MOVING THE KATY PRAIRIE, ONE CLUMP AT A TIME Threatened patch of prairie? Shovels to the rescue! “The 90-acre patch at Saums and Greenhouse roads north of I-10 is a subtly spectacular example of what the dwindling Katy Prairie looked like before development spread west out of Harris County. Sometime later this fall, construction on the extension of Greenhouse Road, plus a detention pond, will start there. Folks in straw hats, with shovels, buckets and bug spray, spent several mornings digging up clumps of this mature prairie for transplanting to other sites. . . . Digging up clumps of little blue stem, rattlesnake master and bee blossom gives prairie gardens a jump start they couldn’t get from seeds – and seeds are hard to come by.” [Inside Fort Bend]
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Landscape
MONTROSE WILDLIFE Poet Mark Doty, while explaining Houston to the Travel set: “Here the city’s splendid tradition of patronage is on its best display, so the great old live oaks thrust their bowing branches out beside the Cy Twombly Gallery and the Rothko Chapel. The limbs dip perilously toward the ground, and the roots heave the sidewalks beneath them into little concrete alps, but since nobody walks anywhere it doesn’t make much difference. In summer the trees resound with cicadas, like electronic versions of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir chorusing an insanely repetitive song. Gangs of bronzy black birds—boat-tailed grackles—prefer smaller trees in busier areas; they like grocery store parking lots and the drive-through lanes at the Taco Cabana, and they shriek and holler long into the night, as if in avian parallel to the traffic below. They’re the loudest part of a plethora of urban wildlife: opossums, raccoons, the occasional snake slithering across the road, a sadly large population of stray dogs. Coyotes roam the cemetery north of Buffalo Bayou, where Howard Hughes is buried. All over town, tiny green lizards hold their heads up with notable alertness.” [Smithsonian, via HAIF]
Collect white berries from all those Chinese Tallow Trees. Save them for winter, then sell them in fancy boutiques. There’s a market!
Landscape students attack the Washington Ave. Corridor! A modest proposal for widening Washington and Center St. between Sawyer and Sabine — from LSU student and SWA summer intern Taizo Horikawa:
During Week 3 I focused on the area along Washington Avenue between Sawyer Street and Sabine Street, pushing the idea of Colors of Ribbons forward. The underused area between Washington Avenue and Center Street is developed as a human-scale, vibrant commercial area with two-story commercial buildings. The north-side sidewalk of Washington Avenue is widened to be 30 feet with a row of shade trees. It works as linear plaza where people spill out from the commercial buildings and lounge around.
After the jump: one-way streets!
The Houston Airport System has found its first customer for some of those bales of hay you’ve seen lining roads leading to IAH. The hay-harvesting project began as a pilot using contractors 2 years ago, but airport employees are now doing the work.
Of the 10,000 acres that comprise IAH, 250 acres are presently being used to harvest hay and 50 of the 2,500 acres at EFD are being used.
Right now most of the hay is a low grade Bermuda grass mainly used to feed livestock such as cattle. . . .
When the hay project is finally in full swing some 2,000 acres of land at IAH and EFD will be used to grow hay, providing a projected revenue source of roughly $4 million dollars a year. Cutting and baling at the airports this year will continue until the fall.
500 round bales at IAH and 400 square ones at Ellington Field are currently available.
- Hay is for horses and Houston’s airports have it for sale [Houston Airport System, via Houston Politics and InSite]
Photo: Houston Airport System
Here’s the kind of project that ought to excite every truly patriotic Houstonian: County Commissioner Steve Radack wants to build a 500-acre lake — for fishing — on the Katy Prairie! How will it get filled? With rain, of course . . . and those regular floods from Cypress Creek! Apparently, they’ll have to excavate five Astrodomes worth of dirt. Where will they put the other four?
Best yet: Radack’s gonna name it after the Pope!
Them Katy birds want their wetlands? We’ll give them wetlands!
Of course, there are some naysayers:
Because the lake will not have a constant source of flowing water, biologists remain worried that there will not be enough oxygen in the lake to support a viable fish population, said [Donna] Anderson of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Texas Parks & Wildlife has also questioned whether nitrates and fertilizer from farm runoff might pollute the lake, said Jamie Schubert, coastal biologist with the department.
Yeah, we’ve heard that line before. Isn’t that what they said about the Gulf of Mexico? Hey, maybe we’ll find oil here, too!
- Katy prairie someday may be an angler’s paradise [Houston Chronicle]
- Dead zones regularly haunt coast [Houston Chronicle]
Photo of snow geese on Katy Prairie: Houston-Galveston Area Council
Uh-oh. That trailer — behind the pole barn — on a former scrap yard — next to the Houston Biodiesel plant — on Buffalo Bayou — may look innocuous. But it’s the new temporary Houston outpost of Los Angeles’s Center for Land Use Interpretation. The CLUI is taking up a year-long residency at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at UH — but this is where our L.A. visitors will be camping out.
What does the CLUI do? Some sample CLUI projects:
- “On the Farm: Live Stock Footage by Livestock:”
In this exhibit, farm animals show us their point of view through wireless video cameras installed temporarily on their head and necks by virtuoso animal and plant videographer Sam Easterson. Easterson’s technology enables a cow, a pig, a goat, a chicken, a sheep, and a horse to guide us around their world; what they look at, what catches their attention, how they move through space, and how they relate to one another, on the farm.
- “A View Into the Pipe,” an exhibition devoted to Los Angeles’s main sewer line.
- “The Best Dead Mall in America,” a photographic exhibit of the Dixie Square Mall in Harvey, Illinois, “a decaying shopping mall shuttered since 1979.” The exhibit is on display permanently . . . inside the mall itself, and is not open to the public.
You get the idea. CLUI’s front man is artist Matthew Coolidge, whose act often incorporates academic-sounding narrations of landscape slide shows.
Here’s video of part of a Coolidge performance at the Aurora Picture Show late last year:
This landscape plan from the Boymelgreen website is our first glimpse of the two condo towers the company is planning for 5.5 acres on the southwest corner of the intersection of San Felipe and a short segment of Woodway — just west of Voss, on the Right Bank of Buffalo Bayou. And this morning the Houston Business Journal has more to report:
New York City-based Boymelgreen Developers is developing the project for landowner Azorim, a publicly traded company in Israel of which Boymelgreen owns 64 percent. . . . The unnamed project will consist of two buildings with 28 residential floors each and an 18,000-square-foot fitness center and spa. The project will have a total of 237 condos starting at $1 million each. Units will be an average size of 2,500 square feet.
The architect is Ziegler Cooper. Boymelgreen’s website refers to the project as the San Felipe Condominiums. (And it reports a building that’s 14 condos smaller.)
Jennifer Dawson’s report in the HBJ says that sales won’t start until the fall, after a sales center — which will later “be converted into a spa, restaurant or office building” — is built on the site of the former Dolce & Freddo next door.
Below the fold: That 1960s office-and-shopping center on the site won’t go quietly!
This 1.35-acre lot at the end of the cul-de-sac on Glencove St. has been on the market for almost 16 months, so you can imagine during that time owner-broker Richard Maier has been trying just about every marketing angle possible. There’s some evidence of it too: The records are a little screwy, but it appears the asking price has been raised three times and lowered four. As of last week, we’re on an upswing! At $2.65 million, it’s back up $51K from its all-time low, but still down from the $3 million of early ’07.
So what do we got?
ABSOLUTELY ONE OF THE MOST BEAUTIFUL SETTINGS NEAR DOWNTOWN JUST BEFORE MEMROIAL PARK. GORGEOUS VISTAS OF ROLLING HILLS, RAVINES, GARDEN TRAILS, CREEKS AND TURTLE POND! ALL LANDSCAPED WITH THOUSANDS OF EXOTIC PLANTS AND TREES! IRRIGATED BY PRIVATE WELL AND LIGHTED BY NIGHT! THE GROUNDS ARE CONTIGIOUS WITH ACRES OF NATURE PRESERVE & BIRD SANCTUARY!
Clearly, though, Maier’s latest sales tactic has just got to work — now he’s even gonna throw in a genuine Midcentury Modern home with the property. Absolutely free!!!
ALSO INCLUDED IS A CLASSIC MID CENTURY MODERN HOME BY NOTED ARCHICTECT TALBOT WILSON WITH 14 FT.WALLS OF GLASS!
Yeah, it’s a risky strategy: This is Memorial. So better end the listing on a more direct note:
LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION!
After the jump, exotic plants!!! Plus an actual interior shot of the 5,000-sq.-ft. 1950 home Maier snuck in.
Yes, that’s a hedge of dense kudzu wrapping around this long skinny house . . . and threatening to do the same to its Fifth Ward neighbors. The kudzu, a court of crushed oyster shells, a house-length porch, a cistern, Murphy beds, and a butterfly roof are the major features of House 99, one of five finalists in a local competition to design a “green” house for $99,000 or less.
House 99 was designed by L.A. architect and USC professor Gail Borden. The Rice Design Alliance and Houston’s chapter of the American Institute of Architects want to build the winning design of their $99K house competition at 4015 Jewel St., or on other properties swept up by the city’s Land Assemblage Redevelopment Authority.
Below the fold: More drawings! More kudzu! More cost-saving measures! More greenness!
Gone to subdivisions, everyone!
Riviana Foods chief Bastiaan de Zeeuw gives more details about the company’s decision to close the Mahatma and Success Rice processing plant at 1702 Taylor St.:
De Zeeuw points out that the acreage devoted to rice-growing in Texas decreased by 75 percent from 1980 to 2006. In the 1980s, he says, Texas represented about 20 percent of total rice acreage in the United States. Now, it represents only 5 percent.
So what will happen to the 9.4-acre site in the increasingly less industrial area just south of I-10 once a new facility is built in Memphis? Read on, after the jump.
This three-bedroom, three-bath, 3,504-square-foot home on a half-acre lot in Memorial is notable for three reasons: The asking price was dropped to just below $650,000 only a few days after it went on the market, shortly before Christmas; it sits on a street whose name Susan Vreeland-Wendt probably wouldn’t approve of (foundation problems and fires generally aren’t the kinds of connotations you look for these days); and its main MLS listing photo features a remarkably bad Photoshop hack job.
What is it that’s been covered over on that front lawn with a hundred rubber-stamp-tool grass plugs? Is it just that the real sod isn’t taking underneath all those pine trees? Or is this a photo from heavy trash day? After the jump: more (presumably undoctored) photos of the house on Leaning Ash Lane.
The charms of gated acreage near Lake Conroe: large, wooded lakefront homesites, plus only a 25 minute commute . . . to The Woodlands! Oh, and if we’re talking about 1400-acre Crown Oaks in Montgomery County, lots of lawsuits, too!
Last year, the Crown Oaks Property Owners Association, along with individual homeowners, sued Affiliated Crown Development LTD, citing poor structure of the two manmade lakes in the development, located outside Montgomery.
But so much has happened since then: After new board members decided the developer would finally work with them to solve the lakes’ problems, the property owners association dropped its suit this fall. But now two groups of 10 individual homeowners have hired separate legal teams to continue their lawsuit against the developer. And in turn, the developer is now suing the engineering and construction firms it hired to build the dams on both lakes.
But there’s even more lawsuit fun:
“The POA tried to get out of the suit as a plaintiff, so my group has also sued them,” [homeowner attorney Kevin] Forsberg said. “The individuals were not satisfied. … Even though the POA started working with the developer in the hopes that the lakes would be fixed, nothing has actually been done.”
What’s it like to build your home on a lake that doesn’t bother to show up? Thanks to the amazing power of the internets, you can experience all the highs and lows of manmade-lakefront real-estate investing yourself — from the comfort of your own computer! Watch videos and read details of the whole dam story . . . after the jump!
Here’s another fine item sure to light up the interior of any sophisticated home, but also certain to warm the hearts of patriotic Houstonians as well. It’s the Firevase, a beautiful ceramic container for flowers or flames from Plodes Studio.
The Firevase is another original decorative piece from the mind of John Paul Plauché, a local designer with a remarkable ability to work images of the Houston landscape into his creations.
Plauché calls the Firevase an “indoor or dense-city version of a firepit.” So much nicer than that mock or simply unused fireplace, no? According to Plauché, the firevase runs on a nontoxic clean-burning alcohol gel-fuel can called Sunjel:
The Firevase attempts to bring everything you enjoy about an outdoor firepit to your tabletop or somewhere where you can’t have a firepit. It’s another thing I enjoyed growing up in a small town just east of Houston. It’s about scale [and] my past experiences of living in dense apartment buildings [where you] simply cannot have such amenities . . .
The vase’s tripod shape is inspired by two kinds of plants: the kind that grow in the ground, and the kind that sprout near Pasadena and on Houston’s scenic eastern reaches:
It can be a seasonal affair if you’d like. Fire in the winter and flowers in the summer. Its shape is inspired by root branching systems, and the stark nature of chemical plant structures that can found off hwy 225.
Refineries, chemical plants, flares, and flowers: at last, interior designers discover Houston’s true local style! Below the fold: more photos of this hot item, plus how you can light up your own home with one for the holidays.
Looking for a holiday gift for that special someone who’s in love with the Houston landscape? Local designer John Paul Plauché of Plodes Studio comes to the rescue with Mon Petit Chandelle, a lovingly handcrafted wax casting of a Houston-area crawfish chimney.
What exactly is a crawfish chimney? It’s the pile of small mudballs that accumulates at the entrance to a crawfish burrow, as the critters excavate their homes from our native muddy soil, the artist explains:
In and around Houston you can find them in wet situations like in ditches, near bayous, and fields or lawns that may not drain as well and/or hold water after a rain. I’m sure you could go to memorial park and find them . . . I used to live in the heights off 26th st. and specifically remember seeing one or two around my mailbox /ditch area….
Plauché says he found the chimney he used for Mon Petit Chandelle in a ditch off Sheldon Rd. between I-10 and Beltway 8. It’s hard to imagine finding a gift with more uh . . . local flavor. Plus, there’s the artist’s statement:
The design was instigated from childhood memories of being more directly in tune with “outsideâ€, the frequency of seeing these little towers and kicking them over . . . it became just a playful memory, and the shape of the mud chimney just seemed to mimic a candle to me in proportion, shape, and texture.
And as the candle burns it returns the associative favor by burning what would resemble the hole through the center of the chimney. Its definitely a local or regional thing. I’m sure a lot of people on other areas of the US wouldn’t have any idea what it is just because the type of crawfish that make these chimneys simply aren’t there.
Below the fold: More crayfish-candle craziness, plus where-to-buy information.
