Tag: 77087

East End
01/15/13 9:45am

HCC Southeast Preparing Campus for Parking Garage

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Land Development, New Construction, Redevelopment, Renovations, Schools
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Note: Story updated below.

This mud pit on Rustic St. is not long for the world; eventually there will be a 3-level parking garage here at very congested HCC Southeast. The East End campus is pressed up against the back of a strip center that faces the I-45 feeder road between Woodridge and Wayside. To make room for the garage, appearing to allow students and faculty to enter from both Rustic and Garland, the 100-seat Carlos Garcia Theater and some inadequate surface parking had to go. This is an otherwise expanding campus: last summer saw the opening of a brand-new Workforce Building (shown here), a 3-story, 60,000-sq.-ft. Brave Praxis Brave Architecture job where many of the campus’s vocational programs — including HVAC, cosmetology, massage therapy, and accounting — are now based.

Photos: Brave Praxis (academic building); Allyn West (site)

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Air Quality
11/08/11 1:21pm

And the Band Didn’t Play On: The Sickness at Barnett Stadium

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Hazards, Southeast Houston, Stadiums
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HISD has now contracted with an industrial hygienist to evaluate the drainage systems, mechanical rooms, and plumbing and electrical systems at Barnett Stadium in an attempt to determine what might have caused 22 band or dance-team members from Stephen F. Austin High School to become mysteriously ill during a football game there Friday night. Several students displayed what appeared to be symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning. Epidemiologists have been interviewing students and school officials “to get information on the whereabouts of the band members within the stadium and collect other health related-factors that could have played a role in the event,” the school district announced. The HISD Athletics Department is expected to announce tomorrow morning whether 2 UIL playoff games scheduled for this week at the 6800 Fairway Dr. location will be moved to a different field.

Photo: Paragon Sports

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Glenbrook Valley
10/08/10 9:54am

What They’re Mad About in Glenbrook Valley

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Home Design
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A quick photo preview of a few of the stops on this Saturday’s “Mad About Mod” tour put together by Houston Mod, which will feature inside views of a few long-ignored modern homes (and a church) in Houston’s latest almost-historic district, Glenbrook Valley: Above and left, the Googie-inspired residence built for drive-thru restaurant barons Elmer and Myrtle Richardson, designed in 1955 by Pasadena architects Doughtie & Porterfield.

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Gulfgate
08/05/10 1:50pm

You’re Not Going To Pay a Lot for This Meineke House

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Home Decor, Homes for Sale, Interiors
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The subdivision for this home on Meineke St. on Houston’s southeast side carries the intriguing name of “Freeway,” but most of you will just call it Gulfgate. It’s only a block south of the South Loop, and Gulfgate Center is just a mile to the east. The home is listed as the official address of All Purpose Plastering, but the for-sale listing has been plastered on MLS for only a couple of days.

The 3-bedroom, 1-bath house was built in 1960 and measures a little more than 1,000 sq. ft. But look what you can fit inside:

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Apartments
07/06/10 7:50am

Park Place Apartment Fiberfest

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Bankruptcies, Demolitions, Hazards, Park Place, Quicklink
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PARK PLACE APARTMENT FIBERFEST Workers from Inland Environments will be taking “extra precautions” with the demolition of 4 apartment buildings at the corner of Park Place and Telephone Rd., the mayor’s office promises. There’s plenty of asbestos to go around in the Park Place Apartments at 7410 Park Place Blvd., but the buildings, which have been sitting vacant for 20 years, aren’t considered structurally sound enough for the asbestos to be removed. A bankruptcy filing by the owner last week delayed the city-ordered demolition, but it’s now scheduled to begin at 9 this morning. Update, 2:10 pm: Now there’s video! And the dust is flying. [Mayor’s Office; previously on Swamplot]

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Apartments
06/28/10 11:43am

Park Place Apartment Demo Parks in Bankruptcy Court

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Demolitions, Park Place, Quicklink
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PARK PLACE APARTMENT DEMO PARKS IN BANKRUPTCY COURT “Not so fast on the daily demo report,” cautions a reader. There’s been a last-minute delay: Park Place Apartments owner Rodolfo Yannarella has thwarted city attempts to demolish the complex near Long Dr. and Telephone Rd. by going to court this morning to declare bankruptcy. The 43-unit complex at 7410 Park Place was tagged with a police demolition order in February. A representative of council member James Rodriguez says his office will “continue to work with the Mayor’s Office, Neighborhood Protection, and the Legal Department to move forward to demolish this nuisance in the community as soon as possible.” [Swamplot inbox; previously on Swamplot]

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Home Prices
06/08/09 11:54am

Introducing the Swamplot Price Adjuster

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Park Place, Price Adjuster
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Are you getting the sense that some properties on the market in the greater Houston area are priced a little . . . inappropriately? Then you’ll enjoy the brand new feature Swamplot is trying out. We’re calling it the Swamplot Price Adjuster.

Which properties will Price Adjuster feature? Ones you send in!

Here’s how it works: Send your nominations to Swamplot in an email. Make sure to include a link to the listing or photos. Tell us about the property, and explain why you think it’s worthy of a price adjustment. Then tell us what you think a better price would be. (Unless you request otherwise, all submissions will be anonymous.)

Swamplot Price Adjuster will feature the best submissions, and allow readers to comment on and quibble with the property’s pricing.

Does this sound like an interesting idea? Good, because we’ve already received our first Swamplot Price Adjuster submission, and it’s waiting for your proposed adjustments:

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Air Quality
02/27/08 1:01pm

Southeast Side: A Tour of the Houston Heartland

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Garden Villas, Houston History, Park Place, Restaurants, Tourism, Toxic Sites, Water Quality
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El Torito Lounge, Harrisburg Blvd., Houston

Houston’s lone professional tourists, John Nova Lomax and David Beebe, stop off at the Brady’s Island in the Ship Channel midway into their latest day-long stroll . . . through this city’s southeastern stretches:

The air is foul here, and the eastern view is little more than a forest of tall crackers and satanic fume-belching smokestacks, sending clouds of roasted-cabbage-smelling incense skyward to Mammon, all bisected by the amazingly tall East Loop Ship Channel Bridge, its pillars standing in the toxic bilge where Brays Bayou dumps its effluent into the great pot of greenish-brown petro-gumbo.

While Brady’s Landing today seems to survive as a function room – a sort of Rainbow Lodge for the Ship Channel, with manicured grounds that reminded Beebe of Astroworld — decades ago, people came here to eat and to take in the view. This was progress to them, this horrifically awesome vista showed how we beat the Nazis and Japanese and how we were gonna stave off them godless Commies. As for me, it made me think of Beebe’s maxim: “Chicken and gasoline don’t mix.”

More from the duo’s march through “Deep Harrisburg”: Flag-waving Gulf Freeway auto dealerships, an early-morning ice house near the Almeda Mall, a razorwire-fenced artist compound in Garden Villas, Harold Farb’s last stand, colorful Broadway muffler joints, the hidden gardens of Thai Xuan, and — yes, gas-station chicken.

“There is nothing else like the Southeast side,” Lomax adds in a comment:

I see it as the true heart of Houston. Without the port and the refineries we are nothing. The prosperous West Side could be Anywhere, USA, but the Southeast Side could only be here.

Photo of El Torito Lounge on Harrisburg: John Nova Lomax and David Beebe

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Edmondson Addition
12/31/07 11:01am

Telephone Road Walking Tour: Not How They Sang It Was

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Flooding, Golfcrest, Houston History, Telephone Rd
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Smile Lounge, 4348 Telephone Rd., Houston

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.”

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.

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