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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“By the time I got back from lunch it was completely demolished,” writes reader Robert Vercher of the long-shuttered former Denny’s Classic Diner at 6415 Richmond Ave., just east of Hillcroft. So he sends us the photo at top, to show us the current status of the chain-restaurant location that once looked so shiny and newish-old (as seen in the older photo at left). Still hungry for a late Grand Slamwich? Try the Denny’s that’s still open, a few blocks west at 8999 Richmond Ave.
Real estate reporter Shaina Zucker cruises Richmond Ave., tallying up the evidence that she suggests might just point to a 
