04/20/09 7:55am

Here’s a whizzy reel showing what the new Metro trains and stations on 4 upcoming light-rail lines are supposed to look like. Dowling St. in the Third Ward, the Edloe Station in Greenway Plaza, the Moody Park Station on the North Line, MacGregor Park Station on the Southeast Line, and Lockwood Station on the East End Line each get about 30 seconds of CGI treatment, from a low-flying camera buzzing some extremely lifelike — though torpid — pedestrians.

Christof Spieler finds a few flaws:

The Third Ward footage seems to be out-of-date; it shows the old alignment crossing Dowling on Wheeler, not the new route that switches to Alabama. But other details are correct: the stations shown are the new prototype station design (by Rey de la Reza Architects), minus artwork.

It’s nice to be able to visualize what these lines might look like. But it’s also a reminder that it’s important to get the details right. At Edloe, for example, the trees integrated into the canopy are nice, but there’s no crosswalk at the west end of the station platform, which means a 500-foot detour for some riders. The Moody Park and MacGregor stations do show that crosswalk, and the sidewalks look pretty good, too. But in all the images, the overhead wires are suspended from their own poles in the middle of the street, not from the streetlight poles on either side, as on Main Street. That makes for more poles and a more cluttered streetscape.

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12/03/08 2:42pm

THE FEDEX IRVINGTON SITE GOES TO AVENUE CDC Avenue Community Development Corp. will be working with the Houston Housing Finance Corp. to build 80 to 100 homes and 180 to 250 apartments on the site of a former FedEx facility it bought near Moody Park. The redevelopment of the 20-acre tract at 4004 Irvington Blvd., just south of Calvacade Street, is the nonprofit organization’s biggest to date, according to Avenue CDC. . . . Construction will begin in 2009.” [Houston Business Journal]