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Thursday, May 1, 2008

A Walk Down Cheezy Street: Richmond Avenue, Past Its Prime

Corner of Richmond and Fountainview, Houston

Pedestrian scribe John Lomax and Marfa City Council candidate David Beebe have, by this time, earned the right to make a few sweeping statements about various Houston neighborhoods. And Lomax exercises that right in his chronicle of the pair’s latest adventure on foot, along Richmond Avenue from Mission Bend to Midtown:

. . . the epicenter of H-Town cheese is the corner of Fountainview and Richmond. A four-story, day-glo, red, white, turquoise, and tan building looms over the southeastern corner there, and it houses a Sprint shop, a little downstairs bar with the godawful name Identity, a scalper’s office, a massage therapist, and a huge Darque Tan outlet.

Sure, Westheimer’s got some cheese, and is a little tattered around the edges in spots, but there’s a veneer of gentility as expressed by old-line businesses like Christie’s Seafood. Richmond, by contrast, used to have that sub-Landry’s fried seafood emporium King Fish Market, which despite the incessant awful commercials that polluted local airwaves circa 1999, is now out of business and practically in ruins. The whole lot of it is a great vat of rancid Velveeta.

As is much of the Richmond Strip. That giant sax outside of Billy Blues is looking more and more like the torch sticking out of the sand at the end of Planet of the Apes.

After the jump: how’s the nightlife?

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Friday, December 14, 2007

Resistance Is Futile: The Proletariat Will Be Crushed

Proletariat Nightclub, 903 Richmond, Houston

In an extensive interview with Houston Press music blog Houstoned Rocks, Proletariat owner Denise Ramos explains she isn’t shutting down her Richmond Ave. bar and music venue in February because she’s afraid upcoming University Line construction on the street will hurt her business. She’s shutting the club down because Metro has told her exactly where the Montrose light-rail station is going to go:

I started going to all these meetings Metro had put together, and in one of the meetings they had the proposed design for the rail, and I noticed that our building was nowhere in the design . . .

Right in front of where our building is, that’s where they [plan to] have the station . . .

We know for sure they plan to demolish our building. That’s a given; we know that. But I just don’t know when that’s going to be.

Guess that means Metro won’t be sliding that station to the west of Montrose . . .

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Monday, August 27, 2007

Houston Pavilions: Woulda Coulda Shoulda

Houston Pavilions Aerial View, Downtown Houston

If you’re curious why the developers of Houston Pavilions, the $70 million mixed-use development under construction downtown, decided not to mix anything other than office space with their 360,000 square feet of retail and “entertainment” space, you’ll be interested to read the comments L.A. developer Bill Denton made to the CoStar Group:

[Entertainment Development Group] put the site under contract in January 2004, then three surface parking lots and a multi-level parking garage sitting on just over 4 acres, and the project has evolved ever since. “We originally planned for a hotel/condo component, but at the time, the city was just finishing off convention center hotels and hotel occupancy was only 52%; now its difficult to find a hotel room in Downtown Houston. So, we changed the plan into two residential towers, which stuck until 12 months ago. Demand on the residential was tremendous, but because of the mixed-use and density, we would have had to do subterranean parking, which blew the economics of the residences out of the water. So now its 200,000 square feet of office space, and based on demand for that so far, I wish we could do 400,000 square feet.”

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Friday, July 7, 2006

Music Festival Planners Offer Gentle Critique of Houston: How Do You Navigate This Thing?

Some visitors to last weekend’s blockbuster Essence Music Festival at Reliant Park had a hard time getting around Houston:

“It was a difficult city to navigate and that can’t be ignored,” said Michelle Ebanks, president of Essence Communications Inc. “The end result was a general lack of systems to manage the sprawl. Houston underestimated the enormity and significance of this event.”

Festival organizers said they heard numerous complaints from attendees related to the distance between hotels, shopping, downtown entertainment and Reliant Park, where the Essence Festival was held.

But Houston officials said the transportation hiccups that occurred during the three-day festival were the result of taking on the challenge of hosting the national event with less than a year to prepare.

Ebanks said organizers had suggested that free or subsidized shuttles be available to ferry attendees about town but that did not occur.

Don’t these people have cars? That’s our “system to manage sprawl.” Sheesh. Next thing you know, these folks will be complaining about a lack of nightlife.

Oh . . .

While transportation was a major issue for attendees, Ebanks said many also complained that after the late night concerts ended there was nothing for them to do.

Who are these people? Event planners or city planners? Remind us what the difference is, again?

Councilman Ronald Green sets the tourists straight, though:

Green, who has attended the event in past years, said the community did “just the minimum” in hosting the event.

He said Houston’s layout is different from that of New Orleans, and event attendees will have to deal with sprawl. But he said the city could do more to appear hospitable.

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