12/11/18 1:45pm

Anyone in the habit of leaving the house knows that Houston’s streets are really best appreciated from a distance. And although he’s not a native, Seattle artist Peter Gorman appears to agree. His recent work, “Intersections of Houston,” shown above, is a series of 20 mini-maps depicting some of the city’s most notably tangled roadway crossings. Some — like the nexus of Scott, Polk, York, and Clay streets (top row, second from the left) — take shape at the borders between Houston’s multiple, incongruous street grids. (The Allen brothers laid out the oldest grid parallel and perpendicular to Buffalo Bayou; later planners favored a more north-south orientation. In both cases, the resulting frameworks are some of the longest-lived legacies of the city. We’ve been stuck with them far longer than most of the buildings they contain.)

Others meander to get around park space: See Lamar, Crawford, and Dallas (third row, third from the left). And then there’s that special subset: intersections that do less to fit into their surroundings than they do to stand out as products of intrepid traffic engineering approaches. Take Lockwood Dr. and Wallisville Rd. (fourth row, third from the lift) for instance; it’s really just a claw-like take on a T-intersection.

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Left, Right, Left
05/03/16 10:30am

MFAH Stickers at Fannin at Montrose, Museum District, Houston, 77005

A reader sends a few shots of a developing piece along Fannin St. composed of traffic signal poles and discarded Museum of Fine Arts visitor stickers. The section above can be viewed from the intersection of Fannin with Montrose Blvd. (just south of the Mecom Fountain near the name change to Hermann Park Dr.) To the southwest lies Hermann Park’s Grand Gateway corridor (the string of light-rail-divided esplanades that started getting jazzed up as part of Hermann Park Conservancy’s 100th birthday present to the space); the landscaped strip runs directly north-south from the fountain roundabout to the Sam Houston statue.

Poles in the vicinity have been accumulating stickers since at least 2013. Here are a few more artsy angles on the scene:

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Stuck in the Museum District
05/21/14 5:15pm

Tree in front of 501 W. Drew St. at Whitney, East Montrose, Houston

Tree in front of 501 W. Drew St. at Whitney, East Montrose, HoustonUpdate, 5/22: Swamplot has now confirmed that the tree was a Chinese Tallow, not an oak, as neighbors, and Swamplot, had originally reported.

Oh, those East Montrosians and their continuing tree battles. Here’s a photo of the street tree that once stood in more more leafly fashion in front of the property at 501 W. Drew St. The gentle warning tape wrapped around it appears not to have made much difference to the chainsaw operators who cut off its limbs last week, though. Had the tape been attached by a tree-hugging neighbor? Not exactly:

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The Giving Up Tree