The Hospitality Apartments at 7300 Bertner just north of OST are “not posh. But they’re perfectly nice,” explains Ann Hightower, whose husband Joe founded the organization that runs them 42 years ago. “Totally functional, with linens, dishes, a stove and oven, a microwave, TVs and access to free laundry.”
Where’s the swimming pool? There isn’t one, but that’s not usually too much of a concern of the people staying there. All the residents of the 42-unit complex are out-of-towners undergoing treatment at the nearby Texas Medical Center.
Joe [Hightower] estimated the apartments have been filled “99-plus percent of the time” over the years.
“You could probably have four projects this big in Houston and just barely meet the demand,” Ann said after the organization’s annual meeting on Super Bowl Sunday. “And then you would uncover another layer of need.”
Residents stay anywhere from 2 weeks to 3 months — for free.
The nonprofit has never applied for or received money from any government agency. The organization has relied on personal fundraising efforts by the Hightowers and friends and the generosity of Houston congregations, private foundations and hundreds of individual contributors. It has no debt, pays no salaries and operates each apartment for less than $10 a day.
Another scene from the active afterlife of the former theme park: “The 150 acre lot formerly known as Astroworld has been empty for a while, but is expected to be packed on Friday when it will be available for rodeo parking. . . . Lighting towers will be brought in and parts of the property not suitable for parking, such as areas with holes in the ground, will be marked off. There will be entrances along the 610 feeder between Kirby and Fannin and exits off of Belfort. After the rodeo, all entrances will be used as exits so all traffic will flow out of the lot. There are only about 12,000 parking spaces on the actual rodeo site. Officials welcome the new 5,000 space parking opportunity. . . . The lot is not paved and is bumpy, two factors that do not bother some rodeo patrons. . . . ‘We think it’s great that people will be able to cross the bridge and it will bring back memories of when Astroworld was here,’ [Andi Devera of the Fazeli Group, owners of the leasing rights] said. The Astrolot opens this Friday.” [abc13; previously]
The newly revealed design for that $7 million pedestrian bridge over Buffalo Bayou near Montrose makes a brilliant metaphor for the appeal of this city, no? From a distance, it doesn’t seem like Houston is really . . . “passable,” either! But once you’re looking at it up close . . . sure, it’s all right: You can make it through. An excellent message to send prospective Houston tourists! Plus: Wasn’t that how the Houston Ship Channel got started too?
Official name of this Memorial Heights TIRZ project: The Tolerance Bridge. Perfect!
Sure, we’ve all heard about the damage to Galveston — from news reports and the sad tales of returning residents. But how’s the place looking to tourists? Lou Minatti took his kids for a visit over the weekend:
The island is in sad shape. But there were some bright spots. The Moody Gardens Aquarium is open, and since there are so few tourists they have greatly reduced the entrance fee. (The Rain Forest Pyramid is closed until further notice.) The kids did get to see a beautiful shrimp trawler up close. They were fascinated.
What struck me most was the fact that all of the trees are dead. All of the beautiful live oaks, planted soon after the 1900 hurricane, are no more. They were killed by the flood of salt water. The only trees to survive are the palms and Norfolk Island pines. My best guess is that every deciduous tree more than 5 blocks from the seawall is dead.
Pretending to be a tourist in his hometown, Misha from Tasty Bits puts together a day’s itinerary that includes the Breakfast Klub, the Rothko Chapel, the Menil, Westmoreland and Audubon Place, Nippon, . . . and Discovery Green:
11am: Head to Discovery Green to see exactly how much park $145 million dollars buys you. The corporate sponsorship at this place is a bit “enthusiastic”, but overall Disco Green (that’s what the cool kids call it these days, I hear) is a surprisingly good time. I didn’t bring my bocce balls or a putter, but I did have fun reflecting the best of Kraftwerk off the completely awesome Listening Vessels, designed by Doug Hollis. Being a bit stubborn, I also spent no less than half an hour trying to figure out if the Synchronicity of Color sculpture was interactive. It’s not, but feel free to give it a shot anyway.
The most interesting thing about Discovery Green is not how much it cost, but how much more livable Houston Downtown appears to be than it was as recently as 5 years ago. . . . Though a bit crammed with “features”, the park goes a nice job of combining a nature, architecture and art in a single organic space that anchors a new, far more residential Downtown than ever before.
Probably the best introduction to the particular and engaging humor of the Houston Chicks’ relentlessly cheery stuck-in-Houston-for-the-summer tourist travelogues is the soon-to-be-classic entry entitled “Houston: Day Seven” from last month, which begins with this striking line:
Today, we went to Rice Village…We stayed for 10 minutes…and left…
and ends, 10 photographs later, in a Galleria parking lot — after a brief repose with an egg-salad sandwich.
The brilliance of the Chicks’ photo essays is difficult to communicate in an excerpt. If you’re looking for a quick take, try The Houston Chicks Have Won!, which recounts a popular Houston archetype in only two frames.
Houston’s lone professional tourists, John Nova Lomax and David Beebe, stop off at the Brady’s Island in the Ship Channel midway into their latest day-long stroll . . . through this city’s southeastern stretches:
The air is foul here, and the eastern view is little more than a forest of tall crackers and satanic fume-belching smokestacks, sending clouds of roasted-cabbage-smelling incense skyward to Mammon, all bisected by the amazingly tall East Loop Ship Channel Bridge, its pillars standing in the toxic bilge where Brays Bayou dumps its effluent into the great pot of greenish-brown petro-gumbo.
While Brady’s Landing today seems to survive as a function room – a sort of Rainbow Lodge for the Ship Channel, with manicured grounds that reminded Beebe of Astroworld — decades ago, people came here to eat and to take in the view. This was progress to them, this horrifically awesome vista showed how we beat the Nazis and Japanese and how we were gonna stave off them godless Commies. As for me, it made me think of Beebe’s maxim: “Chicken and gasoline don’t mix.”
More from the duo’s march through “Deep Harrisburg”: Flag-waving Gulf Freeway auto dealerships, an early-morning ice house near the Almeda Mall, a razorwire-fenced artist compound in Garden Villas, Harold Farb’s last stand, colorful Broadway muffler joints, the hidden gardens of Thai Xuan, and — yes, gas-station chicken.
“There is nothing else like the Southeast side,” Lomax adds in a comment:
I see it as the true heart of Houston. Without the port and the refineries we are nothing. The prosperous West Side could be Anywhere, USA, but the Southeast Side could only be here.
The Greater Houston Convention and Visitor Bureau’s celebrity-laden “My Houston” campaign hits the web!!! And it sure looks a lot like Facebook or MySpace, doesn’t it? All the kewl kids are on it, like Beyonce, and Yao, and AJ, and George and Barbara, and Chloe, and Yolanda. And they’re all saying great things about your city!!!
Only . . . there doesn’t seem to be a way to post your own page. Or add your comments to theirs. Or participate in any way.
All those local celebrities? They are not your friends.Clay and Brian and Hilary are not in your extended network.
Hidden in today’s Chronicle update on the Dome’s status are a few more exciting details about the Astrodome Redevelopment Corporation’s still-mysterious plans to remake the former home of the Astros and Oilers into a convention hotel. It’s gonna be like a county fair!
Company CEO John Clanton casually mentions that the new hotel will have seven restaurants and an amusement park, possibly including a ride to “near the top of the Dome,” plus tethered hot-air balloons, a batting cage, and gondolas.
It’s unclear whether Clanton is referring to Venetian-style gondolas for navigating all the new waterways inside, or the kind you see on ski slopes, for crossing the ballfield central fairgrounds. More details on the Astrodome Redevelopment Corp. website!
More high comedy surrounding the Astrodome: Just what is Texans owner Bob McNair’s problem with the proposal to redevelop the Astrodome into a hotel? It’s . . . the hotel!
“A hotel would be in direct conflict with our games and when the rodeo is going on. You can’t tell guests they can’t come to the hotel on Sundays. That wouldn’t be fair to them. It wouldn’t be fair to our fans.
“We’re trying to be open-minded about this. We’re willing to look at anything that doesn’t conflict with our events.”
Now, you’re probably asking yourself: Haven’t the Texans known that the Astrodome Redevelopment Corporation was wanting to turn the Dome into a hotel now for about . . . what, three years? Wouldn’t the two groups maybe have wanted to chat with each other at some point during that period?
Silly you! You’re presuming that the Texans and the Rodeo and the Harris County Sports and Convention Corporation — Reliant Park’s landlords — actually have some intention or incentive to come up with a workable plan to redevelop the Astrodome. And you’re forgetting that turning the Dome into a hotel was an idea pushed early on by . . . the HCSCC’s chairman, Mike Surface! Remember that space-theme amusement-park concept that was so brilliant that the group that proposed it won the “competition” the HCSCC set up four years ago — even over other developer groups that had more experience and deeper pockets? That group was the Astrodome Redevelopment Corporation.
A year laterthe ARC scrapped its own space-park concept in favor of the convention-hotel complex pushed by the HCSCC. With the Sports and Convention Corporation’s backing, the company worked in secret for three more years to refine the proposal.
Good thing the HCSCC didn’t solicit any alternate proposals during that time. Just think of the confusion that would have caused!
You know things must be getting desperate for the Astrodome Redevelopment Corporation, which earlier this week suffered the indignity of having two rather important stakeholderscome out against the latest incarnation of the company’s tightly guarded, four-years-in-the-making,Frankenstein-inspired proposal for bringing the Dome back to life. When they finally got to see the proposal, “recently,” the Texans and the Livestock Show & Rodeo decided the Astrodome’s new incarnation would be incompatible with their own operations.
But the greatest indication of the redevelopment group’s desperation was revealed just yesterday in local ABC-TV reporter Miya Shay’s blog. That’s right, the Astrodome Redevelopment Corporation is going for broke: The company finally decided to release to the public actual images of its proposal for the county-owned facility!
Yes, it’s a daring strategy to use on a property paid for by local taxpayers, but it just might work.
After the jump: the newly released images of the Astrodome hotel-under-glass!
Swamplot covers real estate, home design and renovation, architecture, and the landscape of Houston, Texas. Swamplot did not flood during Allison — or Ike! Honest! Read more
