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Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Becks Prime Location for a Sports Bar

   

That space on the west side of the Memorial City Mall where the Roger Clemens Rocket Sports Grill was supposed to open . . . before all Roger Clemens memorabilia was removed from it? It’s now scheduled to open this summer as . . . the Becks Prime Sportatorium. [Houston Business Journal]

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Friday, April 18, 2008

Where To Order a Relief Pitcher: Rocket Goes Off at Memorial City

Opening in two weeks: A 15,000-square-foot generic sports bar in Memorial City Mall. Hey, wasn’t that supposed to be the Rocket Sports Grill?

Allison Wollam reports in the Houston Business Journal that Roger Clemens’s plans for a burger empire appear to have been scuttled:

. . . all traces of the seven-time Cy-Young award winner have been erased from the would-be restaurant site.

Just one month ago, construction workers were busy erecting a large red “Rocket” sign at the entrance of the restaurant, while Clemens’ baseball jerseys from the Boston Red Sox, New York Yankees, Houston Astros and The University of Texas Longhorns hung in the entry.

As of this week, the Clemens memorabilia had been removed. The restaurant — which is still under construction — now houses wide-screen televisions, NASCAR video games and a variety of non-Clemens’ related baseball memorabilia.

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Thursday, April 3, 2008

Frostwood and Memorial Forest: Tiny Deviations from the Norm

House on Pine Rock, Houston

House on Beauregard, Houston

Having finished with the Memorial Villages, Robert Boyd’s latest bikeride documentary takes us through the neighborhoods lining Gessner, south of I-10:

The houses here were built mostly between 1959 and 1965. The lots tend to be small compared to those in the Villages (just east of these subdivisions). In fact, if you go immediately south or west, the lots and the houses tend to be larger. This is where Memorial starts to become the more familiar kind of Houston suburb–similar houses on same-sized lots, with developers reusing floor-plans and exterior designs.

As usual, Boyd is on the lookout for anything unusual:

I had a Steve Reich album on my IPod as I rode (Sextet, Piano Phase, and Eight Lines played by the London Steve Reich Ensemble–I recommend it highly), and it occurred to me that a neighborhood like this is like a Steve Reich piece, where there is a comfortable, rhythmic sameness with tiny changes as you go along. The tiny changes wouldn’t have even caught my eye while riding through the much more heterogeneous Memorial Villages, but here they stand out.

After the jump: A few more pix of Boyd’s West Memorial picks!

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