And now, a rare look at the Second Ward’s indigenous Ship Channel dance ceremony, performed along the gentle banks of Buffalo Bayou and celebrating the bountiful fall harvest of crushed concrete.
- Tetsujin [Vimeo]
Video: Freneticore
And now, a rare look at the Second Ward’s indigenous Ship Channel dance ceremony, performed along the gentle banks of Buffalo Bayou and celebrating the bountiful fall harvest of crushed concrete.
Video: Freneticore

Robert Boyd’s original remarks on the scraping of the Wilshire Village Apartments briefly mentioned another older apartment complex that Matt Dilick redeveloped and now runs: the Bayou on the Bend Apartments, at 5201 Memorial, just west of Shepherd. Boyd’s link to discussions of that complex at ratings website Apartment Ratings sparked a quick note from a reader:
It looks like Apartment Ratings attracts tenants who want to complain, but it seems like most of the gripes about other apartments focus on managers who are hard to deal with, thin walls, neighborhood crime, that sort of stuff. Have you read the reviews of Bayou on the Bend?
Bayou on the Bend gets a 35 percent positive rating from readers who have written in to comment — certainly not the lowest number for a large Houston complex. Here are a few choice excerpts:

Reader Jeromy Murphy sends in this photo he took this morning along the banks of Buffalo Bayou, from the jogging path in Buffalo Bayou Park under I-45. What’s going on over there across the water?
While walking back to my office from a downtown meeting, I noticed workers installing new sod along the Bayou. I wonder how long this will last considering the weather report? Anyone along the ship channel need some new sod? It’s probably headed their way.
What’s wrong with a little sod freshening?

Here’s the latest installment of Swamplot’s fun-pix-from-around-town feature!
Above: While visiting last weekend’s Gulf Coast Green symposium and expo at the Reliant Center, Sean Morrissey Carroll catches the Astrodome peeking in on the action.
A few more images loom:
From Downtown yesterday: Buffalo Bayou garbage flotilla!

The new Belle Sherman Kendall Library in West Houston will have a little something extra inside: a half-court basketball gym. The ceremonial groundbreaking took place Monday on the site near Buffalo Bayou:
Besides housing a library and a community center, the building will be the first three-story building in the Houston system, and the first to have a drive-up window.
The site at 609 N. Eldridge will also serve as a city park and a trailhead to Terry Hershey Park. . . . At Kendall’s drive-up window, users will be able to return books, pick-up books they’ve reserved, and pay fines.

Happy New year! Swamplot is off for the remainder of the week, to rest up for an exciting year full of new features, plus plenty more Houston real estate, design, and neighborhood goodies.
Comments and the Swamplot tip line, of course, remain open. If you’re hunting for the results of the Swamplot Awards for Houston Real Estate, browse on over to this page. We’ll see you back here on Monday!
In the meantime, enjoy these excerpts from a recent watery tour of Downtown, shot by Daryl D’Angelo from an inflatable canoe on Buffalo Bayou:

Houston architect Preston Bolton built this bright house for himself in 1970, on the south bank of Buffalo Bayou just west of Memorial Park. It went on the market earlier this week, listed for just under $2 million.

The newly revealed design for that $7 million pedestrian bridge over Buffalo Bayou near Montrose makes a brilliant metaphor for the appeal of this city, no? From a distance, it doesn’t seem like Houston is really . . . “passable,” either! But once you’re looking at it up close . . . sure, it’s all right: You can make it through. An excellent message to send prospective Houston tourists! Plus: Wasn’t that how the Houston Ship Channel got started too?
Official name of this Memorial Heights TIRZ project: The Tolerance Bridge. Perfect!
There’s trouble in Sherwood Forest: Newman Branch, a stagnant finger of Buffalo Bayou that traipses between Little John and W. Friar Tuck Lanes, had fire hydrants running full force on Friday to flush out raw sewage that mysteriously appeared in the waterway, reports Allan Turner in the Chronicle:
Houston oilman Dewey Stringer, who lives near the point where the bayou passes Memorial, said similar pollution has periodically plagued the waterway for at least five years. Generally, however, heavy rainfall dilutes the contamination.
Stringer, who was among residents to report the pollution to authorities, said the odor was so severe that he and his wife found it difficult to sleep. He had planned to relocate to Galveston this weekend and commute to work.
Stringer said he has developed eye irritation from vapors rising from the bayou and both he and his wife have developed persistent coughs.

Uh-oh. That trailer — behind the pole barn — on a former scrap yard — next to the Houston Biodiesel plant — on Buffalo Bayou — may look innocuous. But it’s the new temporary Houston outpost of Los Angeles’s Center for Land Use Interpretation. The CLUI is taking up a year-long residency at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at UH — but this is where our L.A. visitors will be camping out.
What does the CLUI do? Some sample CLUI projects:
In this exhibit, farm animals show us their point of view through wireless video cameras installed temporarily on their head and necks by virtuoso animal and plant videographer Sam Easterson. Easterson’s technology enables a cow, a pig, a goat, a chicken, a sheep, and a horse to guide us around their world; what they look at, what catches their attention, how they move through space, and how they relate to one another, on the farm.
You get the idea. CLUI’s front man is artist Matthew Coolidge, whose act often incorporates academic-sounding narrations of landscape slide shows.
Here’s video of part of a Coolidge performance at the Aurora Picture Show late last year:

A reader reports that the Frame House, a fifties-Modern classic tucked off Memorial Dr., is up for sale for a cool $3 million. Designed by Houston architect Harwood Taylor in 1960, this is about as close to a Case Study House as Houston ever got — and it perches just about as close to Buffalo Bayou as you’d ever want a home to get. Its recent restoration from a mid-eighties whitewashing earned the current owner, his architects, and builder a local preservation award.
If you’re a fan of this kind of Modness, the best news of all is that you don’t have to pay to play: An open house is scheduled for the afternoon of Sunday, February 17th. If you’re not a fan, you can visit and imagine how it would all look with crown moulding and a nice, traditional pitched roof.
After the jump, a few more details about the home, plus a demonstration of the real value real estate agents can bring to a fine listing like this.