A Swamplot reader asks for some help with a recent discovery:
Accidentally came across a neighborhood with some rather large lot sizes and homes off of Scott south of U.H. east of 288…seemed “out of the blue†considering some of the nearby neighborhoods. Think one of the streets was “bowling greenâ€. Please let me know what neighborhood/area this is as it looked nothing like Houston!
Neighbors of a permitted, non-hazardous waste treatment and disposal plant less than a mile south of Riverside Terrace have been upset by the stench that regularly rises from the new facility. And last weekend there was a bit of an eruption at the CES Environmental Services plant at 4904 Griggs Rd.:
No one was injured in Saturday’s explosion, but it was the latest in a series of incidents involving the treatment facility, which is permitted to handle non-hazardous industrial waste, such as used oil.
The city has received more than 135 complaints about the plant this year, mostly related to the odors.
So what exactly landed in the yards along Grace Lane in McGregor Terrace? Exploded waste?
Nancy Sarnoff reports that construction is about to begin on a new gated 52-townhouse development on South MacGregor, east of 288. The developer, Joseph Casimir of Cypresswood Capital, reports on the project’s website that the development
bears three distinctive yet integrated architectural flavors: Florentine, Venetian, and Romanesque, affording you a lifestyle of unparalleled comfort and understated sophistication.
The townhouse development is called The Modigliani, after an Italian artist who spent most of his adult life in Paris, and who died of TB at the age of 35, aggravated by persistent alcoholism and drug abuse.
The 4.3-acre site at 3028 S. MacGregor Way is next door to the University of Texas Harris County Psychiatric Center and across the street from Brays Bayou. Casimir bought it in 2006 for $4.6 million, then demolished the 1936 Wright Morrow estate on the property. The previous owner, the UT Health Science Center at Houston, had intended to build a mental health outpatient facility on the site, but put it up for sale after encountering vocal opposition from neighborhood residents and State Rep. Al Edwards.
Below: Elevations and a site plan!
Just a few blocks north of the site of the new Houston Texans YMCA, the University of Houston has bought 43 acres immediately southeast of its main campus.
The new UH land looks like it’s part of MacGregor Park, but whether it is — or was — was a matter of intense . . . legal interest. The property was originally part of a larger 110-acre parcel that was donated by the MacGregor family to the City of Houston in 1930. More recently, the donors’ heirs sued the city for violating the terms of that gift, which required that the city turn the land into a park. By 2002, the MacGregor heirs had won back rights to the wooded 41 acres between MLK and Spur 5, on the north side of Old Spanish Trail.
The MacGregor heirs’ sale of the property to UH for $25 million closed in February, according to a report by Jennifer Dawson in the Houston Business Journal. The new UH property is south of the gigantic Wellness Center, across Buffalo Brays Bayou.
The land gives UH a possible new entrance on Martin Luther King Blvd., but it’s also likely to give the campus a fifth light-rail station: a MacGregor Park stop will be the second station on the Southeast line, which begins at the new transit center planned for Palm Center.
Rendering of planned Southeast light-rail line on MLK, south of UH: Metro
The brand new YMCA planned for the corner of Griggs Rd. and Martin Luther King Blvd. will be the first ever named after a professional sports team: The Houston Texans. Construction is expected to begin later this year. The new Third Ward facility is meant to be a permanent replacement for the old South Central YMCA between UH and TSU at 3531 Wheeler, which was abandoned for temporary digs in a storefront on Scott St. several years ago.
At a press conference yesterday, officials from the YMCA and the Texans described the new complex as just part of a larger partnership between the two organizations.
Hey, isn’t Palm Center the planned location for the start of the Southeast Metrorail line? So the Y will mark the beginning of athletic training for a lot of kids . . . plus the start of train riding for a larger group. Cute.
After the jump: A tiny picture of the new facility, plus . . . that light rail map!
Telephone Road south of I-45 has changed forever, declares John Nova Lomax:
Gone is the Mexican Catholic blue-collar neighborhood to the north around Queen of Peace church, its place taken by a string of hot sheet motels, clip joints, massage parlors and other such venues of vice. This is what’s left of the Telephone Road Mark May, Steve Earle, Rodney Crowell, Culturcide and others have written songs about.
But it’s all impossibly sadder. The Telephone Road that Earle and Crowell sang about in the rollicking songs of that name is long gone. Crowell’s version is set in the ’50s and early ’60s, and Earle’s in the early ’70s. Today’s Telephone Road far better fits Earle’s “The Other Side of Town.â€
There’s more street-level reporting in Lomax and David Beebe’s latest narrated and well-lubricated walking tour, which starts Downtown and heads east along Leeland, through a neighborhood called Edmondson Addition:
Boarded-up hovels line some streets, awaiting inevitable transformation into the (mostly shoddy) condos that are springing up like dandelions here. Other streets reminded us of some of Galveston’s less opulent older districts – one and two-story wood frame houses standing on bricks, interspersed with brick warehouses and workshops.
The story includes Lomax’s encounters with Golfcrest’s underground shopping-cart economy and his retelling of a Telephone Rd. crack-and-hookers tale too uh . . . racy to fit into a song lyric.
After the jump, a very different portrait of Telephone Rd. from an earlier era.
Why has this property in Riverside Terrace been floating aimlessly on the market for almost five months? Sure, it’s being sold “as is” — and the “is” apparently doesn’t merit an interior photo. But the home has four bedrooms, contains 2,875 square feet of living space, and is apparently salvageable. Plus it sits on a 11,100-square-foot lot on a “lovely, tree-lined street” in a part of town that’s been pretty hot recently, no?
Another day, another round of Houston demolitions. Find out where the action is in our list of structures approved for destruction—after the jump.
A home from the 1930s comes down from the Heights. Plus: an Intercontinental casualty. See our daily address list of destruction—after the jump.
The Doyle Mansion gets its dismissal papers. Plus a Riverside Terrace teardown (you’re looking at it) and nine more homes say goodbye—all in today’s report.
Knocked down in Houston: Six end-of-life houses—after the jump.
