Headlines: A Master Planner for Memorial Park; Those New Missouri City Home Smells

Photo of the Houston Ballet and Wortham Center: Bill Barfield via Swamplot Flickr Pool

14 Comment

  • So we can’t choose one of the many, more than qualified, local Landscape Architecture firms to “re-imagine” Memorial park? What gives? The city already spent money on a master plan for the park, which has crossed my desk a few times during research for projects. Are we tossing all of that hard work to the side to spend more money? Is this someone that the Memorial Park Conservancy juiced in to fulfill their elitist agenda? I can hear it now, Memorial Park to finally become private River Oaks park, Country Club membership required to enter.

  • Let’s hope the plan doesn’t involve more deforestation on the scale what they’re doing to the section of Buffalo Bayou between Shepherd and downtown. Memorial Park has already lost enough trees as it is.

  • I’d hate to see Memorial Park changed up so much …. it’s heavily used already and offers some rare natural Texas forests for us to enjoy. Adding more “off-limits” holes for a few more golfers isn’t in the best interests of the general public.

    Keep Memorial Park green AND ACCESSABLE.

  • The numbers in David Baker’s statement (CenterPoint VP) seem to defy logic: if 50%, as he claims, of Houston’s power lines are already buried and thus out of reach for wind and trees, then why had Houston seen an almost 100% power outage after Ike? I seriously doubt the “50%” figure. The anachronistic ubiquity of above ground power lines is one of the biggest obstacles in Houston’s infrastructure development toward modernity.

  • Neither Memorial Park nor the bayou east of Shepherd are “natural Texas forest.”

    Memorial Park was at one time Camp Logan – an army base. When it was replaced by a park it got put together with pretty much all one kind of tree, of pretty much the same age; as a result they all reacted pretty uniformly to the drought. My understanding is that this is being taken as an opportunity to put in a more diverse forest that more closely resembles what would have originally been there – a mix more like the areas just the other side of the loop that weren’t clear cut a hundred years ago.

    Likewise, the bayou has all sorts of non native vegetation; it’s being taken out to be replaced with natives.

  • I call major BS on the assertion that Houston can’t have underground powerlines b/c of all things, flooding.
    Centerpoint, you’re getting lazy in your excuses.

  • I think the reason the power went out even though much of the lines are underground are due to fuses blowing out. They have fuses placed along the lines to avoid voltage charge that would fry the lines or household appliances. therefore if a fuse blows out, like thousands did, then everyone down the line would be without power even thought their lines were ok.

  • @benny
    Your point does not explain why in the few city regions where power lines are consistently buried (Medical Center and a few inner blocks of downtown) Ike’s power outage did not happen (In the days after September 13 those were the islands of light in a sea of darkness.) In my opinion, that evidence already proves that burying power lines (and other cables) makes network infrastructure much more resilient to severe perturbations.

  • @Larry
    Anyone ever driven through River Oaks and looked up? You know what you don’t see, power lines! They also had no power after Ike, but many had huge generators on semi trailers running their homes. Buried lines didn’t save them from the outages after Ike.

  • @n8ball
    River Oaks has a lot of above ground power lines that are all vulnerable to damage (http://www.myfoxhouston.com/story/18194222/crash-knocks-out-power-in-river-oaks)

  • Local buried power lines are sometimes fed from above-ground lines that are subject to objects (trees) falling on them, hence outage.

  • @n8ball,

    River Oaks has above-ground powerline all over. Just look through the trees to the back yards (or look up where they cross the streets) and you see them. I notice them every day when biking through the heart of River Oaks.

  • @n8ball: maybe an out of town Landscape Architecture firm was chosen so that the plant material in the park wouldn’t just be Crepe Myrtles, Indian Hawthornes and Ligustrums.

  • Someone cue the sad violin music for the Galveston moochers who still haven’t been able to move back to their section 8 housing.