Houston’s Downtown office district, writes Christof Spieler in the RDA’s OffCite blog, “wraps around Pavilions on two sides. It ought to be delivering swarms of office workers to restaurants and the book store. But at lunchtime on weekdays, Pavilions seems empty compared to the streets a few blocks away. What’s wrong?”
In Cite, the blog’s paper-bound cousin, Max Page wishes all the stores in Houston Pavilions had simply faced the street, and that the apartments and condos hadn’t been cut from the project:
Like the residential component, the decision about whether to orient the project to the existing street grid, or turn away, was made in the wrong direction. [Architect Roger] Soto laments the choice. “We had some compelling ideas about activating the street,” he told me. “But in the end, the developer chose to attach retail stores to a ‘central spine,’” perhaps because that approach created a scheme that more closely resembled the traditional covered malls [Developer William] Denton had spent years developing.
How about the action along that central spine?
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A couple of readers have written in to let us know that Hue Vietnamese Restaurant — otherwise known as the first but hopeful occupant of the revamped but still extremely lonely strip center at the southwest corner of Richmond and Kirby — has closed. One writes: 
