 from Future Off-Era Restoration Attempts... "Pin It")
This morning the city announced that it’s giving protected historic landmark status to the Mecom Fountain, in the wake of this year’s partial tuscanization of the 1960s mod landmark (and subsequent crowdfunded reversal thereof). All that bright blue primer has been cocooned over, and full de-restoration was scheduled to be finished by the end of last month.
Also getting the same protective status bump today: the 1883 house at 2120 Sabine St., formerly the First Ward home of state representative August von Haxthausen, who in the late 1800s ran Houston’s German language newspaper the Texas Deutsche Zeitung. That house got its own (more permanently) colorful restoration in 2015 — below are some close-up photos of the newly-technicolor wraparound porch from a previous listing of the property on HAR:
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 A few other homes were given historic-but-not-actually-protected landmark status, including one in Riverside Terrace at 3308 Parkwood (just 1 block east of that house still up for sale by 2 scandal-embroiled former charter school higher-ups). The home at 3308 belonged to a former president of Howard Hughes’ Gulf Brewing Company (which produced a beer called Grand Prize, many decades before the Museum District bar of the same name opened up). The others on the list are the former Old Braeswood home of governor William P. Hobby on Glen Haven Blvd., and 2 well-pedigreed River Oaks mansions on Kirby and Chevy Chase drives.
- Previously on Swamplot: Mecom Fountain Now Being De-Restored, Sealed in Protective Cocoon Layer; Friends of Mecom Fountain: 40,000 Yale St. Bridge Bricks Could Use Some Friends, Too; Private Group Now Trying to Crowdfund the Un-Restoration of the Mecom Fountain’s Basin Wall; Progress on Those Limestone Slabs Getting Screwed Onto the Mecom Fountain; Future Gas Station Coffee Shop Tops the City’s List of New Historic Landmarks
Photos: City of Houston (top), HAR (2120 Sabine St.)
Someone please educate me – I still don’t understand the fuss with the Mecom fountain. They put beige stone over beige concrete. And stopped it from leaking. Why was this tragic?
@Superdave: All the world’s a museum, and all the men and women merely curators.
Conversation in 1884:
Person 1: “So, where do you live these days?”
Person 2: “On Sabine Street, house number 2120”
Person 1: “The 2000 block! That must be halfway to Dallas! It must take you all evening to get home!”
Person 2: “Well, they are starting to build homes north of me.”
Person 1: “I can’t believe a sane person would choose to live way out there! Can you imagine what people in the year – say – 2016 would think of us?”
Person 2: “I’m sure they would write it in a way that all in their future community could see and then easily make their own comments as well”
Person 1: “Now you’re just taking crazy!”