THE MISSING LINK IN THE BIKE TRAIL FROM OAK FOREST TO DOWNTOWN 
After surveying a stretch of land mostly along White Oak Bayou from 11th St. to Lawrence Park, Chronicle blogger Martin Hajovsky says he doesn’t see any traffic problems that would stand in the way of a connection between the Katy/MKT hike-and-bike trail and the White Oak Bayou trail. A bayou-side hookup, which would create a continuous off-road path from Downtown to Oak Forest, is just one segment of grander bayou bikepath plans contained in the Bayou Greenway Initiative, which the Houston Parks Board is working on piece by piece. Adding the longer chunk planned along White Oak Bayou north of the current trail would extend the Downtown route all the way to Jersey Village. [Home in the Heights, via Off the Kuff; previously on Swamplot] Proposed Bayou Greenway map: Houston Parks Board
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Bayous and Waterways
Ah, the life of a roadie/curator on a little Houston showboat. . . . Squeezed into this short video: the weeklong White Oak and Buffalo Bayou popup cinema debuts of the good barge Tex Hex from late last month, documenting the rides and drifts of Houston’s first and only solar-powered waterborne movie projection system.
- Previously on Swamplot: Banks Report: Tex Hex Graduates from Buffalo Bayou Movie Scene, Gets Ready for Official White Oak Bayou Premiere, Bayou Theater: Houston Research Boat Will Have Movies on Sail
Video: Be Johnny
COMMENT OF THE DAY: HOUSTON’S GIVE AND TAKE “. . . COH is required by very clear and strict regulations to treat sewage to standards which make the effluent suitable for discharge into a waterway which can than have water extracted for purification into drinking water. A huge number of communities get their drinking water and discharge their sewage effluent into and from the same body of water. Think of the Trinity River. It’s no big deal.” [Spoonman., commenting on Comment of the Day: Bayou Overlook]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: BAYOU OVERLOOK “Everyone I know thinks I’m crazy, but I canoed Buffalo Bayou from Highway 6 to downtown a few years ago, and it was surprisingly clean and natural. The best part was the stretch through Eleanor Tinsley Park, at the end of the trip, where the downtown skyline suddenly pops into view. In April of this year, a friend and I took a ride on the little-known public pontoon boat ride offered occasionally on Buffalo Bayou near the Sabine Street Bridge. It was a really, really neat experience, and there were only 4 people including us that were there for the ride. The city is so different from the water. They even show you the ruins of a family tomb that was used as a foundation a bridge that still exists, and there is a point where a heavy stream of clean water pours into the bayou from an uncapped artesian well under a street a few blocks away. The weather was perfect that day, and I was shocked at seeing only a few dozen people utilizing the landscaped trails and green spaces along the bayou. I’m sure on the same day, Memorial Park and Hermann Park were packed – why not this place? I wish the Bayou had a more prevalent place in Houston’s image and culture.” [Superdave, commenting on Banks Report: Tex Hex Graduates from Buffalo Bayou Movie Scene, Gets Ready for Official White Oak Bayou Premiere]
On Tuesday night, Houston’s first and only bayou movie barge docked at Guadalupe Park off Navigation for the first of 2 “sneak peek” video performances on the banks of Buffalo Bayou. On the opposite shoreline, a few cargo trains and a motorcade of dirt bikes rumbled past, but the night was clear and mosquito-free, show and boat organizer Bree Edwards claims. Plus, she says: The solar-powered cinema setup on the Tex Hex worked flawlessly. Her pix of the scene:
GETTING THE PURPLE FROM GREENS 
“He developed a purple dot right between the eyes, and within 2 hours it spread over his face and his abdominal parts and within 6 hours he was completely purple.” — Matthew Finn IV, telling reporter Sally MacDonald what happened after his father got a small cut on his leg while fishing in a freshwater tributary of Greens Bayou. The elder Finn died Monday, 11 days after the incident. His family blames an aggressive bacteria — which his doctors have been so far unable to identify — for the death. [MyFox Houston] Photo: MyFox Houston
Here’s a showboat custom-made for Houston’s bayous: an aluminum pontoon deck outfitted for exploring inland waterways . . . and screening videos along the way. Assembled by a design-build sculpture collaborative called Simparch, the Tex Hex has its official maiden voyage scheduled for May 21, the night before Houston’s Art Car Parade. The boat will dock in front of the concrete steps where White Oak Bayou spills into Buffalo Bayou, behind the loft building at 1011 Wood St., for a program of films about — what else? Car culture. They’ll be projected onto the Tex Hex’s onboard rear-projection screen. Downtown skyscrapers are expected to hang out in the background, just for effect.
The Houston Arts Alliance had a tough time tolerating the intersection of Montrose and Allen Parkway, but at last they’ve gotten the job done. The organization’s commission more than 2 years ago for a pedestrian bridge across Buffalo Bayou connected to that corner, dubbed the Tolerance Bridge, was abandoned after a sea of complaints about both the name and design. The new bridge that opens today at that same spot is much simpler than the earlier proposal — and it’s simply called the Rosemont Bridge. But standing — or really, kneeling — guard by the bridge’s southern entrance today are 7 new sculptures by Barcelona artist Jaume Plensa that were given to the city by a small group of donors who aren’t going out of their way to advertise their identity. The name for the artwork: Tolerance.
The see-through figures face mostly toward the south, away from the bridge and across Allen Parkway, to a vacant site where the oft-flooded Robinson Warehouse once stood. Five years ago, the Aga Khan Foundation bought the land there and announced plans to build a new Ismaili Center on it, including lecture, conference, and recital facilities, a prayer hall and a social hall, offices, and gardens:
Readers in Idylwood have been watching Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report for the appearance of this house at 1954 North MacGregor Way, as it wraps around to Sylvan Rd. in their neighborhood. A local resident tells us the 1950 home will be the 10th Hurricane Ike-flooded house bought up by FEMA and torn down. (Other homeowners on the same street have turned down similar early-retirement deals for their properties, claims the resident.) But focusing on that singular pre-storm flooding event in 2008 only doesn’t do justice to this home’s long history of seaworthiness: Our source says this house had 4 feet of water in it on at least 2 occasions, along with several less dramatic Brays Bayou baptisms. Water from the bayou came back to play in the street in front of the house just 2 Fridays ago.
Idylwood scored 3 FEMA buyouts in the wake of Tropical Storm Allison, in 2001.
- Previously on Swamplot: From Show House to Wet House to No House: Saying Goodbye the MacGregor Way
Photo: Swamplot inbox
COMMENT OF THE DAY: WHY HOUSTON NEEDS THAT NEW WALMART BY THE BAYOU “With all this rain, surely pollutants are leeching out from the soils of this brownfield site and flowing into White Oak Bayou. If there were a Wal-Mart here, the surface would be impermeable with only trace amounts of leaked motor oil contaminating the bayou. And as a kayaker that enjoys high water, that means less cancer for me!” [TheNiche, commenting on Only a Little Off Target: Walmart Heading Right Between Washington Ave and the Heights]
HOW TO PREPARE SAN JAC RIVER STEW What’s the local recipe for that San Jacinto River fishin’ favorite, toxic redfish? “The dioxins come from submerged waste pits north of the Interstate 10 bridge. McGinnes Industrial Maintenance Corp., which is no longer in business, owned and operated the pits in the 1960s, filling a 20-acre site on dry land with waste from a now-closed paper mill near the Washburn Tunnel. In the bleaching process, paper mills generated large amounts of dioxins, a family of compounds so toxic that scientists measure them in trillionths of a gram. The EPA says there is no safe level of exposure to the chemicals, which are known to cause cancer and disrupt immune and reproductive systems. The San Jacinto River began to run through the waste pits by the early 1970s because of subsidence — the sinking of soft soils as water is pumped from underground. With the McGinnes pits under water, the dioxins spread into the river and worked their way through the ecosystem, becoming more concentrated at each step in the food chain. For more than a decade, the Texas Department of Health has warned that fish and crab caught along this stretch of water, north of the Lynchburg Ferry, are tainted with cancer-causing dioxin, pesticides and PCBs. . . . In July, the EPA identified the International Paper Co. and McGinnes, which became part of Waste Management through a series of mergers and acquisitions, as the firms responsible for the dioxins problem. Under the Superfund law, the two companies will be required to evaluate and clean up the contamination. They paid about $65,000 for the fencing and roughly 50 warning signs in English, Spanish and Vietnamese, a McGinnes spokesman said.” [Houston Chronicle]
A number of readers have been asking what’s up with the new construction office set up on the former site of the Robinson’s Warehouse at the southeast corner of Montrose and Allen Parkway. The Aga Khan Foundation bought the low-lying property in 2006 with plans to build another of its Ismaili Centers on it — featuring lecture, conference, and recital facilities, a prayer hall and a social hall, and offices and gardens. Is that building ready to go up?
It doesn’t look like it. In the meantime, the construction office was parked on the property for a different project entirely, across the street: The new Rosemont Bridge, meant to connect the north and south sides of Buffalo Bayou Park. When Mayor White first announced the bridge project in late 2008, it had a different name and a different design. Called Tolerance Bridge, it a featured Moebius-strip-like superstructure that was meant to appear impassable from a distance:
COMMENT OF THE DAY: A PARK GROWS IN IDYLWOOD “The neighborhood will be able to ‘use’ the vacant land but cannot build permanent structures upon it. With the exception of one lot at the far end of N. Macgregor, 9 are connecting so that they will form a large U shaped property. There’s been talk of a shared garden but who knows… The area still looks pretty rough right now, but the damaged sidewalks, where driveways once were, are being repaired and curbs installed. There are existing trees and lawns so hopefully it will become, at the very least, another usable green space. I suspect that, when the next big flood happens and some of the remaining homes get hit yet again, if another FEMA buyout is offered, we’ll be seeing more open land along N. Macgregor. . . .” [PYEWACKET2, commenting on Comment of the Day: The Great Idylwood Shoreline FEMA Buyout]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: THE GREAT IDYLWOOD SHORELINE FEMA BUYOUT “The ten houses in Idylwood, 6 along N. Macgregor, 2 on Wildwood and 2 on Park Ln were all heavily damaged by Hurricane Ike. Most all those houses have been hit numerous times, not the least of which was Allison. Those homes were right on Brays Bayou. Come on folks, some of the homeowners hated to sell to FEMA but it was either that or jump through impossible hoops to raise the homes’ foundations. True, there’s been a lot of improvement to the bayou but who knows if those improvements will be effective when the next flood hits? Not everyone chose to take the buyout.” [PYEWACKET2, commenting on Daily Demolition Report: Idylwood Hat Trick]
Architect and Swamplot reader Jeromy Murphy sends in a construction update on the house he and his wife — also an architect — are building for themselves at 502 Archer St. in Brookesmith, “not too far from the container house.” How’s the family project going?
Lori and I designed it together, proving that a husband/wife architecture team can succeed (as long as the husband just agrees to everything his architect wife wants).
One of those design decisions that came so easily: the 8-ft. Isis Big Ass Fan that’ll hang from exposed rafters on a porch overlooking a new retaining wall. The fan isn’t installed yet, but you can see the rafters in this photo:
