it’s time for some Sully and Hitch After Dark.
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http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/sully-and-hitch-after-dark/
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commonsense, nice try, but eugenics was promoted by the scientific establishment from top to bottom. It’s a direct consequence of Darwin’s theory, which suggests that species will over time differentiate, and that groups within each species will evolve into new species, often “higher” than their ancestors. Eugenics is nothing other than the attempt to put this idea into practice. Thank God we put a stop to it.
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You’re still not reading. I never said that religion was the only source of morality. Even Paul in the Bible acknowledges that the pagans know right from wrong. What I said was that science is not a source of morality, and that our modern human rights doctrines arose out of Christian ideas.
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Your attempt to say that Stalin and Mao didn’t kill anyone because of atheism is cute, given the number of priests that were killed by them in order to specifically stifle religion. But I’ll flip your argument around – none of those religious wars were because of religion, at least not the Christian ones, because the Christian religion as taught by Jesus is to love your enemies, turn the other cheek, and put away the sword, as Peter was told to do. No, I’m afraid all those religious wars were really driven by people abusing the name of Christ, not following Christ.
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The Hitchens quote sounds like a sad echo of those warnings that the Jews poison everything. In both cases driven by paranoia, and by failed attempts to silence a part of the human heart that won’t be silenced.
I’ve always liked commonsense comments in the ‘funny troll’ sort of way. But this is sort of depressing. You (commonsense) seem to have a lot of deep resentment/hatred in you for those who hold religious beliefs. Just let people live their lives and believe and worship how they want.
I’ll try to keep replies short, this is getting boring even for me…
The only objectionable part of eugenics is sterilization and extermination and that was ultimately stopped by rational secular law. We use the ‘nice’ parts of eugenics every day by picking pretty and healthy spouses.
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Religion allows slavery quite clearly and hated of Jews. It was secular law that stopped both. Even MLK was surrounded by atheist socialists who championed his cause. So, no, modern human rights did not come from religion.
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Religion does in fact sanction wars. The crusades, Balkans, Northern Ireland, ISIS, Rwanda genocide. All supported by scripture and promoted by religious leaders.
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@Cody, yes I have strong contempt for the absurd especially when it leaks into the real life.
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‘Just let people live their lives’, and here is where we have the problem. It requires a two-way street…and we know of how bad drivers humans are.
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Heard of places like Mississippi? North Carolina? Heck, even Texas is wasting money in the supreme court right now fighting against your humble proposal. I mean no ill will, but it’s not hard to understand where some resentment may be originating.
I pretty much never agree with commonsense. Until now.
See, our founding fathers said No communion between Church and State.
Cool.
Law of the land.
So if anyone pushes their religiousness they must expect push-back!
(by the way that is science. Newton’s 3rd)
Example:
You can facebook me religious messages. And then you can respect my unfollowing you.
I sure don’t want to leave my views to be shaped by religious figures in my community.
My community, which would never ever accept a developer building a giant crescent-and-star-lake someplace. Ideally, my community should not allow a giant crucifix lake.
Just sayin…
Especially in such an international city as Houston!
movocelot: As a Christian, I can tell you that I’d have ZERO issue with someone buying some land to build homes and putting a giant crescent-and-star lake. That might cause me to not want to buy a home there but if someone wanted to do it — more power to ’em.
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It doesn’t bother me at all if someone believes differently than me (or believes in nothing at all). And while I also have no issues with any LGBT people (as they’re my family, friends, co-workers, customers [tenants]), I respect those who have more traditional views of marriage and don’t find them to be hateful.