 
The Friends of Downtown Friendswood withdrew its plan last week to install a new wooden carousel in Stevenson Park next-door to City Hall. Since last November, the site’s been home to a concrete pad left behind when the 42-year-old Fire Station #1 pictured above was demolished and its staff relocated to a new facility at 1610 Whitaker Dr., built with funds from a 2013 bond referendum. By the time of the teardown, the carousel idea (code-named “Project C”) was already on the table, and some residents accused city council of being a little too demolition-happy, owing to their friendliness with the civic organization that proposed it, reported the Chronicle‘s Jeremy Gingrich.
Instead of getting rid of the building, some argued, why not turn its 9,000 sq.-ft. into a community center to double down on the space offered by the city’s existing 9,500-sq.-ft. Friendswood Activity Building shown below at 416 Morningside St.?
Parks and Rec department director Joe Turner tells the Chronicle‘s Mike Morris that a powerline right-of-way crossing on University of Houston property northeast of the intersection of Martin Luther King Boulevard and Old Spanish Trail will be the first improvement allowed by 
The Pasadena city council got together last week to have a look at a $4 million plan that would expand the community pool at Strawberry Park on Lafferty Rd. and Parkside Dr. into something a bit splashier, reports the Pasadena Citizen: “Progressive Commercial Aquatics’ Steve Davis explained the success public and private entities have had with water parks, including nearby Pirates Bay, owned by the City of Baytown. 
Protecting the Ship Channel during an Ike-like (or worse) storm surge has led some to propose a 
“I was once on a campout there and some guy in my troop, in the process of digging a hole for something, found an early 1940′s Walking Liberty half dollar, the most beautiful coin the U.S. mint ever produced. Suddenly we were all seized with hysteria. Old silver coins! In the ground! Right beneath us! And it just so happened that one of the scout masters had a metal detector. So at the behest of a dozen crazed boys in their early teens, he led us off on an afternoon mission seeking treasure. Each boy took turns claiming whatever was unearthed in the next metal strike. The beeping sounded, the digging commenced, up came an old rusty nail. Ten minutes later beeping again, excitement, digging, rusty nail. On and on, crisscrossing Camp Strake, through the woods, down the dirt roads, along the lake: rusty nail, rusty nail, rusty nail. Our numbers dwindled; soon it was just me and one other guy, dreaming of coins, digging up nails. And then it was evening and we gave up. All those little holes. A bucket full of rusty nails.” [
The Houston Parks Board, needing funding for the 40-mile Cypress Creek Greenway, commissioned a study that concluded that the Cypress Creek Greenway needs funding. Apparently, the creek that runs between IAH and Hwy. 290 is the only one of the 10 waterways involved in that 
Approved this week and sent on to Gov. Perry was a new draft of that bill proposing 
