This is what Hermann Park says it would like to look like when it turns 100 next year: This drawing of Centennial Gardens from Chicago landscape architecture firm Hoerr Schaudt shows the blossoming of the current 15-acre Garden Center that’s between the museums and golf course along Hermann Dr. Looking forward to its centennial in 2014, the park conservancy has also recruited Peter Bohlin, the architect behind the Highland Village Apple Store, to design a new entrance:
This photo, courtesy of a reader, shows what will eventually hold up the new pedestrian bridge spanning Buffalo Bayou. This view looks south across the muddy water from the Sandy Reed Memorial Trail near Jackson Hill St. and Memorial Dr. toward the Royalton condo tower on Allen Pkwy. Crews have also begun clearing away more trees and brush between this spot and the Adath Yeshurun Cemetery, where the bayou’s master plan shows the Lost Lake will be.
What used to be just a corner lot and one of those green tell-tale signs in Midtown is becoming a little more parklike, it seems: Parks department rep Estella Espinosa says that Elizabeth Glover Park at Elgin and Austin will be closed through August while crews upgrade lighting and drainage systems and install new features, including a crushed granite plaza, dog run, and bocce ball court. According to a post yesterday at Midtown Houston Rocks, there are 2 other parks getting a similar treatment: Midtown Park at Gray and Bagby and Baldwin Park between Crawford and Chenevert on Elgin, a few blocks southeast of here.
Photo: Allyn West
With the June 10th deadline to submit the Astrodome proposals that the Harris County Sports and Convention Corporation kind of forgot to ask for approaching, architect Ben Koush pens some poetic support for UH grad student Ryan Slattery’s idea to open the Dome up for public use and reduce it to a shell of itself: “Architects, myself included, often tend to like ‘structure’ and buildings that are under construction better than those that are finished. Even crappy suburban spec houses have a noble purity when they are just a concrete slab and 2x4s, before the pipes, wires, and air-conditioning ducts go in and clutter everything up.” Noble purity notwithstanding, Koush does recognize at least one problem: “Since the Astrodome is essentially in the center of a giant parking lot with gates as well as a long, un-shaded walk discouraging the public from visiting, one wonders who would actually use [it].” [Arts + Culture Houston; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Save the Astrodome
Architect John Kirksey has an idea for building a park on 36 blocks in south Downtown — just north of the Pierce Elevated, between Louisiana and Caroline. But he doesn’t own the land, and he’s not proposing to buy it up. So Kirksey’s plan isn’t for a single park space — it’s for a bunch of linear walkways. Okay, call it a series of extra-wide sidewalks on the east-west streets. Here’s how it might look, driving through:
Why not both? Yesterday, Mayor Parker announced a $556 million plan that, if approved by city council on April 24, would fund the seemingly unrelated instead-of-light rail Post Oak BRT and Memorial Park reforestation: Uptown would annex 1,768 acres of property into the TIRZ, and a gradual increase in tax revenue over the next 25 years would help to keep the BRT operational and implement a program of park improvements. Those would include, says Houston Parks and Rec director Joe Turner in a city press release, “erosion control, removal of invasive non-native plants, the reestablishment of native grasslands and forests and facility needs.” Still: Only 36 acres of the property roped in for annexation would be taxable. And does this plan mean that BRT — first thought to be up and running by 2017 — will be delayed? Don’t worry, says Uptown Management District president John Breeding. Besides what will be generated by the more environmentally friendly TIRZ, money for BRT will come from TxDOT and — if approved by a vote on April 26 — Transportation Improvement Program grants from the Houston-Galveston Area Council. [City of Houston; previously on Swamplot] Drawing of Post Oak BRT: Uptown Management District
Even if the Astrodome’s still around and Houston’s bid to host the 2016 Super Bowl falls through, an important international competition might still be staged here: “ESPN said in January [that] Houston was one of 13 contenders it was considering as a host” for the 2014-2016 X Games, reports the Houston Business Journal’s Bayan Raji. The Lee and Joe Jamail Skatepark on Sabine St. (shown here) is at the center of the Harris County-Houston Sports Authority bid to put on the tricksters’ event that’s been in L.A. the past 9 years, writes Raji, along with Reliant Stadium and the Dynamo’s BBVA Compass Stadium. Whether the skatepark going up in Greenspoint, billed in January as the largest in the U.S., also figures in the bid Raji doesn’t say; ESPN will announce which of the 13 cities are finalists this spring. [Houston Business Journal; previously on Swamplot] Photo: David Fross
Last spring, Metro spent $100,000 to relocate this tree out of the way of the expanding Southeast Line. Planted in 1983 near Old Spanish Trail and MLK Blvd., the tree was meant to stand in for an MLK memorial that’s still to come. While Metro crews worked in May to transplant the tree a few hundred feet away to a site inside MacGregor Park, Black Heritage Society president Ovide Duncantell chained himself to it to make sure everything went off without a hitch. But now the 30-year-old tree’s “strugging to survive,” reports the Houston Chronicle‘s Robert Stanton: ”‘The tree doesn’t look good to me,’” Duncantell tells Stanton. “‘I’m not in a position to say that tree is dying, but I’m hoping like hell that it’s not. The city . . . and Metro have a commitment to our organization that the tree would continue to stand there as a sentinel until that statue is completed. They should have been watering the tree all along, and this wouldn’t be a question. . . . Somebody fumbled the ball.’” Stanton adds that Metro has been watering it through an irrigation system and said it would “step up monitoring.” [Houston Chronicle] Photo: KHOU
Looks like this mile and a half extension of a hike and bike trail leading north out of Terry Hershey Park is ready to go. Photos popped up on HAIF yesterday that follow the trail as it dives beneath the Katy Fwy. and banks west between Highway 6 and Eldridge Pkwy. along the Addicks Dam.
According to the Terry Hershey Park website, this extension now makes a continuous ride possible from neighborhoods around Wilcrest, Kirkwood, and Dairy Ashford to the Addicks Park and Ride to the northwest.
Here are a few more photos of what you’ll see:
Design plans for the $18 million Emancipation Park overhaul are done, reports KUHF’s Pat Hernandez, and the work — including renovations (as this rendering suggests) to the gym, baseball field, pool, and community center — is expected to begin at the 10-acre Third Ward park this summer.
Yesterday’s Daily Demolition Report listed 1706 Alamo St., where Houston’s Theater LaB has operated since 1993. The 65-seat theater sat on 1,600 sq. ft. in the First Ward. Theater LaB sold the property last October. Also in the demo path, a reader reports, was Thespian Park across the street, where among bajillions of native plants the Tunisian-born set designer Rodolphe Zarka installed 18 of these panel murals in 2003. A tipster tells Swamplot that a group of First Warders were told late Monday night that everything — murals and all — was going to be bulldozed the next day.
All winter this Hermann Park high point has been fenced off while crews have worked on Miller Outdoor Theatre’s heavily used seating (and rolling-down) area to update drainage and irrigation systems, among other hill-improvement-type activities. The project, funded by the city, has a budget of almost $261,000. This photo shows a little patch of progress; though performances start back up in April, the theater warns you not to get your hopes up: the hill could remain closed through May.
Photo: Miller Outdoor Theatre
One more of each, thank you: Creekside Park Village Center, rendered above, will be the Woodlands’ 7th and will be anchored by its 4th H-E-B, the master-planned community says. The shopping center will serve Creekside Park, a 100-acre community planned to go in up there west of Lake Paloma. It appears that the center will herd its shoppers inward toward a 4,300-sq.-ft. glass-walled restaurant, which you can see in the rendering. And there’s gonna be a fire pit in that park-like median-thing. (And a water feature on the other end. You know. Just in case.) In all, 80,000 sq. ft. of retail and office space are proposed for the site on Kuykendahl.
Will the newest installation at the Menil Collection be a hole in the ground? The Art Guys were told last week that the museum intends to remove the live oak they “married” in 2009 in “The Art Guys Marry a Plant,” a public ceremony at the Lillie and Hugh Roy Cullen Sculpture Garden at the MFA,H. The museum acquired the tree in 2011 and held another public ceremony when it was planted in Menil Park on Branard St.; the little site (shown at right) backs up to the bamboo grove walling off the park from the Rothko Chapel and Barnett Newman’s “Broken Obelisk.” [Houston Press] Photo: Robert Boyd
Comment of the Day Runner-Up: How To Memorialize a City of Open Spaces, Once All the Vacant Lots Are Filled
“. . . I’ve been saying for a long time that the city should be actively acquiring and developing one lot in each neighborhood as a pocket park with some kind of unique sculpture or statue as its centerpiece.
Some kind of consistent theme of that sort could form the basis for grassroots tourism of a unique variety. Sort of a park crawl rather than a pub crawl . . . or perhaps both at the same [time]. Houston’s best assets, after all, are our neighborhoods. We should show them off.” [TheNiche, commenting on Headlines: Vargo’s Comes Down; The Honeywood Trail House of Honey]