A small local flurry on Twitter, after abc13 reporter Miya Shay spots one of these and posts a photo:
Anyone know anything about the “Keep Houston Ugly” stickers popping up around town?
They’ve been around for a while, haven’t they? You can buy one yourself — a different version — online. Find a place to stick it, and you can push the meme further!
Nobody notices all those tiny cracks on a windshield either, until somebody does, and somebody else does, and pretty soon cracks are showing up everywhere.
This timely building at 4819 Harrisburg in Eastwood, built in 1935 for the Sterling Laundry & Cleaning Co., showed up in yesterday’sDaily Demolition Report. The architect was Sol R. Slaughter, who also designed a home on the bayou in Idylwood the same year.
The building faces Metro’s new East End Corridor light-rail line. Rice University project manager Spencer Howard writes in with a few details, but isn’t exactly sure what’s going on:
The building was renovated as an artist live/work/gallery just a few years ago.
METRO pledged to save the facade of the building with the clock on it, across from Eastwood Park. They preferred to have someone else buy it and move it, but if that didn’t happen, they were going to move it back on the property and reattach it behind the new setback. Yesterday they sent out the demolition list for next Monday and it was on it. The neighborhood has alerted their gov’t reps.
“Also, as an aesthetic aside, is it some sort of tradition, or just the mechanics of writing with a spray can, that all graffiti, no matter where, seems to have the same writing style (the font, as it were) ?” [Dave, commenting on Playing Townhouse Tag in the Near Northside]
The foundation for Open Channel Flow — a 60-ft.-tall public artwork built from steel water pipe and featuring a pump-it-yourself outdoor shower — is now in the ground at the Sabine Water Pump Station. Over the fence to the south is the new Lee and Joe Jamail Skatepark. When the structure is complete, sweaty skaters — or really, anyone on the north side of Buffalo Bayou Park who’s looking for a quick wet thrill — will be able to stand over the 6-ft.-diameter stainless steel drain cover, yank the rubber handle on the adjacent pump, and get doused by “the equivalent of a few cups” of water, released from the showerhead hanging 30 feet overhead.
But dude: Don’t forget about the blinking light! A strobe at the very top of the structure will flash with each pump. Which will cue bored office workers viewing from Downtown to mark another notch in their cubicles.
“‘So how dicey is it really and when will it become artsy and then trendy?’ Question of the day! As Montrose ex-pats now living on Dowling St. I can tell you that we have experienced NO crime in the year we have been here. As for artsy, you can walk to Rick Lowe’s Row House installation and the relocated Flower Man house, among several other art spaces, from our new home. Artsy, yes. Trendy, very thankfully no.” [Cranky Old Coot, commenting on Home Sweet Funeral Home: Washington Terrace Mortuary Seeks Residents]
This latest edition of Seen on the Street sticks close to the pavement. First up: Artist David Cook snaps this hot photo of . . . no, that’s not an egg frying on Kirby. Just a street button with . . . culinary aspirations?
What’s more to see around town when you keep your head down?
Sure, Mary Ellen Carroll is gonna pick up this Sharpstown lot across from Bayland Park and the house on it and rotate the whole thing 180 degrees. Oh, and then there’s gonna be that hydroponic curtain-wall fencing system and the solar and geothermal systems and the wi-fi cloud and the fancy door hardware and the bees and all. Still gotta meet the local deed restrictions.
To start our latest installment of fun pix from around town, Jay Lee snaps scenes from this week’s flooding — in a neighborhood near Kirkwood and Briar Forest.
A bouquet of bathtubs by sculptor Donald Lipski will be the centerpiece of a new Houston Water Museum and Education Center in northeast Houston called The WaterWorks. Named “Tubbs” — apparently after Texas country musician and frequent bather Ernest Tubb — Lipski’s sculpture appears to encourage the recycling of water from one bath to the next, although in a playful way perhaps at odds with the standard “short showers only” messages contained in most water-conservation public-information campaigns. The sculpture’s splashing will be controlled, however: That’s a water-recycling system hidden in the bathtub stems.
The museum, scheduled to open in August, will be adjacent to the Northeast Water Purification Plant at the southwest corner of Lake Houston, at 12121 North Sam Houston Parkway East, in Humble.
The bathtub sculpture is a considerable improvement over Lipski’s first proposal for the WaterWorks Museum, the “magic” overflowing water pitcher pictured here:
The newly revealed design for that $7 million pedestrian bridge over Buffalo Bayou near Montrose makes a brilliant metaphor for the appeal of this city, no? From a distance, it doesn’t seem like Houston is really . . . “passable,” either! But once you’re looking at it up close . . . sure, it’s all right: You can make it through. An excellent message to send prospective Houston tourists! Plus: Wasn’t that how the Houston Ship Channel got started too?
Official name of this Memorial Heights TIRZ project: The Tolerance Bridge. Perfect!
Swamplot covers real estate, home design and renovation, architecture, and the landscape of Houston, Texas. Swamplot did not flood during Allison — or Ike! Honest! Read more
Comment of the Day: And All Cats Are Gray in the Dark
“Also, as an aesthetic aside, is it some sort of tradition, or just the mechanics of writing with a spray can, that all graffiti, no matter where, seems to have the same writing style (the font, as it were) ?” [Dave, commenting on Playing Townhouse Tag in the Near Northside]