08/31/17 5:15pm

If you had been wondering whether the sandbag and tarp barrier (pictured at top) mustered around Kristin Massey’s Meyerland home was able to hold back the floodwaters once nearby Brays Bayou overflowed its banks a block to the north Monday night, here’s your answer: “We did all that we could, but it would never have been enough,” Massey wrote on Facebook the following morning.

To prepare for the storm, Massey had spent close to $5,000 to arrange a perimeter defense using 18,000 pounds of sandbags. But the water reached the 9 ft. level on Braesheather Dr. a block south of Brays Bayou and just west of the 610 Loop (above) — and up to 4-and-a-half-ft. high inside her 1961 home:

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Harvey Defenses
08/25/17 3:32pm

SANDBAGGING IN MEYERLAND What kind of person would pay close to $5,000 to have 18,000 pounds of sandbags delivered and installed in a low stack in front of a 5-ft.-high waterproofing barrier surrounding her home? The owner of a Meyerland single-story 4-bedroom (pictured above) 1 block south of Brays Bayou that flooded “for the first time” in the Memorial Day deluge of 2015 (according to a real estate listing of that year) and then twice more in the past year or so. “This may not even work,” Kristin Massey tells Houston Public Media’s Marissa Cummings. “It’s just an effort to hope that it will.” Massey says she would have installed more sandbags if more had been available: “I would have liked to have gone higher than 11 inches, but I have about half or a third of what I need.” [Houston Public Media] Photo: Houston Public Media  

06/15/17 11:45am

Noticed that striking Meyerland Mod headlining our demolition report this morning? The 1956 home at 4815 Braesvalley Dr. first came to Swamplot’s attention 9 years ago, as the site of a remarkable scene. The then-86-year-old architect Lars W. Bang, a prolific purveyor of Modern Houston homes, was driven to the property in hopes that the real estate agent listing the 4-bedroom property might confirm that he was indeed its designer. “My husband, Jim, helped him out of the car and invited him into the house,” Meg Zoller wrote, “but Mr. Bang’s knees aren’t what they used to be . . . and he just wanted to stand out front and look at the house. After some time he decided that he could not confidently say whether the home was one of his designs or not.”

Bang passed away the following year, but not before his authorship of 4815 Braesvalley was confirmed. (It turned out his name was on a set of plans kept by the Meyerland Homeowner’s Association.) Writing in the next edition of the Houston Architectural Guide, Stephen Fox labeled it a home that “rescues Meyerland from being boring.” The plan contains 3 courtyard spaces, one of them now topped by a screen roof:

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Mod Be Gone
05/16/16 4:30pm

5243 Lymbar Dr., Meyerland, Houston, 77096

5243 Lymbar Dr., Meyerland, Houston, 77096

Hitting the market late last week in the neighborhoods of Meyerland and of $425,000: a groovy 1970s home a few doors down Lymbar Dr. from soon-to-be-renamed Johnston Middle School, northeast of the intersection of Willowbend Blvd. with Chimney Rock Dr. The living room of the 2,362-sq.-ft. house features a round concrete fireplace amid wood paneling and sealed brick floors; a shower-side planter setup makes appearances in the master suite’s bathroom.

Here’s the cantilevered porch and striped front door a the top of the home’s circular driveway:

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Meyerland Mod
04/19/16 1:30pm

A few folks at the Halstead apartments surveyed the scene along Brays Bayou late yesterday morning, catching sight of all kinds of action in the water. The video above captures the part of the lonely journey of an unmoored porta-potty floating away from the site of the under-construction Starbucks on the former gas station corner next door; the trip was also also tracked from further upstairs in the complex, where another photographer was documenting the flood:

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What’s In The Water?
04/18/16 12:30pm

Flooding along S. Braeswood Dr., Meyerland, Houston, 77096

Here’s this morning’s view north across S. Braeswood Dr. between Chimney Rock and Hillcroft in Meyerland, where Brays Bayou has once again been feeling out some alternate route options. That’s the Congregation Beth Israel synagogue and the closed-for-the-day Shlenker School across the water on the northern bank, looking higher but not that much drier; current reaadings for the nearest upstream county gauge show nearly 8 inches of rain over the last 12 hours, with higher totals further west. That hasn’t stopped some folks from checking things out from close-up:

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Soaking In the Scene
02/10/16 11:30am

Demolition of St. Nicholas School, 10420 Mullins Dr., Willowbend, Houston, 77096

An early morning post-deconstruction photo of the Mullins Dr. campus of the Medical Center Charter School (originally the St. Nicholas School, when the campus was private), just north of the Centerpoint transmission easement paralleling Willowbend Blvd. half a block to the south, was snapped by a reader yesterday. A representative of the school tells Swamplot that the 4-ish-acre property has been sold, and that townhomes are apparently in the works for the land.

Demolition permits were issued in two parts this week — here’s a shot of more cleanup going on this morning:

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Clearing the Board in Willowbend
01/21/16 4:45pm

Future Site of Starbucks, 4660 N. Braeswood Dr., Braeswood Place, Houston, 77096

A pile of dirt is heaped up at the northeast corner of N. Braeswood Blvd and the West Loop feeder road this afternoon, next to a sign announcing the upcoming arrival of a Starbucks to the site. The lot held a Citgo station before demolition in mid-2013; a reader notes that construction crews have been poking around at the site for at least the past 3 weeks.

The blocky facade of the Halstead apartment complex can been seen in the background of the above snapshot — down the street to the east, the Halstead and next-door Meritage complex are slowly being joined by a midrise residential development going up at the corner of N. Braeswood and Frankway. East of that is a Proguard Storage facility and the Southwest Wastewater Treatment Plant.

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Coffee on 610
01/21/16 2:00pm

9402 Braesheather, Meyerland, Houston, 77096

Raised 5 feet on piers, this 1-story, 4-bedroom single family home lifts potential home owners above the din, as well as the Brays Bayou floodplain. The listing proclaims that the 1959 building did not flood during Memorial Day weekend last year; the house went on the market a few days before Christmas for $975K. A lift is available on the side of the front patio (above) for those disinclined towards stairs:

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Above Brays Bayou
12/28/15 3:15pm

8877 Frankway Dr., Meyerland, Houston, 77096

A reader snapped a few shots of construction over at 8877 Frankway Dr.: a midrise apartment complex taking shape in a long-vacant strip of land next door to the Houston Orthodontics building and a ProGuard public storage facility, just west of where S. Braeswood jumps across Brays Bayou to become N. Braeswood. The project will fall into a row with the next-door Meritage and freeway-adjacent Halstead apartment complexes to the west, both on N. Braeswood between Frankway and the West Loop. Just east of the Proguard facility is the Southwest Wastewater Treatment Plant, which accidentally released nearly 100,000 gallons of raw sewage into Brays Bayou and the surrounding area during this year’s Memorial Day flooding.

A crane is on the scene, and some preformed concrete segments have been trucked in:

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Meyer Park
06/09/15 4:00pm

WESTBURY CENTERETTE SITE WILL REMAIN DRY Hot off the presses from the latest Westbury Crier — amid reports on the aftermath of May’s bayou overflow events, which flooded 267 homes in the neighborhood: An update on the status of the site of the former Westbury Centerette at the corner of W. Bellfort and Chimney Rock, which was demolished in March. “Originally,” the newsletter reports, “the property owner planned to construct a facility for LA Fitness; however, we regret to announce that this plan will not proceed. The property owner continues to evaluate options for the site.” [Westbury Crier; previously on Swamplot] Video of Westbury Centerette demolition: Brays Oaks Management District