Yesterday we introduced the first 2 nominating categories in the Swamplot Awards for Houston Real Estate. Nominations will remain open until midnight Sunday for both awards: Favorite Houston Design Cliché and Best Teardown.
Today, there are 2 more award categories to introduce. And they’re both new to the Swampies. The first one is for Houston’s Parking Lot of the Year.
What qualities would a lot have to have to for it to qualify as Parking Lot of the Year? In a city full of places to park, what would make one stand out? The ease of the parking experience? Additional on-site or nearby attractions? The fact that the site is being used for parking in the first place? As usual, the Swampies are open to the sharp and clever formulations of readers. When you use your nomination to give this category a twist, sell your vision!
More complete instructions covering the nominating process can be found on this page. In the meantime, you’ll find plenty of spaces available for your nominations in the comments section below — and in the Swamplot inbox, if you’d prefer a more private venue.
From Previous Comments on this site
—
Fiesta Mart #38 would make a nice parking lot for HEB.
You could have your park, and your parking lot.
I nominate the City of Houston parking lot in the Museum District, underneath the elevated Southwest Freeway, bounded by San Jacinto, Wheeler, and Caroline.
This lot is conveniently located for citizens and citizens-to-be visiting the nearby Mexican Consulate. Nothing better crowns the experience of waiting in line for 3 hours only to find out your document has the wrong stamp, than parking your priciest possession between two sleeping bums, barely 10 feet underneath 8 lanes of steadily-humming traffic being held up by 30 year old concrete pillars. The city maintains individual coin-fed meters and lighting that would make the Addams family jealous.
The parking lot on the roof at 2528 Amherst, across from La Madeleine. Your car won’t float down Kirby when it floods, there is usually a partially consumed can of beer if you’re thirsty, and, if you need to urinate,you couldn’t ask for better company.
The Astrodome! Consider this an early start at the 2011 or 2012 nominations…
Mugsy’s/BlueFish/Yelapa/Hobbit parking lot. A virtual Pollok manifested in parking lot form. Bricks, concrete, asphalt, tree stumps make up this smorgasboard of land. This combined with the imaginary grid of space distribution makes it a Houston experience. Good things the businesses there are worth it!
For an honest suggestion: I quite like the parking lot at Central Market. When I go there with my girlfriend on the weekend, we just park in the back of the lot and walk to the front door.
.
When the weather is nice, and they are cooking outside, and they have a band playing, it’s a nice little walk.
.
I think the people that complain about the lot being full are those that circle for 10 minutes trying to save themselves from 2 minutes of walking.
Can we nominate the announcement of a parking lot? How about the soon to be lot now interrupted by the former Sheraton-Lincoln.
The Bluefish/Hobbit parking lot is definitely challenging for those of us in extended cab trucks!
Anyone else hate the 11th street Kroger parking lot?
Any parking lot where you get waved in by someone in an orange vest and traffic directing light, pay, then come out to find that your car has been towed because the parking lot attendant was bogus.
I third the Hobbit/Yelapa parking lot. Every time I eat at one of those restaurants, I worry about losing a portion of my vehicle.
I nominate Interstate 45.
Put up a parking lot; HEB gets the park, Fiesta’s the lot.
I nominate Spaghetti Warehouse, where the local bums take to the uneven lot as unofficial traffic controllers helping you make an easy straight-in park then expecting tips for their “service”.
I spend more on parking than I do for dinner.
I’m with Pax and the gang for the Hobbit/ Bluefish parking lot. Although, I think of this parking lot as more of an homage to our rustic, pioneer days when earlier Americans braved hardship in Calistoga wagons crossing the great frontier. The skull of a hapless traveler lay next to the rough ruts cutting across the great plains. Not knowing if you would be able to endure the crossing to the other side was frightening and somehow filled with optimism for a new, better life. This parking lot is a reminder of how far we’ve come as a country and, yet, a prime example of how far we still have left to go. Hark! I see the purple mountains majesty, and a shattered U joint.
“Hear, hear” for the Bluefish/Hobbit parking lot. That awkward, irregular, serpentine, patchwork quilt of a parking lot is such a refreshing challenge over the nice blacktopped perfectly lined Truman Show-esque parking lots of the strip center world.
Alternative nomination: the lot for Borders/Pesce at Upper Kirby that was striped by someone who thought there would be savvy Mini Cooper driving folks who know how to park instead of the blinged-out SUV kind that expect a battleship-sized dry dock spot with tugboats to guide them in safely.
I nominate the 4×4 only back parking lot for the Tavern on Gray.
Kirby Drive.
i have a hard time nominating the blue fish et all parking lot as something unique since it almost feels like a natural extension of richmond.
The Mekong Shopping Center in Midtown, 2808 Milam.
During the day, even the police park crazy.
At night, the roof transforms into KHON’s cultural playground: Concerts, Theater, Film. . .
LOVE IT!
I nominate the single-sex, Catholic high school parking garage. Fortunately there are two examples of this genre this year to help garner votes from both genders – the Duchesne Academy 3 Series Stacker completed summer of 2010 and the St. Thomas High School Tower of F-150 Horsepower now under construction.