Or, if you’d wanted your water to look a little different:
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Katy
COMMENT OF THE DAY: WHAT YOU MISSED AT THE GREAT FORBIDDEN GARDENS ONE-THIRD-SCALE QIN DYNASTY SELL-OFF 
“I was there on Sunday, came home w/ 2 soldiers, 1 horse and 3 small figurines. The soldiers are FANTASTIC and I wish I had bought more, but for 100 ea it was a little steep to get a whole army of them. I have a bit of buyer’s remorse about the horse, b/c its in pretty bad shape, and is not long for the world. But it was only 25$. There were many people there, but it was by no means crowded, took 45 minutes to get in the gates.
The woman who rang me up, told me that a salvager was going to come by on Monday (yesterday) so I imagine the remaining men who were [intact] (there were still 100s left at noon on Sunday) will start turning up in thrift shops around.
What else? I am glad I got to see the gardens one time before it was destroyed. It was a lovely ground and I wish I had known about it. (I sort of knew about it, but never went.)
Apparently they were going to sell all the cherry trees as well, so they may still be on the market.” [anon, commenting on The 6,000 Garden Gnomes of Emperor Qin: Let the Great Houston Grave Ransacking Begin] Photo: Candace Garcia
COMMENT OF THE DAY: LOST TOMB OF THE GRAND PARKWAY “The bulldozed-over ones will make for some serious headscratching in the 23rd century when they are dug up and ‘discovered.’ Maybe the Asiatic Proconsul will use it as propaganda/proof [that] Global Manifest Destiny was already in the making in the early 21st century.” [SL, commenting on The 6,000 Garden Gnomes of Emperor Qin: Let the Great Houston Grave Ransacking Begin]
This weekend, while New York crowds flock to a recently opened exhibit of Forbidden City treasures belonging to China’s last emperor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Houstonians will have a chance for a much more satisfying and interactive experience with the wonders of the ancients: Crowds here will be swarming to plunder a replica of the massive gravesite of China’s first emperor. It has come to this: Forbidden Gardens, the garden-free (and yes, until now open-to-the-public) little 60-acre museum and cultural center on the Katy prairie has found no buyer willing to purchase intact its collection of 6,000 one-third-scale terracotta soldiers from the 2,200-year-old Xi’an tomb of Emperor Qin Shi Huang Di, its one-twentieth scale model of Beijing’s Forbidden City, or its many other handcrafted and made-in-China models of historic Chinese treasures. So everything in the museum will be sold off piece by piece, in one giant 2-day artificial-grave-side blowout liquidation sale.
“CASH ONLY!! ALL SALES ARE FINAL!!” screams a notice posted to the ordinarily staid museum’s website:
What’s it come to that a quirky little roadside attraction in Katy can’t quietly sell off its extensive collections of handcrafted-in-China replica Chinese figurines and miniatures online without getting overwhelmed? In advance of the curious shutdown of Forbidden Gardens, the institution’s stewards had decided to liquidate its entire collection of scale-model attractions, including the more than 6,000 terracotta warriors assembled for a broadly interpreted one-third-scale replica of the partially excavated tomb of China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang Di. And yes, the venue chosen for a good portion of the sales: Craigslist.
(Last month, the venue’s staff announced that Forbidden Gardens, located on Franz Rd. in Katy just off the stub-end of the long-planned Grand Parkway, would be shutting down — to make way for the expansion of the proposed ring road’s Segment E. But plans provided to Swamplot show that the proposed path for the Grand Parkway would only skirt the theme park property, and would perhaps even burnish its credentials as a roadside attraction.)
An ad on the online classifieds site taken out by Forbidden Gardens’ curators over the weekend offered a “variety of terracotta warriors for just $100 each.” Plus: “We are willing to make a deal if you buy in bulk.” Pieces from other exhibits were offered for sale, including 1/20th-scale buildings — and porcelain figurines, for as little as $1 each! Clearly, this was an “everything must go” sort of event: More pieces from Katy’s strange little “museum and cultural center” showed up in other Craigslist postings that featured vases, store furnishings, even those red benches arrayed around the grounds.
By late Wednesday afternoon however, the ads had been taken down. “At this time interest has been so great that it is overwhelming us,” reads a new note on a new Craigslist ad posted by a museum staff member. “There are only 5 of us and we are all part time.” All those goods are still available — it’s just that the staff couldn’t handle the online rush:
If you are interested in seeing the museum one last time we welcome you. If while there you see something that you are interested in and the staff is not overwhelmed, please feel free to make an offer. . . . If you are interested in purchasing an entire exhibit we greatly welcome you to call the main office. For those of you wishing to purchase individual objects we will be having a mass sell off after the museum closes Feb 13. Please check our website where we will post info on this as it becomes available.
Mass sell-off! In other words, the already strange spectacle of Forbidden Gardens has morphed in its final days into something curiouser still: A museum of replicas where visitors can bid on the exhibits and take them home with them.
Segment E of Houston’s new Grand Parkway — more commonly known as the new ring-road highway planned to cut through the Katy Prairie to link the Katy Mills Mall to the Houston Premium Outlets mall in Cypress (and to facilitate cultural exchange programs between those two institutions) — has its first casualty, and it’s not an Attwater prairie chicken. One of Katy’s quirkiest and most beloved attractions, Forbidden Gardens, has announced it will close. The Chinese history and cultural museum’s peculiar but convenient location on a former rice field along Franz Rd. just off the Grand Parkway’s stub end likely wasn’t “just off” enough. Forbidden Gardens’ last day open will be January 30; a note on its website says the closing will “make way for the Grand Parkway expansion.” Forbidden Gardens opened in 1996.
All it takes is a little subtraction! Say you’ve got 20 picocuries of cancer-friendly alpha radiation per liter in your drinking water. Well, there’s gotta be some margin of error in measuring it, right? Say, 6 picocuries per liter? Then just go ahead and subtract that number out (because you’ve gotta be optimistic about these things, you know, or it’ll kill you). Then . . . voilà ! Your level of those nasty little mutation-causing particles is now just 14 picocuries. And phew! what a relief! Because the EPA’s “maximum contaminant level” for alpha radiation happens to be 15 picocuries per liter, and those math wizards at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality have just saved your community’s water supply from receiving a violation notice! Slight problem: since 2000, the EPA has requested that states not use this little data-jiggering technique. But not to worry: TCEQ’s Linda Goodins, who oversees all drinking-water safety regulation for the state, doesn’t think the EPA’s request was an actual requirement. (Just to placate to those ever-meddling feds though, TCEQ discontinued its subtraction technique last year.)
Speaking of Katy schools: The power lines in the photo on the left, a couple miles southwest of Katy Mills mall, flag the dividing line between Jefferson Development’s Firethorne subdivision, zoned to Katy ISD, and the just-announced Firethorne West addition in Fulshear the company just announced — which will be served by the Lamar Consolidated ISD. The new Katy ISD elementary school site waiting for November’s bond vote and proudly featured in the center of Firethorne’s master plan will not be serving the 1,400 planned homes in Firethorne West, even though they’ll be only 2 blocks away. The kids in Firethorne West will likely be attending Huggins Elementary, which is more than five miles to the southwest. And until new roads are built they’d actually get to drive past that “Future Katy ISD†elementary school every school day to get there:
COMMENT OF THE DAY: CINCO RANCH SPRAWLS WEST “This is really, REALLY good news. It brings us one step closer to the ultimate goal of expanding this wonderful neighborhood all the way to Fulshear. Although they may have to change the name to something like Catorce Ranch, since there are likely several more cattle farms in this community’s God-given territory.” [Gucci Mane, commenting on School-District Manifest Destiny]
SCHOOL-DISTRICT MANIFEST DESTINY Cinco Ranch — recently named the fastest-growing residential community in the country by a real-estate consulting firm — will keep expanding west. Newland Communities just purchased 492 acres west of neighboring Pine Mill Ranch, way out near Firethorne between FM 1463 and Katy-Flewellen Road; the company plans to have new Cinco Ranch-branded homesites available there within a couple of years. Further west, there’s even more land available for cheap: the 742-acre Tamarron Lakes subdivision was foreclosed on in April. Kirk Laguarta of Land Advisors Organization, who’s marketing that property for $19K an acre, tells the Houston Business Journal that the property that Newland just bought is considered more valuable that that, in part because it’s zoned to Katy ISD. But Newland may not be interested in expanding Cinco Ranch into Tamarron Lakes — that development belongs to the Lamar Consolidated ISD. [Houston Business Journal]
A few snippets from yesterday’s grand opening of the new 88,000 sq.-ft. H-E-B at the new “Katy Main Street†shopping center at the southwest corner of I-10 and Pin Oak Rd., just west of the Katy Mills Mall: a “Texas Front Yard†at the entrance where you can pick up mulch, bug spray, and that giant parrot-like watering yardbird you were looking all over for; a solitary “Fudgie Wudgie†fresh fudge stand; a guacamole station; and H-E-Buddy giving hugs and high fives to shoppers in the produce section. This is the fourth H-E-B in Katy. It’s adjoined by a new strip center with no current tenants.
Mod tracker and photographer Ben Hill believes this early-fifties Ranch is the best house Houston architect Wylie W. Vale ever designed in Katy. It’s a little less country — and features more rock — than this Swamplot reader favorite he designed a mile southeast, on Woods Hole Ln.
This 3,345-sq.-ft. single story, which sits on an acre of land near the center of the original town, has been on the market since mid-June, for $375,000. The home was originally built for former mayor Arthur Miller. And it was still in the family when Hill took these photos last year:
Nope, no idea why this 2-story house for sale at 3834 Brook Garden Ln. in Katy won’t be shown until “furthur notice,” but given that cute little literary reference in the listing and the main photo included (above), it sure is tempting to guess. Yes, this is a 3-bedroom, 2 1/2-bath home built 6 years ago in the Lakes of Bridgewater subdivision that features a well-stocked bar and . . . well, after that it gets kinda hazy. Won’t you stumble along with us for a quick tour?
“We had gone to many places calling themselves farmers markets but their produce was coming in from California and Florida,†Susan Becker tells the Chronicle‘s Samira Rizvi. The 3,800-sq.-ft. Katy Fresh Produce Market she and her husband opened this week at 5026 East Third St. in Katy calls itself a farmers market; it’ll be open every day except Tuesday and “at least half” of the produce will be from local farmers, reports abc13’s Kevin Quinn, who spots bell peppers from Alvin, green beans from Cat Spring, and peaches from Fairfield (the city, not the subdivision).
- There’s a new farmer’s market in town [Ultimate Katy]
- New farmer’s market opens in Katy [abc13]
Photo: Katy Fresh Produce Market
I CAN DO THAT Katy real estate watcher Lou Minatti finds himself in awkward position: “After years of ranting about dumb real estate sales gimmicks, here I am seeing them applied to my own modest tract house. It’s listed on the MLS and boy does everything appear HUGE! My back yard isn’t large at all but with a wide-angle lens it looks like an acre back there. . . . Too bad [my agent] didn’t do the photos before the hard freezes turned everything brown a few weeks ago. . . . Going through the interior photos, the agent turned on every single light in the house, even with bright sunlight coming through the windows. It does seem to look better.” [Lou Minatti]