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Thursday, August 28, 2008

Pictures Plus Telephone Picture

Big Alex, Telephone Sculpture by David Adickes, on Roof of Pictures Plus Prints and Framing, 115 Hyde Park Blvd., Montrose, Houston

Having once graced a hotel owned by a legendary real-estate swindler, David Adickes’s telephone sculpture has quite the Houston pedigree:

Adickes first placed it on a friend’s property off SH 4 and FM 1960 before leasing to J.R. McConnell, former owner of the Grand Hotel, now called The Derek, on the corner of Westheimer Road and the West Loop.

“I said that I am going to make you a deal you cannot resist,” recalled Adickes of their arrangement. McConnell leased it for a penny a day and gave the artist $36.50. “He actually paid 10 years in advance,” Adickes said, laughing at the memory.

“Big Alex” was forced to move from that location, though, when The Grand Hotel became the Derek. It lived on Adickes’ personal lot on the corner of I-45 and Quitman Street for about six months. During that time, Adickes was forced into a back and forth battle with someone who felt the face on the phone needed its mustache painted black.

Robert Kimberly finds Big Alex in its new home at the corner of Mason and Hyde Park in Montrose, on top of Pictures Plus Prints and Framing. (Yeah, you read it here first.)

Photo: Robert Kimberly

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Thursday, August 7, 2008

Boomtown Houston Is Back, Though Maybe a Little Dusty

   

Boomtown is a strategy game simple in concept but surprisingly difficult to master. The board features several groups of properties – Rice, Montrose, River Oaks, Downtown, Bellaire, West U. and others. Four people can play, as characters Billy Bob, Fast Eddie, Aunt Hattie and Day Bue, charmingly drawn in old-fashioned style by Merriman. Each player starts out with a certain amount of money and bids against the others, trying to build real estate empires.” [Hair Balls, via Swamplot Inbox]

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Friday, May 23, 2008

No White Tablecloths: Kraftsmen and Textile in the Heights

Oriental Textile Mill, Houston Heights, Houston

On June 1st, Scott Tycer will be opening a new wholesale and retail location of his Kraftsmen Bakery in 10,000 long-vacant square feet of the old Oriental Textile Mill on 22nd St. and Lawrence in the Heights. Also opening in the space two months later: a 1,200-square-foot restaurant with a garden patio and bar area, designed by Ferenc Dreef.

Tycer, who was the chef at Aries and then Pic on Montrose, and who runs Gravitas on Taft (which Dreef also designed), will be cooking at the restaurant, which will be called Textile. Tycer described Textile to blogger Cleverley Stone:

We’re going to build out the dining room with textiles, lots of hanging fabrics and different tablecloths on each table. This will not be your typical white-tablecloth restaurant.

Tycer is right: White tablecloths would probably not be appropriate for the space. A history of the Heights written by Sister M. Agatha of the Incarnate Word Academy and published in 1956 describes the operations of the textile mill, which was originally built in 1892 as a mattress factory:

B. J. Platt for years was superintendent of the plant that turned out a product which looked like long rolls of carpeting and which was used for pressing cotton seed oil. The plant’s capacity was about 50 rolls a day, varying in price from $200 to $400 a roll.

The textile was woven from hair. Old residents of the Heights have handed down the story that in the beginning much of the hair was obtained from China when pigtails were being discarded. But certain it is that camel’s hair in time came to be the staple used in production.

Photo of Oriental Textile Mill: Tasty Bits

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Monday, April 28, 2008

Cherry Demolition: West U Made Us Do It

Cherry Demolition Sign on Montague Hotel Before Demolition, Houston

Reluctant rubble maker Cherry Demolition was once exclusively a house-moving company, shuffling quaint little homes in West University. But that was before the late 1980s, when the neighborhood started changing, reports the Houston Business Journal:

Older bungalow-style houses were being torn down and replaced with new multiple-story brick homes.

Instead of watching potential moving business disappear along with the bungalow homes, the Cherry brothers drew up a plan to buy the bungalow-style houses, remove them from the property, find a buyer with a vacant lot, sell the house and then deliver it.

But although this strategy kept the house-moving business going, it was not without problems.

Houses that were too wide, roofs that were too tall or termite damage increased the cost of moving a structure. Three strikes against a house usually meant passing it over. Usually only one in about 20 houses was a suitable candidate for moving and reselling.

Hmmm . . . what to do???

Then inspiration struck. If only one out of 20 homes could be moved, the rest were candidates for demolition, the brothers realized.

Photo of Montagu Hotel by Flickr user ss.yesterday

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Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Entourages and Animal Acts: Airing the Dirty Laundry at Colonial House

Lantern Village, 5815 Gulfton, HoustonDavid Kaplan of the Chronicle catches up with Houston-apartment legend Michael Pollack and fills in a few details of the Colonial House story:

According to media reports then, Pollack lived in a super-size Colonial House apartment called “the Dream Suite,” which had a colored water fountain inside and a king-size water bed.

The Dream Suite was real, but Pollack says he never lived there. His home was the Four Leaf Towers and later the Houstonian, he said.

His glamorous stud image was just an act, he maintains, designed to rent apartments.

“I was promoting day and night,” Pollack said. “To me, it was a job.” . . .

According to Houston City magazine, he’d show up at nightclubs in a chauffeured custom Cadillac limousine with a moon roof. He traveled with an entourage, including bodyguards in satin jackets adorned with Pollack’s silhouette.

There are more memorable Pollack TV spots to be dug up:

One commercial featured Pollack in a safari outfit and a tiger. He had a fear of cats, even little cats, and being next to the full-grown beast was terrifying, he recalled.

In 1986, Pollack left Houston because, he said, the local economy and apartment market looked increasingly grim.

Colonial House was foreclosed on in 1988. It was acquired by DRG Funding Corp., the lender that financed the complex’s redevelopment. Pollack moved back to California, working there a few years before settling in Mesa[, Arizona].

In Houston, the Colonial House era is no more. A year after the foreclosure, the mammoth complex changed its name to Lantern Village.

After the jump: Laundry tips from a longtime resident of today’s Lantern Village!

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Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Southeast Side: A Tour of the Houston Heartland

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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Thursday, January 31, 2008

Long Point, Long Walk, Long Story

Hillendahl Cemetery, Long Point, Spring Branch, Houston

There’s just too much to take in from the latest rambling, illustrated walking tour by David Beebe and John Nova Lomax, narrated in harmony from their two separate corners of the Texan blogosphere. The pair’s latest venture — appropriately enough — runs along Long Point, through the heart of Spring Branch:

. . . primarily Long Point is a binary street combining Mexico and Korea. In contrast to the multi-ethnic riot that is Bissonnet, or the Pan-Asian explosion that is Bellaire, Long Point is binary. Some businesses fuse into MexiKorea. The Koryo Bakery, right next door to the only Korean bookstore in Houston, touts its pan dulce y pastels, for example, and it seems that many of the Korean-owned businesses aim at Spanish-speakers more than Anglos. (Someone should open a restaurant out here called Jose Cho’s TaKorea.)

The camera-and-tequila-toting duo guide us through a shady thrift-store nirvana they declare to be drab but safe, pointing out salient features along the way: cans of silkworm pupae in a former Kroger turned Korean supermarket, and the historic Hillendahl Cemetery (pictured above) carved out of one corner of a Bridgestone tire barn parking lot.

After the jump, more Spring Branch walking-tour highlights!

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Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Preservation Alert: Save the Historic Salvage Yard!

Johnny Franks Auto Parts AdIt’s not just the rice silos that’ll be leaving the First Ward. Next thing you know, they’ll be demolishing . . . the used-auto-parts yard across the street. A source very close to Charles Kuffner reveals that the owner of Johnny Franks Auto Parts at 1225 Sawyer St., across the street from the Mahatma Rice silos, has already sold the land to residential developers.

But wait. Johnny Franks Auto Parts bills itself as “The Nation’s Oldest Salvage Yard.” Is this true? If so, how could Houston let such an important historical site be destroyed? Founded in 1910, the salvage yard for years advertised itself as “the house of a million parts.” Sadly — like so many other historic structures in Houston — that may be its ultimate fate.

After the jump, Kuffner counts the reasons why there’s probably no stopping residential development from taking place on this historic site:

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Monday, January 21, 2008

Free Eighties Furniture at Colonial House!

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The brave work of Southwest Houston and Houston Apartment Renaissance scholars has been rewarded — a second mid-1980s Colonial House TV commercial is now available on YouTube!

No it’s not quite as iconic and over-the-top as the one with the VCR in the pool, but look at that fabulous indoor-outdoor furniture! Almost a quarter century later, we know Michael Pollack is alive and well, but does anyone know where that living-room mandala and dining-room set ended up?

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Monday, December 31, 2007

Telephone Road Walking Tour: Not How They Sang It Was

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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Monday, December 10, 2007

Beautiful Southwest Houston: The Golden Age of Apartment Living

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This charming period piece from the abortive early-’80s Southwest Houston apartment renaissance surfaced on YouTube late last month, to the great acclaim of chief Michael Pollack fan Lou Minatti, who has hosted an online shrine to the iconic and once high-profile Houston developer on his website for several years. Why was Pollack such a big deal?

What Gallery Furniture’s “We really will save you moneyyyyyyy!” was to the north side of town, the VCR in the Pool was to the southwest.

And really, who can forget the charms of Colonial House, at the corner of Chimney Rock and Gulfton? Writes Minatti:

Built in the late 1960s, Colonial House was in terrible shape.

Gangs and prostitutes had moved in, while basic amenities such as air conditioning had quit working. Pollack moved in and the gangs moved out. Pollack’s crew gutted and rebuilt each of the 1,800 units in just three months. But after all that hard work, Pollack had an even bigger task ahead: How was our suave, sophisticated hero going to fill those apartments? That’s where his infamous TV ads came in.

Here’s a question: Doesn’t the bench-pressing dude on the Nautilus about five seconds in look a bit . . . familiar?

After the jump: Pollack claims it was all an act! Plus, what he’s up to these days — with pix!

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Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Just Listed: Texas Modern Outside, Martha Washington Inside

3202 Huntingdon Place, River Oaks

Note: Story updated below.

A house in Houston can’t earn much more of a modern Texas pedigree than this: Designed in 1970 for Oveta Culp Hobby by quintessential Texas architect O’Neil Ford. Built by Brown & Root. Later, the home—until his death earlier this summer—of former Texas secretary of state, attorney general, chief justice, and 1978 Democratic gubernatorial candidate John Hill.

It’s just been listed with Greenwood-King agent Colleen Sherlock: three stories, five to seven bedrooms, five full and two half-baths, 8275 square feet on a quarter-acre lot in River Oaks. Asking only $2,395,000.

From O’Neil Ford, you’d expect a classic Texas modern design: clean brick lines with a sense of history, an easy flow between indoors and out. Until you get inside, where—it appears—an early-1960s interpretation of a New England colonial interior has somehow been grafted in.

Sound like a jarring contrast? Continue after the jump, and see for yourself.

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Wednesday, August 22, 2007

How the Downtown Tunnel System Was Born

Houston Underground

Near the end of a short New York Times feature on Houston’s downtown tunnel system is this historical nugget:

[“Tunnel Lady” Sandra] Lord, a writer and Houston historian, traced the origins of the tunnels to Ross Sterling, an oilman and governor during the Depression, who, inspired by Rockefeller Center, linked two of his downtown buildings underground in the early 1930s. Soon after, an entertainment entrepreneur, Will Horwitz, connected three of his vaudeville and movie theaters to save on air-conditioning.

And they say geothermal cooling is something new for Houston.

Photo: Flickr user The Rocketeer

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