IHB2

I was born in 47, moved to a new house in Bellaire near Chimney Rock & Bissonnet in 48 - there was a rice field at the western end of our street, a little over a block away, and a friend I met in kindergarten lived on several acres and his family kept horses 1 block north of Bellaire Blvd & 3 blocks west of Chimney Rock. sleeepovers at his place were great b/c we got to stay in one of their very cool barns. and it was all prairie, very few trees except for the forest along Brays Bayou pre-channelizing. yeah, you could say the "character" of the neighborhoods has been only fluid and the worth of preserving them at one stage rather than another is purely a matter of opinion.

my money is on the 63 Rambler as cause of the accident. I went through the passenger side windshield of one in 1965 b/c it's brakes went out. 6 months before that a friend of mine also went through the passenger side windshield of one b/c...the brakes went out that 2nd scene is probably JD Hospital on Allen Pkwy (maybe still called Buffalo Drive then but I don't remember).

the route shown in that area in the ppoint does not appear to be different from the original Uptown Line proposal. Dillards and other structures on the east side of Post Oak there are close enough to the street that METRO was going to have to take a couple of really small parcels and land on the west side they undoubtedly would have preferred not to take (cutting into the Waterwall acreage is guaranteed to draw howls from someone). can't find the original METRO drawingsbut swamplot had several blogs on it, and here's a link to some info: http://www.yourhoustonnews.com/river_oaks/news/uptown-rail-requires-land-from-waterwall-park-more/article_3abfd47c-179c-5482-aeab-f0d22a4f4c52.html

interesting. thx for posting. remains to be seen how they solve the sufficient ROW acquisition problem METRO discussed in its original Uptown Line plan in the area between Dillard's and Lakes of Post Oak. those slides in this ppoint still show it to be a tight squeeze through there. glad as hell I don't work there and don't need to venture there once this work begins.

and the "Bird" flip in shadow is absolutely classic devonhart!

too cool! I was just starting at Jane Long Jr High when the 60 snow happened. I was home sick with the measles and it was my mom's turn to drive carpool, so she left me home alone...I don't think her car was fully out of sight when I ran outside, made and threw as many snowballs as I could then stashed 3 of them in the back of the freezer. a few months later I exacted sweet revenge on the mean dog that lived behind us. the "evidence" of the assault melted, the perfect crime...

Also Finer's Drug Store in the low brick bldg on the corner of Mapleridge (7th St) & Bissonnet, across Mapleridge from the Bellaire Goodyear store (today it's a Libreria). And for a short time a Valian's takeout Bissonnet at Rice. Felix had a restaurant that today is the Brisket House at Bissonnet and Bellaire, which originally was a "circle" intersection (and Bissonnet was called Old Richmond Road all the way through Bellaire and West U to the curve at Edloe. The fried burgers and fountain drinks at Dugan's counter were spectacular - at least in my preteen critique.

Either the Ones A Meal or the Dobbs House is today Bellaire Broiler Burger. I can't remember which one it was, but maybe it was both. I grew up a couple of blocks from there from the late 40s-late 60s.

I just unpacked these 70 vintage matchbooks from my late parents' stuff. Mostly Houston area restaurants of the 1950s and 1960s, but also some Houston hotels, oil industry service companie, and some great Bellaire businesses. There are another 80 or so from all over Texas and some international and other US states - I'll post a pic of these after I take it. I sob a little just looking at the Valian's matches, and Kaphan's, and Pier 21, and Safari, and...

2nd Office Club in the Buffalo Pharmacy Center corner of Buffalo Speedway & Bissonnet at some point during the 70s (can't be more precise, the whole decade was a blur). where the HEB is today.

I've already said I attended every public METRO meeting re the Univ Line from 2005-2010. You can access my public testimony from several of those meetings if you don't believe me. I meant 3 minute headways. What you've "never heard of" regarding METRO's LRT plans and actions since the Solutions vote in 2003 would fill a thick book.

how can the Univ Line LRT run 3 minute headways during rush hrs w/o signal priority?

leaving aside the fact that the tracks inside the West Loop were ripped up decades ago, and that even when they were still there in the early 60s there was a) no I610 loop at all, a total Houston Metropolitan area population of a shade over 1 million, Sugarland had a population of about 3500, Katy even less, and Alief was still farmland, and 3)there were maybe 8 trains a day on the track that remained west of Post Oak... the 2 LRT lines meeting at 59/610 were planned to run 21 hrs per day M-F, at max 6 minute headways, minimum at rush hours 3 minutes. have you ever driven through the 59&610 feeder rds/59 HOV entry&exit/Westpark Toll Rd & Westpark St merge/Post Oak clusterf***? your response would indicate no you haven't.

I did not miss any METRO meeting on these 2 lines from 2005-2010. They were and are essential to a rational LRT grid, but they were and are both so poorly designed that they will destroy mobility in 2 of the busiest areas inside and near the loop. it's too bad politics caused the poor design, but had there been no opposition who knows how much more tax$$$ would have been wasted by the leadership of "old" METRO. given the economic crash and its effect on both local and federal revenues, it's probably a good thing that METRO was not in the middle of trying to construct 5 lines at once when the bottom dropped out. and one shudders to think that without the crash and the METRO mismanagement it exposed, we might still have that arrogant crook Frank Wilson and his enabler David Wolff spending tax $$$ for nothing - nothing is what we ended up with for the $$$ spent and it's all on them.

and yet....he won at least in the short term. and as mentioned numerous times on HAIF - delay is the death for controversial multi-billion $$$ projects like the 2003 Solutions LRT component Bill King is unlikely ever to have to comment on the piss-poor routing of the University Line b/c it ain't gonna get built while he's still physically able to write for the Chron ;-)