If you can smash a bunch at once, it’s much more efficient.
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Tag: Demolitions
Lowering our throughput allows us to refine our targeting; or that’s what we’ll be saying if anyone asks.
Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
No, it’s not nothing. But it will be soon.
Swamplot will dig into some of the more entertaining and eye-opening details of the proposal later. But in the meantime, before folks go around shouting “heck, yeah!”, hyperventilating, or considering it all but a done deal, you might want to make note of a few circumstances surrounding the release of the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo and Houston Texans‘ 37-page illustrated guide to spending $66 million of somebody’s money to tear down the Astrodome and build a memorial park and “Hall of Fame” in its place.
The proposal was leaked to reporters yesterday — likely before the Rodeo and the Texans had planned, a source tells Swamplot. (A sample “huh?” slide from it is illustrated above.) Nevertheless, the release marks the latest evolution in the 2 organizations’ willingness to publicly acknowledge their (likely longstanding) role as the foremost opponents of preserving the Astrodome in any form. (Last year the Rodeo and the Texans released a cost estimate for turning the Dome into a parking lot.) Whether this is a concerted strategy in the organizations’ campaign to kill the Dome or a fumble, it does signal a possible risk for them: What would happen if the until-now-growing sense among many Houstonians that everything possible has been tried and somehow mysteriously “won’t work” (blow up the place already, I’m tired of hearing about it!) gave way to a realization that the same 2 parties may have, in fact, been responsible for bungling, blocking, discouraging, sabotaging, or outright vetoing every single proposal for saving or revamping the Astrodome over the last dozen years? Would it kill all the seeming public-sentiment victories they’ve achieved so far?
Dome-Be-Gone for $66 Million
“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.
Photos: Robert Vercher (demolition); LoopNet (diner)
City-Fried Steak
Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday the city’s permit offices were open.
Just a few structures that managed to sneak in before the fireworks:
Not talking about moving. And I don’t want to change your siding. But there’s a warm wind blowing, the stars are out. And I’d really love to knock these down:
Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
Pull on up and we’ll take your demolition order right here.
Chiming in with this morning’s Demo Report, which more formally announces the departure of a couple of old single-story buildings at 607 and 609 Chenevert St., reader Jack Miller sends in this photo of the scene yesterday a couple blocks north of the George R. Brown Convention Center and immediately south of Minute Maid Park. At the far left, an excavator is seen assuring that the former Houston Professional Musicians’ Association and Houston Precious Metals buildings from 1949 will indeed get out of the way in time for the Nau Center for Texas Cultural Heritage to be built on the site.
Is this yet another story of older Houston buildings making way for the new? Maybe, but at a larger scale, it’s partly the reverse: Two houses from 1904 and 1905 were moved onto a portion of Avenida de Las Americas glommed onto the site 3 years ago, on a spot across Texas Ave. from the ball park (behind and to the left of the camera). And the photo below includes a glimpse (on the far right) of the 1919 Southern Pacific 982 steam engine scooted out of the houses’ way and settled in along the light-rail line on Capitol St.:
Centering Our Cultural Heritage
