- 9 Falling Leaf Ln. [HAR]
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Tag: Landscape
IT’S HIGH SIGN SEASON IN HOUSTON 
Spring has sprung, notes local film curator Peter Lucas. And that means a fresh crop of hand-painted signs has already sprouted: “Each spring — that all-too-brief time when the sun starts to shine in a few bright spurts but hasn’t yet begun to make being outdoors nearly unbearable and opening our eyes wide nearly impossible — this town begins to reveal an exhibition rivaling those in any of our art galleries and museums. Colors pop against each other. Structures pierce the blue sky. Degraded materials reveal complex textures. Drop-shadows create depth interplay with architectural flourishes and telephone lines. Emerging amidst these illuminated color fields and intersecting shadows are countless hand-painted signs. All around us, unique paintings of tires, kitchen appliances, people, foods, animals, and collages of typography show themselves and remind us that this is quite literally an art town.” [Glasstire] Photo: Peter Lucas
Here’s some raw footage from a camera-wielding drone flight landscape artist and researcher Steve Rowell piloted earlier this year over portions of the Baytown Nature Center, the Crystal, Scott, and Burnet Bay peninsula that not too long ago was the home of the tony Brownwood subdivision — before it got all sinky and decided to subside 10 or so feet into the water. In some portions of the video, you can still spot the occasional home or garage slab from a fifties- or sixties-era rancher or 2, not to mention concrete broken up from other foundations and driveways and recycled on-site into surge barriers that now control the more recent, court-ordered wetlands environment.
Touring Brownwood by Drone
Cite magazine editor Raj Mankad leads readers on a brief photo tour of “one of the most mind-boggling sites in the Houston area.” Hills, in Pasadena! “Many of the slopes are planted with grass,” he writes. “On one visit several years ago, I saw a horse grazing at the base of one. If I squinted, I could imagine myself in Montana, if not the Alps.”
Better than a waiting-for-snow ski resort, though, these landforms north of Hwy. 225 inside Beltway 8 east of Red Bluff Rd. on the south side of the Houston Ship Channel are made of phosphogypsum. Phosphogypsum is a byproduct of the production of phosphate fertilizers, which took place on the site between 1960 and 2011, under the successive stewardship of a series of companies including ExxonMobil and Agrifos. Why was all this gypsum kept in mountainous piles instead of stuffed into wallboards or something? Well, the EPA doesn’t allow that if the material is too radioactive, which phosphogypsum generally is. So the glowy stuff has to be stored somewhere.
There’s Glow in Them Thar Hills
WHERE THE LITTLE PINK FLAGS ARE WAVING NOW, NEXT TO I-45 NORTH 
Reader Joel Balderas seeks some Brooke Smith-area feeder road intel: “I’m curious what’s going on at the property located at approximately 2450 North Freeway. I live just around the corner and I noticed that a couple weeks ago the for sale sign was taken down and stakes were placed around the property with pink flags. The lot looks to be about an acre and a half and sits on the northbound side of I-45 between North Main and Patton. I-45 bounds it to the west. Little White Oak and Top Brass are to the north. A small home is to the south at 2406 North Freeway. To the east is a wooded area that would double the size of the lot. After the wooded area you would hit Little White Oak again. On the north east corner is a T-Mobile tower and on the south west corner is a large billboard facing north, which is currently advertising Fiesta. If you hear of anything I’d appreciate the info.” Photo: Joel Balderas
Having succeeded in somewhat reducing the planned amount of tree carnage at the southern end of their neighborhood bounding a portion of the Willow Waterhole Stormwater Detention Basin, residents of Post Oak Manor now have another curious byproduct of those flood-reduction efforts to contend with. Contractors working on the Harris County Flood Control District project are now lining a section of the new detention basin with actual barbed-wire fencing. “This is public paid-for lands,” complains neighborhood resident Valerie Runge. “I can’t help but feel this is retaliation for the trouble we caused trying to keep a few of the trees.”
Cows, Too
How long will it take a Katy worker to zoom past acres of newly paved prairie, over a now-uprooted prehistoric burial ground, and under EZ Tag toll sensors on a lunchtime jaunt to the outlet mall in Cypress? Maybe as quickly as 5 minutes, if the 200mph speed reached last week by driver John Hennessey in one of his company’s souped-up Corvettes on the 15-mile stretch of the Grand Parkway between I-10 and Hwy. 290 can be maintained. Of course, that might become a little more difficult once the new Prairie Tollway opens to slower-moving traffic for the first time this coming Saturday.
200mph from Mall to Mall
Parents and students connected to Eastwood’s Lantrip Elementary School are showing off a new mulch-covered running track, separate wheelchair-ready path, and set of 12 raised garden beds on a decomposed-granite pad built this fall by volunteers from materials purchased with a $20,000 grant the school won in July. The garden-bed installation, pictured above in front of an older campus greenhouse, will also serve as an outdoor classroom for the school at the northern reaches of Telephone Rd. Also newly installed: a set of 20 new fruit trees with irrigation equipment sent by the Fruit Tree Planting Foundation, in addition to the earlier grant from Keep America Beautiful and the Lowe’s Foundation.
An East End Greenbelt
- 2007 Huldy St. [HAR]
SOAKING IT UP IN TEXAS 
Back in Texas for the grand opening of his new “pavilion” for the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth — a design the institution liked so much they decided to name the building after its architect — the loquacious Renzo Piano has a few comments for Dallas writer Betsy Lewis about the Houston landscape: “You may be used to the light in Texas, but it’s a special light. It’s brilliant, stronger than usual. I remember actually one of the first things we did when I came in ’80, Dominique de Menil told me, ‘I want to go to Israel because I’ve been told that Israel is the same light as Texas.’ I don’t know why she said that. By the way, it was not true. But it is true that Israel has a strong light. But in Texas it’s also because of the latitude, because of the absence of mountains, and the clouds and the nature. Nature is also very spatial. It’s flat. When you plant a tree in Texas, it grows up. It’s a real forest. That there’s something in the water in Texas is probably true. Sometimes people believe that countries are different because of funny trees, but anyway . . . There’s something in the water as well. I’m joking. I’m talking about the water table. But anyway things are special in Texas.” [Glasstire] Photo of Piano Pavilion, Fort Worth: Glasstire
- 5531 Dawnington Pl. [HAR]
That vague line of pink barely visible low in the forested area just beyond the backyard of this house on Warm Springs Dr. in Post Oak Manor marks a few of the hundreds of trees the Harris County Flood Control District plans to knock down as part of a second phase of work on the easternmost portion of the Willow Waterhole Stormwater Detention Basin complex. Most of the trees slated for removal are in a 5-acre zone to the southeast of Post Oak Manor (outlined at the bottom right of the aerial map below), just north of South Main St. and directly to the southwest of Beren Academy. But the pink line is part of a separate 2-acre strip that’s slated for thinning just south of Post Oak Manor. And that’s got some residents there — and in adjacent ‘W’ neighborhoods Willowbend, Willow Meadows, Willowbrook, and Westbury — upset.
COMMENT OF THE DAY RUNNER-UP: AFTER THE BAYOU FLOODS 
“I’ve been riding the trail along the Bayou for 6 years and I’d say the flood debris problem has been greatly reduced of late. That might just be a result of the drought, but certainly the city has been quicker to send crews with fire hoses to wash the trail after floods.
Some part of me misses the mess, though . . . I knew where the debris would tend to accumulate after a period of high water and developed affectionate nicknames for each patch.
Why, I’d whistle as I passed through dysentery ditch, and marvel at cholera canyon. But MRSA meadows, now that was some goop, I tell ya . . .” [Patrick, commenting on Lookee What the Kinder Foundation’s $50M Is Gonna Help Build Along the Bayous] Illustration: Lulu
- 4837 Kinglet St. [HAR]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: VISIONS OF A FREEWAY LINED WITH OFFICE BUILDINGS 
“I live in the area and I think it’s a big improvement on a used car lot. I would love to see the remaining car dealerships gradually moved away and a continuous strip of mid/high rises from Memorial City to Hwy 6. Now that would be a true ‘Energy Corridor.’†[outwest, commenting on A New 17-Story Office Tower Just Like the Others in the Energy Corridor] Illustration: Lulu
