COMMENT OF THE DAY: THE IDEAL CITY “If you really want to give people a taste of American liberty, why would you build a master-planned community, where decision-making is taken away from the residents? Build a normal town with democratic institutions of government — a city council, school board, zoning commission, etc. Lay out the town on a grid — that way, no neighborhood is closed off and people grow up there with the feeling that everything in life is within reach. The centerpoint is trickier — do you go with the traditional town square with courthouse, or does the typical imposing courthouse create too much sense of the power of government? The grand centerpoint in the rendering looks a little fascist to me; too much ‘bow down before this.’ Maybe center things on an avenue instead of a square or circle and that way diminish the power of any icons. The courthouse can be consigned to a side street. Actually, the original layout of Houston did a pretty good job of conveying American ideals.” [Mike, commenting on Could Glenn Beck Bring Independence to Texas?]
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Tag: Houston History
At a Neartown meeting two days ago, Kirk Baxter presented these two drawings for a Mary’s memorial, according to a HAIF poster, celebrating the 30-year heyday of the Westheimer bar for Montrose’s gay community. Some 300 memorial services were held here over the years. Mary’s was closed in 2009; the building where it sat since the early ’70s opened this weekend as the coffee shop Blacksmith.
The drawings show a kind of replica Mary’s installed near Waugh and Hyde Park; two of Mary’s original doors — donated to the project by Blacksmith owner Bobby Heugel — would sit underneath tiles reclaimed from the original roof.
Nothing about the memorial has been approved or decided yet, says the HAIF poster. During the meeting several other potential locations were brought up: a spot behind the original building the regulars called the Out Back, and across the street, facing the building, in front of Half Price Books.
- A Memorial in Montrose for Mary’s [HAIF]
- Previously on Swamplot: Blacksmith Now Serving Coffee In Former Montrose Leather Bar, Restored Mary’s Mural on Westheimer Painted Over Again
Photos: HAIF user trymahjong
Welcome to the new Houston Club: this rendering shows Gensler’s renovation plans for the lobby near the top of the 50-story One Shell Plaza, where the city’s oldest social club is merging with the not-as-old Plaza Club and moving in. Since 1955, the club met at 811 Rusk (shown at right); but Skansksa bought the 18-story building last year, hastening the move. Swamplot reported in early January that much of 811 Rusk’s contents are being auctioned off tomorrow — the less club members will have to drag up 49 floors to their new fancy digs:
KICK A BUILDING IN MEMORIAM Former New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable liked Houston. In 1976, she called it “the city of the second half of the twentieth century.†It’s the first half of the twenty-first century now. Houston’s status is no more cemented than it was then, but Huxtable’s is. She passed away yesterday at her home in Manhattan, at the age of 91. [New York Times]
Former Houston Rocket Hakeem Olajuwon quietly opened the doors this past week of a brand-new flagship store for his new clothing line, DR34M. It’s conveniently located just off NASA Pkwy., inside a mansion built during the Depression by a Texas oilman — used later for more than 20 years by NASA for its Lunar and Planetary Institute.
The 17,000-sq.-ft. Italianate mansion by the Clear Lake shore was completed in 1930 by Houston city hall architect Joseph Finger for Jim West, whose family sold it to Humble Oil when he died in 1941. Since then, it has been owned by the Pappas restaurant family and Rice University. And in 1969, during the Apollo missions, the nearby Johnson Space Center moved its moon unit here; it stayed until 1991.
Olajuwon, who has made a lot of investments in Houston-area real estate since his 2002 retirement from the NBA, bought the West Mansion in 2006. He had plans to subdivide the sprawling 41-acre estate to sell off to developers, according to news reports. Later reports indicated the mansion would be razed, or that a retirement village would be built around it. But since early this year, workers have been making extensive renovations to the building, inside and out:
The city of Houston granted a demolition permit yesterday to a company called Magnolia Services, allowing it to demolish the Pleasures Men’s Club, aka Pleasures Cabaret, off Highway 290 at 34th St. As aficionados of Houston history (as well as lurkers on the website of the shuttered strip club) will no doubt recall, Pleasures was the latest incarnation of Gigi’s Cabaret, where in 1991 the former Vickie Lynn Hogan, fresh off stints working at Walmart and Red Lobster, gave a fateful lap dance to her future husband, octogenarian oil (and breast) man J. Howard Marshall II. The rest, as they say, is history. As was Marshall, only 14 months after the wedding.
COMMENT OF THE DAY: ALSO, PAVING OVER THEIR ANCESTORS “Yes we do know what people were doing 10,000 years ago. Basically it’s the same thing we are doing today. Making and raising children, trying to feed our family, and working to have safety, shelter, and clothing.” [Bill, commenting on Grand Parkway Will Pile on the Dead]
GRAND PARKWAY WILL PILE ON THE DEAD 
An agreement between TxDOT, the Harris County Historical Commission, and 5 Native American tribes over what to do with the prehistoric human remains unearthed in the prairie highway’s path will allow construction of the Grand Parkway Segment E to continue — with only a bump in the road: “Under the agreement, TxDOT will fill the excavated areas and cover them with rip rap, creating a permanent burial site near where the road would cross Cypress Creek, about three miles south of U.S. 290.” The reburial might confuse future anthropologists, though: “[UH professor of anthropology Kenneth] Brown expressed frustration over TxDOT’s handling of the site, saying crews saved some artifacts but ruined the area for richer study. The agency’s crews scraped and sifted mechanically instead of digging by hand. ‘When you scrape, you will find things, but you won’t be able to see how they were associated,’ Brown said. ‘That is a shame because we do not know what people were doing 10,000 to 14,000 years ago, and we won’t know now.'” [Houston Chronicle; previously on Swamplot] Photo of gravesite: abc13
The asking price of a property in the Avondale (West) Historic District has been dropping $500 per day since its latest relisting on Thanksgiving Day. A pre-holiday hiatus had capped a 2-year sales effort at several price points by various agents and agencies. The 1910 home and grounds are described as part of the estate of Ross Sterling, a former governor of Texas (1931-32) and founder of Humble Oil, which later became the far humbler ExxonMobil.
Spooked former residents looking for some sort of larger, more mystical explanation for the disastrous end of the Park Memorial Condos at 5292 Memorial Dr. now have confirmation of a first-class backstory to hang their storytelling hats on. A little late for Halloween, a medical examiner has determined that the human remains discovered this summer during the condos’ demolition — and the preparation of the site for its replacement, the Park Memorial Apartments — belong to bodies interred at a cemetery that once graced the site. That would be the Crooms Cemetery, Preservation Houston’s David Bush tells teevee reporter Deborah Wrigley. The African-American burial ground was named after Felix Crooms (who scored nearby Crooms St. as well), was in operation from approximately 1917 to 1937, and also served as the final resting place for members of St. Luke’s Missionary Baptist Church.
Rice Epicurean Markets is finally giving up on 4 of its 5 remaining locations, the company announced today. The lone holdout is the company’s store on Fountain View at Inwood, which will remain open for the foreseeable future. Its Holcombe, Weslayan, Tanglewood, and Memorial locations will be leased to The Fresh Market, a chain based in North Carolina.
Also making an appearance in this morning’s Demolition Report: the crumbs of East Montrose’s short-lived but storied MuffinMan restaurant. Back in the wacky late summer of ’10, the four-square-turned-duplex at 2310 Converse St. played host to what proprietor Jason Perry modestly claimed to be “the greatest penis shaped muffin restaurant Houston had†(Note: Perry’s description referenced the shape of the muffins, not of the building or its rooms; a 6-ft. sign he posted on the front lawn announced to his neighbors his earnest contention that a “four inch muffin is better than an eight inch cock.”)
COMMENT OF THE DAY: BOOING A DEBAKEY HIGH SCHOOL FOR HEALTH PROFESSIONS MOVE TO THE OLD SHAMROCK HOTEL SITE “Any biomedical educational institution gains considerable strength by being closely associated with TMC. There’s a much higher credibility and visibility factor. And as a bonus, students may be visited by Glenn McCarthy’s ghost.” [Chef, commenting on Headlines: Houston Club Shacking Up with Plaza Club; Galveston’s Port of Call Dreams]
DEEP INSIDE MISSION CONTROL 
At last, that in-depth, exhaustive tour through the Johnson Space Center’s Building 30 that you’d been waiting for — coffee bars and tiny women’s rooms included: “The corridors look like they should exude the odor of decades of cigarette smoke,” space-travel fan Lee Hutchinson writes, “but the federal government’s ‘no smoking’ policy has been in place long enough that most smell faintly of stale coffee instead.” Bonus: Every console in Apollo-era Mission Control explained — or close enough. [Ars Technica] Photo: Steven Michael
DEMOLISHING HOUSTON’S GRISLY PAST 
“Houstonians just don’t celebrate death and the past the way New Orleanians do,” writes John Nova Lomax in his recounting of 4 creepy tales from Bayou City history. “In fact, we tend to simply forget all the awful and weird things that have happened here over the last 176 years, and mercifully so, because there have been an enormous number of terrible episodes.” It’s much easier to forget, of course, when the gruesome settings themselves are summarily disposed of. The “Houston Heights House of Horror” — a 3-room shack at 732 Ashland St. that was the scene of a noted hatcheting in 1910 — by 1937 had been torn down and replaced. Its substitute is gone now too; a warehouse that’s home to a company called SemaSys now stands in its place. And down in Seabrook, condos occupy the site of the famous warehouse-like “Mansion on Todville Rd.” (in photo) where in 1984 a group of housesitting youngsters murdered its owner, child predator Bill List. [Houston Press] Photo of atrium, 3300 Todville Rd., Seabrook: Carl Guderian [license]
