Tag: 77074

Art
11/12/10 5:44pm

Prototype 180: The Great Sharpstown Turnaround Has Begun

by
Public Art, Renovations, Sharpstown
12 Comments

Spun around 180 degrees on its site yesterday: the 1,304 sq.-ft. Ranch house at 6513 Sharpview, before a small crowd gathered at Bayland Park next door and an online audience following the live-streaming cameras mounted to the long-vacant 1960 structure. Conceptual artist Mary Ellen Carroll‘s big house-twisting exercise was 10 years in the making. A reader sends in this report from the muddy field:

I missed the talks . . . but was there from about 11:30 ’till when they finished for the day at 2:30. What happened was they backed the house off the site, turned it perpendicular onto Sharpcrest, and then there was this great moment when the house was moving laterally along the street, and then they backed it in towards us (we were at the back of the lot, on the lot line that faces Bayland Park).

. . . The group seemed about evenly divided between architecture folks, including at one point Rice Architecture dean Sarah Whiting, art crowd types (Molly Gochman, Arturo Palacios), and the many friends MEC has made during her time in Houston due to her being such a nice person. A healthy handful of neighbors milled about, including this woman who stood on her roof with a cup of coffee, who at one point went inside and got an umbrella when it started raining.

Our correspondent also apparently missed some very hot Mexican food: Hometta blogger Jenny Staff Johnson reports a taco truck hired to cater the event caught on fire.

CONTINUE READING THIS STORY

, , , , , , ,
Schools
09/10/10 5:44pm

The Academy of St. Agnes in the Fields

by
7 Comments

The 18.7-acre vacant former site of the Gillman auto dealership on Bellaire Blvd. at Fondren will soon become an extension campus of a Catholic girls’ high school down the road. The main campus of St. Agnes Academy will remain at 9000 Bellaire Blvd., next to Strake Jesuit between Gessner and Ranchester, which the school calls “landlocked.” This new site a little more than a mile to the east — purchased just Wednesday — will likely become the new home of the school’s athletic facilities, to allow for expansion on the main campus. If that happens, the Catholic school’s sports teams will play on fields across Bellaire Blvd. from Plazamericas — formerly known as the Sharpstown Mall. St. Agnes Academy moved to its current site in 1963, after almost 60 years in Midtown.

CONTINUE READING THIS STORY

, , ,
Alief
05/10/10 5:45pm

The Bellaire Corridor Donut: There’s an International Zone Between the Loop and Beltway, but Not So Much Dough

by
Houston Data, Sharpstown, Southside Place, Texas Medical Center
46 Comments

University of Houston architecture professor Susan Rogers explores the Bellaire-Holcombe corridor from Highway 6 to the Med Center and finds a donut in her path.

For each census tract that intersects Holcombe or Bellaire Blvd., Rogers tallied the total number of residents born outside the United States and those residents’ country of origin, using 2000 Census data. The results surprised her:

Most of the action is in the zone between the Loop and the Beltway. “The diversity drops steeply inside 610,” she notes:

I had graphed the street from just 610 to Hwy. 6 for a talk on the links between Asia and Houston and then decided to add the rest as a potential “contrast” – what I found when I completed it absolutely astounded me – the absolute drop is so stark – and of course the income graph is nearly the exact opposite . . .

That graph showing median household income in the same census tracts:

CONTINUE READING THIS STORY

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Hazards
02/25/10 9:35am

What Happened To the No. 4 Bus Shelter at the Maplewood Shopping Center

by
Maplewood, Public Transportation
1 Comment

“This must have been quite a fearsome impact,” reports ever-vigilant blogger Slampo, who files these photos of what had until the wee hours of Wednesday morning been the No. 4 inbound bus shelter on Beechnut just east of Hillcroft, directly in front of the Foodarama parking lot. “There’s one of those concrete-lined garbage containers somewhere in there under the former shelter’s roof.” These photos were taken a few hours later.

CONTINUE READING THIS STORY

, , , , ,
Leasing
10/07/09 4:57pm

Old Sharpstown Target: New Center of Convenience

by
Retail, Sharpstown
3 Comments

A reader reports that the long-shuttered and fallow former Target store on the northbound 59 feeder just north of Bellaire Blvd. (and across the freeway from the Sharpstown Mall) will finally be used for something productive — though it’s “probably not the kind of use the Greater Sharpstown Management District had in mind.” What’s that?

The new owner, Golden Sharpstown Inc, is reportedly in the process of turning the 160,000 square foot building into the new home of Texas Jasmine, “the leading wholesaler for C-Store Owners.” (That’s Convenience Store, for the uninitiated.) Texas Jasmine is out of space at their old location [at 7800 Harwin near Fondren, pictured above], and does a thriving business supplying gas stations and convenience stores throughout Houston with everything from dill pickles-in-a-bag to pipe tobacco.

Well, who doesn’t need a dill pickle in a bag now and then? How convenient for the convenience-store owners, no?

Sure, says our tipster, but:

CONTINUE READING THIS STORY

, , , , ,
Art
05/27/09 11:27am

Houston House and Lot Flipping: Conceptual Art Meets Sharpstown Deed Restrictions

by
Development Restrictions, Public Art, Sharpstown
23 Comments

Sure, Mary Ellen Carroll is gonna pick up this Sharpstown lot across from Bayland Park and the house on it and rotate the whole thing 180 degrees. Oh, and then there’s gonna be that hydroponic curtain-wall fencing system and the solar and geothermal systems and the wi-fi cloud and the fancy door hardware and the bees and all. Still gotta meet the local deed restrictions.

Video: Douglas Britt

, , , , , , ,
Bellaire
12/04/07 6:08pm

Shade, Subs, Plexes and Suds: A Bissonnet Story

by
Sharpstown, Streets, Westwood
No Comments

Money Stop on Bissonnet, Houston

It’s high time for another street-walking adventure from the writing, singing, photographing, and drinking duo of quasi-professional pedestrians John Nova Lomax and David Beebe. Their latest challenge: a 14.5-mile walk along Bissonnet, from Synott Road (just past Dairy Ashford) to Montrose, which brings Lomax to this stirring conclusion on the sidewalk-transforming power of street trees:

By now, I’ve walked damn near the entire lengths of Bellaire, Westheimer, Clinton, Navigation, and Shepherd, and Bissonnet is nicer than all of them, for the simple reason that its sidewalks have far more shade. Westheimer has none between 6 and the Loop, save for a few landscaping fantasias at scattered corporate campuses; there’s none to be had on most of Shepherd unless you duck under a bridge (where you might sit on human turds); sun-baked Bellaire has none from Eldridge central Sharpstown, and the East Side streets are only a little better. Bissonnet, on the other hand, seems like a stroll through Yosemite.

Below the fold: local color.

CONTINUE READING THIS STORY

, , , , , , , , , , ,
Air Quality
09/24/07 10:11am

The Smoggiest Place in Houston

by
Bellaire, Hilllcroft, Parks
No Comments

Picnic Area at Bayland Park, near Bissonnet and Hillcroft

Looking for a home in an in-town location, but don’t want to miss that exhilarating feeling you get from East Side neighborhoods near the Ship Channel?

Why not start your search near Bayland Park, at the corner of Bissonnet and Hillcroft, just west of Bellaire? It’s outside the Loop, far to the west of Houston’s industrial areas, close to some of some of the city’s most dynamic neighborhoods . . . and recently was rated one of the most consistently smoggy places in Houston.

That’s right: Smog is worse on the West Side.

The data may surprise many Houstonians who associate smog with the chemical refining and industrial byproducts that foul the air in East Harris County.

In fact, the highest ozone readings in the city are routinely captured by monitors located on Houston’s densely populated southwest side. Recent data shows Bayland Park, just west of Bellaire, to be one of Houston’s smoggiest neighborhoods. According to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the Bayland Park monitor, located in the 6400 block of Bissonnet Street, recorded 45 days in the last three years when ozone levels violated public health standards.

During that period, the monitor registered ozone concentrations as high as or greater than those recorded by monitors in the Ship Channel region.

Howzat happen?

University of Texas chemical engineer David Allen analyzed data collected by the Bayland Park monitor in 2006. He and others determined that climate patterns explained the high ozone concentrations on Houston’s west side. Based on computerized modeling of weather patterns, Allen said nearly every incident of excessive ozone levels in Bayland Park that year happened on days characterized by the same weather pattern: hot and sunny, with still air in the morning and light winds from the east blowing in the afternoon.

“The east winds pick up Ship Channel air and carry it all the way into west Houston where it settles over neighborhoods,” Allen said.

That’s the smell of money.

Photo: Harris County Precinct 3

, , , , ,
Bonham Acres
08/15/07 12:11pm

New to the Market: Palm-Encrusted in Bonham Acres

by
Homes for Sale, Interiors
No Comments

8810 Bonhomme Rd.

This grand five-or-six-bedroom, five-bath home on four-fifths of an acre near the corner of Bissonnet and Fondren is festooned with stucco palm-tree frescoes and an aggressive porte-cochere, and can be yours for only $347,000. At that price, you can assume that the furnishings are not coming with it. Which is probably a good thing, though much of the decoration appears to be . . . encrusted on the interior.

You simply have to see this one for yourself: Tour the overdecorated interior—before it’s ruined by a new buyer—after the jump.

CONTINUE READING THIS STORY

, , ,
Alief
06/01/07 10:34am

Walking on Bellaire

by
Bellaire, Gulfton, Sharpstown, Sprawl, Tourism
No Comments

Street Sign on Bellaire BlvdOver at Houstoned, professional barfly John Nova Lomax and crooner David Beebe take a long, strange trip down the entire length of Bellaire Blvd.—on foot. Lomax’s conclusion:

If Westheimer is mainly about the fetishes, broken dreams and vanities of Anglo whites, and Shepherd is all about the needs of cars, Bellaire is a world market of a street, a bazaar where Mexicans, Anglos, Salvadorans, African Americans, Hondurans, stoners, Vietnamese, Chinese, Koreans and Thais go to shop and eat.

The report from western Chinatown:

Tall bank buildings are sprouting, with glass fronts festooned in Mandarin. Strip malls fill with Vietnamese crawfish joints, Shaolin Temples, and acupuncture clinics. As we crossed Brays Bayou, a huge temple loomed in the distance, and it didn’t take much imagining to pretend you were gazing across a rice paddy toward a Vietnamese village. A Zen center abuts one of the last businesses in town to carry the all-but-forgotten A.J. Foyt’s once-omnipresent name. A couple of ratty old apartment complexes have changed into commercial buildings, each unit housing its own business.

The rice paddies, of course, have left the neighborhood.

More highlights of their journey, as they walk east: live turtles in the water gardens outside the Hong Kong City Mall; front-yard car lots in Sharpstown; Jane Long Middle Schoolers rushing convenience stores; the “Gulfton Ghetto.” Plus, this illuminating report from Alief:

Alief Ozelda Magee, the town’s namesake, is buried right there, under a slate-gray monument with a touching epitaph: “She did what she could.” And hell, maybe she still is. The adjoining apartment complex, which is rumored to cover some of the graves here, is said to suffer from a poltergeist infestation.

Photo: Cruising down Bellaire, by flickr user corazón girl

, , , , , , , , , , , , ,
« Previous Page