 
Note: This story has been updated to indicate that City Council’s October 23 vote approved funding for previous work that was already completed on the plaza, not for future renovations.
This week Houston City Council voted to cut a check to workers that finished the first round of renovations on the plaza. The results of their work — including new fencing, gates, and a terrace — clear the way for the second chapter of redos to begin. The video at top winds it way through round 2 of changes, showing off the new children’s reading area, stage, and outdoor seating bound for the 0.75-acre space between the Jesse H. Jones Building (AKA Central Library) and the Julia Ideson building directly east of it.
While 25-year naming rights are already locked down on the Phillips 66 Jumbo Video Screen (on the right in the rendering abvoe) and Janice and Robert C. McNair Performance Stage (left), the puppet theater depicted below is still in need of a namesake:
“The site plan for this block, where the apartment complex stands like J.J. Watt blocking the retail from the park for which it should have been the activity generator, stands as a symbol of a city at a pivot point in its urbanization, where all the lessons it has learned the past ten years still can’t make up for the decades it snoozed in urban neglect and public space amnesia. Imagine if you took the George R. Brown and dropped it halfway across Discovery Green, splitting the park’s integral components and killing its interaction with surrounding elements — that is the Superblock in a nutshell. Midtown will still benefit from a central greenspace, and the little pocket park at the north end might turn out to be something nice. But however modestly successful this becomes will only be a painful reminder of what could have been.” [
Star baker and former b-baller Roy Shvartzapel explains 
How much new parkland has the city acquired since 2007, when it passed the so-called open space ordinance meant to encourage residential developers to donate part of their properties to the public? “Not one acre,” reports the Houston Chronicle. Almost all the developers, reports Jayme Fraser, have “written checks” instead. But the city hasn’t spent the $11 million it has garnered in fees to buy land; much of it, rather, has gone to maintain and add amenities to the parks it already has: “
With the June 10th deadline to submit the Astrodome proposals that 
A Houston man’s arrest for Dumpster diving outside City Hall was news to Mayor Parker: “And I had to say, really?” says the mayor in teevee reporter Doug Miller’s story. “
