COMMENT OF THE DAY: HOUSTON’S MAIN STREETS OF DISTRACTION 
“The fact that its not facing the freeway is progress. For too long, Houston has used its freeways as a super fast main street.
One of the reasons why the traffic is so bad in this area is that people gawk at the purdee buildins facing the freeway in addition to the excessive on/off ramps within a 2 mile stretch.” [DNAguy, commenting on This 21-Story Office Tower Is Headed for the West Loop’s East Side] Illustration: Lulu
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Don Luis Cruz, also known as the octogenarian violinist often found trilling and harmonizing with Gulfgate traffic, passed away yesterday at Pasadena’s Bayshore Medical Center, having reached the age of 90. He was a daily fixture at the intersection of Woodridge Dr. and the Gulf Fwy. feeder road until the summer of 2012, when he was beaten by a man in a wheelchair over the money in Cruz’s violin case. “Over the years,” writes the Chronicle‘s Craig Hlavaty, “crooks targeted The Violin Man for his tip money, bike, moped and even his amp. After each incident, however, Cruz would ignore his family’s pleas and head back out to his corner.” This video feature on Cruz’s string habit aired on Telemundo in 2011:
THE LONG ROADS BEHIND 
What’s changed in the last 5 or so years along stretches of Richmond Ave, Long Point, Washington Ave, Bissonnet, Telephone Rd., Clinton Dr., Harrisburg, Airline Dr., South Post Oak, Bellaire Blvd. and other unlikely pedestrian paths? It’s been a good half-decade since formerHouston Press writer John Nova Lomax and his Marfa-headed sidekick David Beebe dared to walk their lengths and chronicle their adventures along the way. [Houstonia] Photo of Smile Lounge, Telephone Rd.: John Nova Lomax
A BRIEF GUIDE TO HOUSTON’S WALKING-WHILE-DRINKING ZONING 
Ever wonder where in our fair city it is and isn’t legal to drink alcohol in public? Writer Nick Panzarella stakes out the boundaries: “We researched the Texas legal code, which states that public drinking is prohibited only in certain areas of state parks and wherever a city has specifically deemed it illegal. In 1994, the City of Houston successfully petitioned to ban drinking in public within the entire Central Business District (the area roughly bounded by Dowling Street and I-45, McGowen Street and Buffalo Bayou). On the one hand, you can’t drink on downtown’s streets, or Midtown’s or EaDo’s. On the other, it’s open season for open containers everywhere else.” That doesn’t condone public intoxication, notes Panzarella. “But there’s no law against strolling Allen Parkway with a Lone Star while taking in the skyline, or sipping margaritas to-go in Eleanor Tinsley Park.” [Houstonia] Photo: Jeff Turner
Architect Rob Rogers tells The Architect’s Newspaper how the Mid Main apartment-and-retail development he’s working on for the 3500 and 3600 blocks of Main St. in Midtown will break the mold behind the typical garage-wrapped-with-apartments scheme, which he calls the “Houston Wrap”:
Unwrapping Main St.
Wondering whatever happened to the competition entries from architects competing for the new Main St. light rail station planned for the block between Capitol and Rusk streets downtown, where the new East End and Southeast Lines cross the existing rail line? After a long silence about the project, Metro board members voted yesterday to scrap the plan for a signature station at that location, and to spend $1.05 million to build a standard canopy there instead.
The winner of the invitation-only competition — which included SHoP Architects, LTL Architects, and Neil Denari from New York as well as Houston’s Interloop—Architecture — was New York and Oslo firm Snøhetta. But who’d have known it?
No Snøhetta for Main St.
COMMENT OF THE DAY: A LINEAR SHOPPING DISTRICT FROM HIGHLAND VILLAGE TO THE GALLERIA 
“I love that all these projects are coming to fruition on Westheimer.
As more and more private investment comes to this area of Westheimer between Post Oak and Weslayan, will the city of Houston invest in the walkable infrastructure to make this one coherent district as it fills in?
What would we call it?
East Uptown? Lower River Oaks? Highland West?” [DNAguy, commenting on The River Oaks District’s New Box of Dior] Illustration: Lulu
COMMENT OF THE DAY: THE PARKING SPACES OUT FRONT 
“So my friend’s neighbors on both sides and across the street have used pea gravel to make head-in parking spaces in front of the their houses in the Heights.
In doing so they eliminated 2-3 parallel street parking spots in front of each house, as well as taking over what I assume is the city right of way. I assume this can’t be legal, but then this is Houston so who knows?
Anyway these neighbors throw fits if anyone parks in their spaces. My friends like to have people over and now parking is a real challenge. I’ve been confronted by the neighbors before and have told them that these are not their spaces and they vehemently (violently) disagree. Am I right? Am I wrong? Should I just pretend they aren’t there and park behind them on the street like I would have had they not taken over those spaces? Is there anything that can be done?” [charlie, commenting on Where the Sidewalk Goes Private in Cinco Ranch] Illustration: Lulu
A regular Swamplot reader has a question about the sidewalk on the south side of Cinco Ranch Blvd. as the street passes between retention ponds for the North Lake Village and South Lake Village neighborhoods, just west of Cinco Lakes Dr. (map here). “The sidewalk exists on the south side of the street block from Peek Rd. to Mason Rd. When it reaches the pond, the sidewalk moves to the inside of the fence and becomes private. The fence is between the street and the sidewalk.” What’s a pedestrian supposed to do when the only sidewalk moves into a gated area, and is marked as off limits? Asks the reader: “Can a pedestrian be cited as a trespasser? Note the North side of the street is a golf course with no sidewalk.”
And 4 more blocks to go: Site work began last week here in East Downtown to chunk up the pavement into such tidy piles and clear the way for that 5-block pedestrian path known as the EaDo Promenade. These photos show what the very north end of the path, at McKinney and Bastrop St. a block south of BBVA Compass Stadium, looks like, as of yesterday:
There are almost 6,000 miles of street in Houston, according to the Memorial Examiner, and now about a half a mile of one in Midtown can call itself remarkable. The Greenroads Foundation, which confers on streets a kind of LEED-like designation, gave its first formal props to a project in Texas to Bagby St. between Tuam and St. Joseph Pkwy., for the $9 million in improvements built along the 0.62-mile span the past few months.
Included in those improvements are bike racks, street furniture, wayfinding signs, wider sidewalks, and narrower, less harrowing crosswalks. (You can see in the photo above that these improvements don’t include burying utilities.) But the designation isn’t meant just to make the lives of pedestrians more aesthetically pleasing: LED lights were installed; rain gardens were put in to help with drainage; “fly ash” concrete, which reduces carbon emissions, was used where possible; and Bagby itself, with its potholes, patches, and cracks, was repaved atop what the Midtown Redevelopment Authority calls “newly stabilized materials” that are supposed to require less maintenance over the long haul.
Here are a few more looks at the transformation:
 and Improved... "Pin It")
Construction should begin by the end of October to transform a chopped-up industrial street in East Downtown into something like the pedestrian promenade rendered here. Anton Sinkewich, the director of the East Downtown Management District, explains that 5 blocks of Bastrop St., between Bell and McKinney, running near the Houston Food Truck Park and leading toward BBVA Compass Stadium on Walker, will be regraded. A pedestrian-only crushed granite path will be installed and dozens of trees planted. This first part of the project is modest, says Sinkewich, though there are plans in place to include more amenities if and when the ’hood continues to grow.
Rolled-in brick planters, some fake grass, a place to sit to sip your Starbucks: You’ve got yourself a park! Or, in this case, a seat-of-your-pants impromptu parklet, a li’l green gesture toward leisure and recreation where before there had been only the cool impersonality of curbs and the business of parking meters. All this stuff was set up first thing this morning — which just so happens to be National Park(ing) Day, devoted to pop-up experiments like this one — atop those 3 parallel parking spots in front of Frank’s near the corner of Travis and Prairie in Downtown, creating a like outlier just catty-corner from Market Square Park.
This is how it went down:
All day Friday these 3 parking spots in Market Square in front of Frank’s — and where Hines wants to build that 33-story residential tower — will be unavailable. Why? Well, Gensler and the Houston chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects (including firms Asakura Robinson, SWA Group, M2L, and Elizabeth Austin Landscapes) are gonna be using ’em to set up a parkette for National Park(ing) Day.
Just as the similarly hopeful Better Block project attempts to reproduce pedestrian-friendly street life for a few hours in a controlled environment, these wee pop-up parks work like dioramas of urban leisure: A rep tells Swamplot that a shade structure, trees, shrubs, and board games (checkers and Jenga, yo!) will be rolled in and set up here at 417 Travis from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. for anyone who wants to park it and stay awhile.
Additionally, a group of architecture students from Texas Tech are trying to stimulate the same simulation at the corner of Leeland and St. Emanuel in East Downtown, near the food trucks at the Houston Food Park.
- Houston Park(ing) Day [Facebook]
- Previously on Swamplot: A Few New Views of the 33-Story Apartment Building Hines Wants To Build in Market Square, A First Look at Some of the 33-Story Apartment Tower Hines Wants To Build in Market Square, How To Build a Buffalo Bayou Pedestrian Bridge: A Photo Tutorial, Hines Interested in Building Residential Tower on Downtown Block Near Market Square Park, East Downtown’s Food Truck Parking Park, Planning for the Future of Washington Ave, The Great Houston Street Life Simulation
Photo: Barbara Novoa
That retail task force that Mayor Parker put together about the same time that Macy’s announced it was closing the Downtown store came through with its first report yesterday, recommending that Dallas St. between Milam and La Branch — or between the hotels on the west side of Downtown and the hotels, Discovery Green, and George R. Brown Convention Center on the east — be prettied up into a kind of retail promenade. And the task force recommends that it happen sooner rather than later, in time to capitalize on the disposable incomes of the hordes coming to town for the NCAA Final Four in 2016 and the Super Bowl in 2017.
The rendering above, included in the report, shows a Kardashian body double strolling through the intersection of Main St. and Dallas; the Sakowitz building, catty-corner across from the to-be-demolished-in-a-week Macy’s, would pair with GreenStreet to anchor the linear district and provide similar photo opportunities. It appears that the task force hopes to lure national retailers and rally existing tenants and landowers, like Hilcorp, to the cause with tax breaks and other incentives, including waiving the city ordinance requiring that signage Downtown be no taller than 42.5 ft.
