06/20/07 12:01pm

Downtown Houston Skatepark

“If your city doesn’t have a skatepark, then your city is a skatepark,” reads a headline on a Skaters for Public Skateparks website. And really: Houston has so many better uses for its concrete surfaces—like channeling floodwaters.

In the words of one proponent, speaking in a Public Use Skateparks for Houston (PUSH) video:

If you want to get the kids off the streets, get them to quit tearing up your ledges and your rails, and put them some place where they can actually have some fun and stay out of trouble, a place where families can come hang out — there’s a real need for it in a city this big.

It’s the flypaper theory of city planning: Build it, and maybe those annoying skaters will go there and leave your property alone.

You might have expected building owners bothered by scrapes and skate wax to have been bigger proponents of the newly announced downtown Skatepark. Instead, it took a $1.5 million donation from Joe Jamail for the Houston Parks Board to meet its fundraising goals.

The park will be 35,000 square feet of sculpted concrete on the west side of Sabine St. at Memorial Dr., just under the Sabine Bridge over Buffalo Bayou. There better be some drains in those bowls.

PUSH spokesman Barry Blumenthal told city council to expect 200 skaters and hundreds of onlookers at the park on a typical Saturday.

After the jump, more views of the new skatepark.

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06/15/07 10:42am

Downtown Houston Tunnel and Frustrating Shopper

The mysterious Tunnel Mole, posting on Houstoned, provides a succinct list of shopping features missing from the not-so-glamorous Downtown daytime underground scene:

It’s got infinite ways to get annoying chores done, except it’s devoid of the most annoying ones that you want to do while you’re on the clock, like upgrading your cell phone. And here’s what else you don’t have in the tunnel:

*Music
*Movies
*Television
*Sex (not that we’ve noticed, anyway)
*Liquor
*Dreams of a Houston team snaring the pennant/Super Bowl

In short, anything that could sweep you up from the realities of life. The tunnel’s very grounded, because duh, it is in the ground.

Photo: “In space no one can hear you scream,” by Flickr user Matthew Wedgwood