Tag: Houston History

Bellaire
11/06/09 8:13pm

It Didn’t Take, This Broken Wing: What the Developer of Wilshire Village Had in Mind for Bellaire

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Commercial Real Estate, Houston Architects, Houston History, Proposed Developments, Retail, Strip Centers
9 Comments

Lauren Meyers, archivist of would-be Houston, digs up an earlier plan for a building at 4500 Bissonnet, on the corner of Mulberry St. in Bellaire. That’s the vacant property long in the possession of legendarily delinquent Wilshire Village landlord Jay H. Cohen, where Matt Dilick, the man who now apparently controls it, is planning to build a 2ish-story stucco mild-West meets retail-Tuscan strip center and sell off the rest of the land.

Back in 1946, Cohen’s father, who had developed the Wilshire Village Apartments on West Alabama and Dunlavy 6 years earlier, planned a 122-home subdivision on the 30-acre strip between Avenue A (now Newcastle St.) and Mulberry St. with a partner. And at the southern end of the property, facing Richmond Rd. (now Bissonnet St.), a sweeping, low-slung modern structure spanning Howard St.: the Mulberry Manor Community Center, designed by Houston architects Lloyd & Morgan.

Meyers quotes a Houston Chronicle report from September 1, 1946:

CONTINUE READING THIS STORY

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Comments
11/06/09 5:03pm

Comment of the Day: Staying Safe in Midtown, Back in the Good Old Days

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Crime, Houston History, Midtown, Quicklink
2 Comments

COMMENT OF THE DAY: STAYING SAFE IN MIDTOWN, BACK IN THE GOOD OLD DAYS “Last I lived inside the loop was 17 years ago in Midtown…before it was chic. I lived behind an 8 foot chainlink fence topped with razor wire. My friends called it “the compound” but I never ever had a problem.” [Tex, commenting on The Front Porch Gang]

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Bellaire
11/06/09 1:44pm

First They’ll Need To Clear Out All That Vegetation That’s in the Way

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Houston History, Land Sales, Proposed Developments, Quicklink, Redevelopment
12 Comments

FIRST THEY’LL NEED TO CLEAR OUT ALL THAT VEGETATION THAT’S IN THE WAY Nancy Sarnoff hears word that the owners of the 100-year-old Teas Nursery at 4400 Bellaire Blvd. near Newcastle are hoping to sell off the property for single-family homes: “The Bellaire business will be relocated, sold or liquidated, according to Tom Teas, president and manager of the landscaping division. Plans are for the nursery company to redevelop the five acres of land itself and then sell lots to builders. The project will start in January.” [Prime Property; previously on Swamplot]

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Adaptive Reuse
10/08/09 5:42pm

Comment of the Day: Before Richmond Hall Went Light and Quiet

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Art, Comments, Houston History, Menil, Nightlife, Quicklink
2 Comments

COMMENT OF THE DAY: BEFORE RICHMOND HALL WENT LIGHT AND QUIET “. . . The building was the original Weingartens grocery store. Then in the 1960’s /1970’s it was the Texas Opry House. Then in the early 1980’s it was the Parade Disco (yes,the Parade Disco of New Orleans Bourbon Street, fame or infamy, depending on how one looks at it). The place rocked . . . Monday nights was punk rock night and it was real punk, not the poseur “punk”. But Friday & Saturday nights was gay disco. Some of the best music ever. Then the Menil converted it into [Richmond Hall] . . . it houses Dan Flavins awesome light sculpture.“ [Tim, commenting on Chipperfield Sculpts the New Menil: Goodbye, Richmont Square]

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Apartments
09/18/09 5:50pm

Emergency Demo: The Savoy Hotel’s Final Weekend Stay Downtown

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Demolitions, Downtown, Houston History
23 Comments

Houston’s first-ever highrise apartment building will be demolished next Friday, September 25th, a spokesman for the Houston Police Department announced today. Neighborhood Protection inspectors have determined that structural problems with the vacant-and-crumbling 1906 Savoy Apartments building (later the Savoy Hotel) require it to be taken down as quickly as possible. The Houston Press‘s Craig Malisow reports:

[HPD’s Mark Curran] said the police have had difficulty contacting the owner, who is currently in Lebanon. (Curran didn’t remember his name off-hand, but a 2007 Press story identified him as Michael Nassif). The owner has 10 days to file an appeal, Curran said.

The nearby Metro line will need to be closed during the demolition — hopefully not longer than Friday-Sunday, Curran said.

Curran also said that the building would be guarded continuously until it is torn down.

The original Savoy Houston’s first public building to have electricity. Not included in the demolition order: the building next door with the big Savoy Houston sign on top. After that portion was built in 1961, the entire complex was operated as the Savoy-Field Hotel.

Photo of 1906 Savoy Apartments, in front of 1961 Savoy-Field Hotel: Flickr user oooch2

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Bellaire
08/25/09 9:52am

John Teas, 1934-2009

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Gardening, Houston History, Landscape, Quicklink, Trees
9 Comments

JOHN TEAS, 1934-2009 That 1916 house on Teas Nursery property at 4400 Bellaire Blvd. — now home to the company’s landscaping business — was his birthplace. He died yesterday. “His grandfather, Edward ‘Papa’ Teas, Sr., whose family had been in the nursery business since 1843 starting in Indiana, moved his family to Bellaire from Missouri in 1910 to grow and sell produce, but turned to landscaping when a freeze in 1913 wiped out his business. He was responsible for introducing azaleas and crepe myrtle to the area, so legend goes, and for planting some of Houston’s enduring natural beauty, including Rice University’s oaks. John Teas helped plant the oaks along the Rice campus on Fannin Street as a boy. The family’s nursery businesses extended from Fort Bend County through Conroe, but the roots were sunk the deepest in Bellaire, where the nursery and landscaping business continue to this day.” [Bellaire Examiner]

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Buying and Selling
08/21/09 5:03pm

An Old Sixth Ward House To Take Home with You

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Demolitions, Historic Districts, Historic Preservation, Home for Sale, Homes for Sale, Houston History, Old Sixth Ward
27 Comments

A reader sends in this photo from the corner of Union and Henderson Sts. in the Old Sixth Ward, one block off Washington Ave. And comments:

Anyone in the market for a FREE house? This caught my eye on my way home [yesterday] and made me laugh out loud. I knew it was a rough sellers market but wow – FREE?

Sorry about the ghost images in the picture – I got so excited about a FREE house that I forgot to roll down the car window before snapping the shot!

The home dates to 1890, and was sold in October of last year. This past April, the city historical commission denied the owner’s request for a “certificate of appropriateness” to tear it down.

Photo: Swamplot inbox

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Flooding
08/14/09 7:23pm

Measuring Progress in Cubic Feet per Second

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Houston History, Land Development, Landscape, Quicklink
16 Comments

MEASURING PROGRESS IN CUBIC FEET PER SECOND “Also, over the past 50 years, high-impact building and roadway development have reduced the amount of permeable surface to accept stormwater, increasing flooding and pollution. Stream flow speeds in Houston, for example, have increased from under 5,000 cu ft per second in 1930 to about 27,500 cfs in 2000, says the U.S. Geological Survey. With stream-flow increases come a greater potential for flooding. The actual stream flow from 2001’s Tropical Storm Allison in Houston’s Brays Bayou peaked sharply at about 34,000 cfs, 20 hours from the start of runoff. This compares to a more gradual stream flow in 1915, before development. . . . Allison, which caused $5 billion of damage in Houston, would have been a nonevent even 50 years ago because the natural landscape would have absorbed the water, say sources.” [GreenSource]

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Comments
08/13/09 7:33pm

Comment of the Day: Grading the Replacements

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Houston History, Quicklink, Redevelopment
25 Comments

COMMENT OF THE DAY: GRADING THE REPLACEMENTS “I’d love to see any examples you can provide of [lovely architecture] being replaced by a poorly built McMansion. For every one you might find, I can show you a thousand where a tiny, usless, worn out, obsolete, shack was town down and replaced with one or more new, modern, luxurious, atractive homes. Are they all perfect? Certainly not. But I think the transformation that has occurred in the Inner Loop over the past 25 years is nothing short of amazing. I only hope [it] can continue for another 25 years. Better homes inside the Loop. Better apartments inside the Loop. More people inside the Loop. More money inside the Loop. More shopping inside the Loop. More restaurants inside the Loop. More jobs inside the Loop. More density. More energy. More everything.” [Bernard, commenting on Comment of the Day: What Happens To Those Small, Stylin’ Inner-Loop Homes?]

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Houston History
08/13/09 3:41pm

When Westheimer Was for Cruising

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Lower Westheimer, Montrose, Quicklink, Streetscapes
4 Comments

WHEN WESTHEIMER WAS FOR CRUISING John Nova Lomax reminisces: “This was Oil Bust Houston, and it looked then like Montrose might become a full-on slum. There were no condos along ‘Theimer (as it was often called by the mullet set) and few fancy restaurants. From Montrose Boulevard all the way to what is now called Midtown, Westheimer was lined with little more than one “modeling studio” after another, and it seems like there were even more tattoo shops than there are now. The denizens and visitors to these businesses (not to mention the street hustlers, drag queens, punks and Guardian Angels that still lurk in the area) provided plenty for the hordes of suburbanites — getting their first taste of freedom and big city life — to gawk at from the safety of their Blazers and Cutlasses. . . . on weekend nights, Westheimer would be bumper-to-bumper from Bagby to well past Buffalo Speedway, and sometimes all the way out to the Galleria, a phantasmagoria of teenage hormones and sound-collisions: car-horns, engines revving, and squealing girls, the hiss-and-almost-subsonic bass rumble of ‘Paul Revere’ booming from a Jeep Cherokee interlocking with a Honda CRX chirping out that inane ‘Two of Hearts’ pop ditty or the root canal Teutonic skronk of that ‘Warm Leatherette’ monstrosity.” [Hair Balls]

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Apartments
08/04/09 4:24pm

At Home in Houston’s Wilshire Village Apartments, Back in the Day

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Demolitions, Home Decor, Houston History, Interiors, Lancaster Place
21 Comments

Note: Updated below.

So tell me, whatever happened to . . . those Wilshire Village Apartments? Houston photographer Sarah Lipscomb stumbled across a couple of classic interior shots of the then-new apartment complex while poking through old photos a few months ago with her aunt, Johnna Lee Muller.

Writes Lipscomb:

They didn’t have internet in those days but they got to smoke, read magazines and look at globes.

Another view of home entertainment in the early 1940s, Wilshire Village-style:

CONTINUE READING THIS STORY

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Greenspoint
08/04/09 3:16pm

Charles Gwathmey’s Greenspoint Strip

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Houston History, Office Buildings
2 Comments

Diehard Modernist architect Charles Gwathmey, dubbed one of the “New York Five” (along with Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Richard Meier, and John Hejduk) in the early 1970s, passed away yesterday in Manhattan of esophageal cancer. Gwathmey, who was 71, was probably most famous for his addition to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum, which his firm, Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects, completed in 1992.

Gwathmey-Siegel was no stranger to Houston. In the late seventies and early eighties, the firm designed a series of 4 spec office buildings that line the south side of this city’s North Belt, just southeast of the Greenspoint Mall.

Photos: LoopNet (400 N. Sam Houston Pkwy. E) and Feagins Interests (Damson Oil Bldg., 260 N. Sam Houston Pkwy. E)

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Quicklink
05/08/09 12:40pm

Leadbelly, Waiting for the Sugar Land Train

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Sugar Land
No Comments

LEADBELLY, WAITING FOR THE SUGAR LAND TRAIN Houston music historian Roger Wood traces the lyrical references of Bob Dylan’s new song, “If You Ever Go To Houston”: “Not nearly as many people realize that ‘Midnight Special’ is a song about getting arrested in Houston and sent to prison in Sugar Land (where the train tracks ran right past the prison near Hwy. 90, and where the folklore about the midnight train beacon signifying early release for the lucky cell-dweller upon which it might shine predated Leadbelly’s song, written while he was incarcerated there). The first verse of that one: ‘If you ever go to Houston, you’d better walk right’ (also recorded by Leadbelly with the alternate line, ‘If you’re ever down in Houston, you’d better walk right,’ which I myself allude to in the title of my first book, ‘Down in Houston: Bayou City Blues’).” [Hair Balls]

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Clark Pines
03/25/09 5:57pm

Comment of the Day: Buried Landscapes of the Houston Heights

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Flooding, Houston Heights, Houston History, Landscape, Quicklink, Woodland Heights
4 Comments

COMMENT OF THE DAY: BURIED LANDSCAPES OF THE HOUSTON HEIGHTS “Before developers established the heights and its various neighboring subdivisions, a massive filling project took placed. It was pretty much a landfill for the City of Houston. . . . Developer clear cut the existing pine forest (the oaks pretty much only existed near the bayous and tribs) and filled in the uneven landscape. A big example is in Woodland Heights. A 60-inch storm sewer line runs in an old trib to White Oak Bayou. The line is 20-ft below the current natural ground in the area. After the line was built, the natural channel was filled in and streets placed on top. The line currently goes under many people properties and houses and many don’t know it exists. . . . Outside of that, several ox bows and other trib were filled in. A couple were not though. There is one just east of TC jester where it cross White Oak Bayou south of 11th. It has water in it. There is another just west of Yale that is dry. I’ve seen historic photos showing people jumping off the banks of the the natural streams in the bayous in the Clark Pines area (14th street west of Durham). A current development is actually being build on an undeveloped piece of land that was a site of the landfill in this oxbow. The houses are being placed on piles driven deep into the ground to avoid them from sinking or collapsing. I doubt they are telling the home buyers this. Long time residents know about it though.” [kjb434, commenting on Wet and Wild: Strip Redo on White Oak]

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