COMMENT OF THE DAY: BALLAD OF THE FOURTH WARD “Freedman’s town is not a historic district under the City’s historic preservation ordinance. In fact, it is an excellent example of why historic districts are needed. Freedman’s town was where freed slaves settled after emancipation. The land was crap due to the flooding from the bayous. The residents built roads out of brick made by hand and constructed utilities. They basically built a thriving community out of swampland with their own hands. The area decayed and turned into crack town in the 1980s. In the late 1980s, Residents and activists were able to put over 500 buildings on the national register of historic places. Today, less than 30 of those buildings remain. And the effort to preserve the shot gun shacks was based on the historic and cultural value of the buildings, not just for the architecture. Had Freedman’s town had the protection of the current historic ordinance and a fraction of the kind of tax assistance that goes to stadiums, grand parkways and Walmarts, a significant piece of American history could have been saved and become a national tourist destination along the lines of Ebeneezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. . . .” [Old School, commenting on Daily Demolition Report: Dixie Chuck]
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Tag: Houston History
When he died last year, did Melvin Lane Powers really have a photo of his aunt and former lover, Candace Mossler, enshrined on his living room mantel? Or is this foreclosure listing photo just some agent’s idea of a real-estate insider’s awkward joke? A tipster who’s sure the 3-bedroom, 5-and-a-half-bathroom property near the corner of Caroline St. and Wentworth was the real-estate developer and true-crime celebrity’s home for the last several years (both he and his estate are listed as former owners on the property’s county tax records) believes the fireplace pic — possibly the only home-decor item left in the house — is a portrait of Mossler, who died of a prescription-drug overdose in 1976.
An M.D. Anderson Cancer Center official tells the HBJ‘s Jennifer Dawson that the UT institution will likely wait 3 to 10 years before putting any new structure on the site of the former Prudential Tower it’s been working diligently all year to knock down. Workers were moved out of the 18-story structure — renamed the Houston Main Building — last year. The hulking remains of the iconic 1952 Kenneth Franzheim building at 1100 Holcombe Blvd. will come down in a cloud of dust after several rounds of dynamite blasts on January 8th.
M.D. Anderson senior VP Dan Fontaine says the Med Center institution doesn’t even have a design yet for the 2 new structures — likely for outpatient care — that will eventually be built in that location. Until the institution finds a better use for it, the demo site will be turned into a “park-like setting.”
- Hospitals hesitate on billions of dollars of construction [Houston Business Journal]
- Previously on Swamplot: Med Center Prudential Tower Skeleton Will Survive Through End of Year, M.D. Anderson Tower Will Go Out with a Bang, Kill It in One Big Boom, Or Piece by Piece?, M.D. Anderson’s Quiet Preservation Effort: Peter Hurd’s Prudential Mural Has Left the Building, Sure Looks Like Demolition This Time: M.D. Anderson Begins Taking Down the Prudential Tower, Will M.D. Anderson’s Contractor Bungle the Largest Fresco Rescue Ever?, The Prudential Tower’s Grand Entrance, Before Its Not-so-Grand Exit, Update: M.D. Anderson Not Demolishing Former Prudential Tower Yet, Just Hacking Away at It a Bit, Report: M.D. Anderson Begins Demolishing Med Center Icon
Photo: Karen Lantz
COMMENT OF THE DAY: TRACKING THE RUMORED JACKIE O-EXXONMOBIL CAMPUS CONNECTION “The property and Coventry Development Co. are owned by the Aristotle Onassis Estate. Onassis blew thru Houston in 1960 and bought this tract known as Chrimerene, the Gulf Fwy land developed into Baybrook and a motel which is now vacant land on South Main at Greenbriar.” [charles zeller, commenting on Who’s Behind Springwoods Village, Anyway?]
The folks charged with blowing up old buildings at UT’s M.D. Anderson Cancer Center have set a January 8th date for the big dynamite surgical event meant to knock down what’s left of the institution’s Houston Main Building. The hulking 18-story tower at 1100 Holcombe Blvd. was built in 1952 for Prudential Life Insurance as part of Houston’s first-ever suburban office campus, designed by architect Kenneth Franzheim. The Med Center institution bought the building in 1975, but began the long demo process early this year.
The godfather of Houston’s high-ceilinged modernists passed away last Wednesday at the age of 91. Preston Bolton moved to Houston in the days before air conditioning, after serving in a field artillery unit during World War II. An architect of many distinctive homes in the area — first in partnership with Howard Barnstone, and later on his own — Bolton was also a cofounder of the Houston Ballet and an early supporter of many other arts organizations. Among the homes designed by Bolton featured on Swamplot over the past few years: This elegant single-story townhome on a street that bears his name in Lafayette Place, and his own Buffalo Bayou-side home on Pine Hollow Ln., which is still listed for sale.
- Architect and civic leader Preston Bolton dead at 91 and Editorial: Preston Bolton was an arts pioneer [Houston Chronicle]
- Previously on Swamplot: As It Is and Was: Preston Bolton Single-Story Townhome Near the Galleria, Preston Bolton’s Pine Hollow Home — For Less!, Comment of the Day: There’s Probably an ‘N’ Missing in There, but Houston Architects Will Take All the Compliments They Can Get, North Post Oak Courtyard Mod: When Townhome Didn’t Mean Stairs, Preston Bolton’s House of Skylights, Weekend Open House Tour: Hunters Creek Village
Photos: HAR (266 Pine Hollow Ln. and 519 Bolton Pl.)
Frequent Olivewood Cemetery visitor Roger Barnaby came across a disturbing discovery in the historic African-American cemetery south of White Oak Bayou between Heights Blvd. and Studemont not long before dark on Halloween: Survey markers and what look like new fenceposts, installed only a few inches from some marked graves. Barnaby tells Swamplot he’s not certain of the purpose of the posts, but believes they and the survey flags mark an intended expansion of the cemetery’s longtime neighbor to the south and east, grocery distributor Grocers Supply. “You can even see that they pounded a survey spike into one of the graves,” he notes:
Houston may have missed out on its opportunity to play host to one of the 4 retired orbiters doled out recently by NASA. But it will end up with a space-shuttle-related attraction that jibes well with the Johnson Space Center’s longtime role as a practice and simulation site for training astronauts. Space news website CollectSpace is reporting that Space Center Houston will soon receive the Space Shuttle Explorer, a full-size orbiter mockup currently on display at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida.
One advantage of the Explorer over the 4 orbiters Houstonians wanted but couldn’t get (besides not having any layers of space dust to clean off): Visitors will be able to walk through it.
FREEING UP FUNDS FOR EMANCIPATION PARK 
The Third Ward’s 10-acre Emancipation Park — on Elgin 2 blocks east of Hwy. 59 — is scheduled receive at least $7 million in improvements, though the historic park’s supporters are hoping to raise funds to boost that figure to $18 million. Either would mark a significant step up from the $800 the Rev. Jack Yates and a group of freed slaves pooled to purchase the property in 1872, as a location for Juneteenth celebrations. (It was later donated to the city.) Recent commitments include $4 million from the OST/Almeda Corridors Redevelopment Authority, $2 million from the city, and a just-announced $1 million grant from Texas’s Parks and Wildlife Dept. According to an HBJ report, local landscape architecture firm M2L Associates is currently at work planning an entry plaza, outdoor exhibit area, trails, lighting, historical markers, and a new building with additional parking for the park. Later phases of improvements would renovate or add a community center, pool house, playground, picnic areas, benches, and sports fields and courts. [Houston Chronicle, Houston Business Journal] Photo: City of Houston
From his Twitter command post, Swamplot reader Greg Arnold sends these photos of what Heights-area I-10 feeder road construction has unearthed: Actual bricks under Heights Blvd.’s longtime (and future) surface of asphalt.
The facilities steering committee at UT’s M.D. Anderson Cancer Center has decided to demolish what’s left of the institution’s Houston Main Building at 1100 Holcombe Blvd. with several blasts of dynamite — before the end of the year. The announcement in an online employee-only newsletter cited safety concerns for the decision: “Manual demolition with jackhammers and blow torches would expose our employees, our patients, the public and dozens of construction workers to noise, dust and vibration for months. Implosion reduces that exposure to a matter of minutes.”
The 18-story Med Center structure was known as the Prudential Building before M.D. Anderson purchased it from the insurance company in 1975. It was vacated last year, and demo work on the building began this past April. The newsletter announcement also recaps the institution’s explanation for knocking down the structure, which was designed by Houston architect Kenneth Franzheim in 1952 as part of Houston’s first suburban office park:
A division of a Houston company called PowerMax Green Technologies (which may or may not be related to this Florida company with a similar name and similar products) is hoping to set up a manufacturing plant in Hitchcock to build atmospheric water generators, or machines for extracting drinking water from humid air. Even better: Galveston County Daily News reporter Laura Elder has identified the site the company is interested in as the former Blimp Base at 7526 Blimp Base Rd., just off FM 2004 — where the Navy once developed and stored blimps for spotting German submarines in WWII, and which is now an approved Foreign Trade Zone. Officials with the Green Environmental Management have been meeting with area officials about their plans to build 2 facilities totaling 160,000 sq. ft., Elder reports.
- Pulling water, jobs out of thin air? [Buzz Blog]
- About Us [The Blimp Base]
Site photo: The Blimp Base
Why is everyone marking the 175th birthday of Houston today? Because that many years ago, the Allen brothers waited until what they hoped would be the end of a brutal and sticky summer before posting the first newspaper ads for what they were sure would become “the great interior commercial emporium of Texas.” A few highlights from their dry and breezy copy from August 30, 1836: “Tide water runs to this place and the lowest depth of water is about six feet. Vessels from New Orleans or New York can sail without obstacle to this place, and steamboats of the largest class can run down to Galveston Island in 8 or 10 hours, in all seasons of the year. . . . There is no place in Texas more healthy, having an abundance of excellent spring water, and enjoying the sea breeze in all its freshness. No place in Texas possesses so many advantages for building, having Pine, Ash, Cedar and Oak in inexhaustible quantities . . . In the vicinity are fine quarries of stone. . . . Steamboats now run in this river, and will in a short time commence running regularly to the Island.” A city can dream, can’t it? Happy birthday, Houston!
- Telegraph and Texas Register [The Portal to Texas History, via Swamplot inbox]
Image: The Portal to Texas History
Over at the Houston Press, food critic Katharine Shilcutt and chief mapmaker Monica Fuentes have traced the history of locally owned restaurants on the stretch of Lower Westheimer from east of Taft all the way to Dunlavy way, way back — to the long-ago days of 1997. Sure, the sequence of maps (see below for the latest) leaves out bars, coffee shops, and fast-food joints, but culinary additions are color-coded (after the start date) by year of appearance. Featured appearances between now and next year: Underbelly, the Hay Merchant, Uchi, and L’Olivier. Your guide to eating the strip and curve:
COMMENT OF THE DAY: BOWLED HIM OVER “I learned to swim there too, some of my fondest memories are from the Westland Y. My favorite: I was leaving swim lessons without my glasses (I was blind as a bat) and was running to my mom who was waiting in the car. I plowed into a really tall guy and knocked the wind right out of him. Hit him right in the breadbasket with my head. Couldn’t see him but I heard him laugh. There was no mistaking that laugh…I had run over Channel 2 weatherman Doug Johnson. I was mortified. My mom saw it all happen, but refused to get out of the car. She had the hots for Doug and she was on day two of “no washing your hair†after getting her giant bouffant permed at the Beauty Bunch. You know what they say, the higher the hair the closer to God, and my mom was really, really close to God back then.” [Heights Weirdo, commenting on More Rides to Gym]