Swamplot Archives by Tag: 77083

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Forget It, Jake. It’s Asiatown

   

The Chronicle quietly debuts that new, more inclusive name for the pan-Asian strip along Bellaire Blvd. between 59 and Highway 6 formerly known as Chinatown: Asiatown. A recent email describing marauding, gun-toting, and noodle-slurping gangs in the area is wrong: “Janet Chiu, manager of Tan Tan, one of the purportedly robbed restaurants, said the tales caused business to drop by 20 percent. ‘It’s more Dead Town than Asiatown,’ she complained, voicing a strident denial that her cafe had been robbed.” [Houston Chronicle]

Read more about: , , , , , , ,
Thursday, October 30, 2008

Neighborhood Guessing Game Over: Go West

Neighborhood Guessing Game 30: Entry

This sure was a tough one again this week, wasn’t it?

First, your guesses: 4 for Kingwood, 2 each for The Woodlands, Clear Lake, Willowbrook, and Champion Forest. Plus: Memorial, Memorial near Dairy Ashford, off Briar Forest inside Beltway 8, Hudson, Fondren, Fondren Southwest, Briar Forest around Kirkwood, Briar Hills, between Wilcrest and Kirkwood north of Memorial, “Memorial and Gessner towards Westheimer,” “Gessner between Memorial and Briar Forest,” Jersey Village, Hammersmith, west of the Galleria between Woodway and Westheimer, Dairy Ashford, Atascocita, Humble, Spring, Jones Rd., FM 1960, Eldridge, Copperfield, Sugar Land, Sugar Land south of 59 and east of Williams Trace, Missouri City, Friendswood, Bear Creek, Quail Valley, Olde Oaks, Green Tee Terrace in Pearland, Lakeside Place, and Brook Forest.

That’s a lot of guesses! Many of them were close, veering toward the west side of town.

But not far enough west. Maybe if more of you Neighborhood Guessing Game lurkers had actually entered a guess, someone might have happened upon the right name. C’mon in next time, there’s room for you! More than enough Houston subdivisions to go around!

So: no winner. But an honorable mention goes to JT for this evocative description:

Going to date this house from 1977 to 1982 as the formica butcher block counters and
brick fireplace with the clerestory style ceiling are giveaways. The master bath looks original as it has a late 70’s “oversize greenhouse window and more interior brick. Gut reaction is Champion Forest/Olde Oaks area of Northwest Houston because of the layout, traditonal furnishings and oddball juxtaposition of a moonbridge, early american railings and soft contemporary open floor plan and window styles.

So where is it?

Continue Reading This Story >

Read more about: , , , ,
Wednesday, February 6, 2008

A $2,100 Price Drop and Still No Bites?

Flea Powder at 6822 Songbrook Dr., Alief, Houston

Bet the sellers are just itching to get rid of this place.

Here’s part of a photo from the listing of a 3-bedroom, 2-bath home in Braewood Glen. It’s been on the market for two weeks, and the asking price was lowered to $109,900 just a few days in.

After the jump: They already got rid of the carpet what more do you want?

Continue Reading This Story >

Read more about: , , , , , , , ,
Friday, June 1, 2007

Walking on Bellaire

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

Read more about: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,