TexasVines

The Beef and Bird was great...I grew up about two stones throws from there

In my area Lakeside and Walnut Bend it seemed like things hit hard because there were literally 10 for sale signs on some blocks, but a lot of people in that area were higher up and or pretty valuable and many were conservative with their cash....many many of our neighbors still live there today and some even call our house the (my last name) house even though the people that bought it from us have lived there now longer than we did there were also a lot of people in that area not in the oil business....some of our neighbors on our street went over seas one with Aramco and another with Cooper and rented their houses out....houses if they sold sold for 30,000 - 40,000 less than when times were better.....some were vacant, but all were maintained.......WestChase went from being developed and streets cut and landscaping done on the edges of the raw land to just vacant space with nice landscaping and streets of nothing....same with CityWest.....the HPD was busy back then solving real crimes so all those vacant places like CityWest pond, end of Richmond...the drinking age was 18 then and cops and society were a lot less strict back then....every so often especially at the end of Richmond the cops would roll up in a car or two and those "new to the game" would go running off into the field and the cops would just laugh and not even get out of their cars and get on the speaker and say they were getting complaints and to pick up all the trash or they would run us off for good....when Richmond finally got extended the cops came by one night and told us a new place to go that was a four lane road just north of the west side police station where they stopped construction because a ditch there was polluted and the company went under and it was going to be forever before it was all settled...I don't think the cops ever came there all over Houston was basically abandoned developments many commercial....streets, landscaping, vacant land......out west near Dairy Ashford they went from building two streets of houses at a time to building none.....you could go out there during the boom and 25-30 houses were framed at a time....then they just finished them and that was that....many did not sell for a year or more....same in Alief, Sugarland and many other areas on the west side the SNL deal was really a separate issue, but it was like a kick in the nuts after a punch in the face....Houston lost all their major banks....Texas went from single banks under a holding company to branch banking, Texas Commerce, Republic, Gibraltar SNL and tons of others were bought up....the real kicker was many of the bankers jerked the strings on people pretty quick because they all thought oil was going to be back pretty soon....when oil did not come back those banks found themselves sitting on assets decreasing further in value and costing in upkeep...Frost was the only major Texas bank to not go under....Mortgage lending went to hell too Commercial construction fell off the map as well and a lot of buildings sat as empty shells....times were bad, but it never seemed like a total panic...a lot of the USA was still doing OK and many people had moved out of Texas to build homes and commercial property so while some companies were down others were able to ride it out by working out of state or in Hong Kong (money seemed to flow out of Houston to Hong Kong for commercial properties then back from Hong Kong early on in the recovery) apartments were what REALLY went to hell.....places like gulfton NEVER recovered...oil is hard ass work for young people....young people that liked to work hard and party hard and spend cash....so they rented apartments....also the yankees that were flowing in crapping everything out from places like Michigan were also dead ass broke so renting an apartment was their only option at first....the apartments in some areas of Huston have never recovered and many probably will not until the D8 runs them under.....crap built in a fashion that absolutely prevents any type of renovation and torn to hell and never maintained for decades now a lot of schools had T-shacks so when things went bad Houston did not have tosit on a ton of empty school...the T-shacks just went away.....there was a LONG time where Houston did not build a lot of high schools or even many middle schools....the elementaries seemed to come after the subdivision filled out so there were not even a ton of those vacant...I think Alief shut off part of Hastings and or Elsik and even then they were HUGE schools in population so class sizes shrunk...a lot of people I knew lost their ass, but many seemed to have connections and they got into something else...others had actually saved some money and just stopped pissing it all away....a few moved back to California and rode that boom up again....there was a long time when Texas was way down and most of the rest of the USA was doing pretty well...people that were young and single or young with young kids were the ones mostly up and moving....higher ups were doing a lot of commuting during the week and back home on the weekend....or some overseas looking back Houston really rode it out pretty well and with the exception of losing all the big banks and the clout that came with that it was probably pretty good for Houston it really diversified the economy over all and taught people about saving cash VS pissing it into the wind....for all the "high rolling" back then people were a lot more conservative in Houston then and even today....they were not house flipping every year they were paying houses off and buying things like nicer cars that were easier to toss the keys back on and cloths and other BS that did not totally kill them when they had to stop buying them....Texas also has the homestead exemption and back then it was unlimited amounts....so people that say it coming ditched a LOT of assets and went and bought a ranch or a big house and homesteaded it and that is what they were able to use to climb back out of the hole...Texas back then did not allow home equity loans so real estate had not totally blown out of proportion as well......the home equity and 2nd/3rd mortgages is what is killing the USA now it was a pretty crazy time before the bust and pretty crazy after....Houston in the 70s - 90s was a wild time

Rusty Pelican was the restaurant there was a halmark card shop just to the left as you walked west out of Target....the Target mall entrance was at an angle.....I believe there was a toy store (possibly a KB) a womens fashion store...the Pizza was Godfathers with an outside entrance....the game room probably was funway freeway......it started out across the mall from Godfathers inside the mall then moved across the mall next to Godfathers with plans to cut an outside entrance for later hours, but the expense of cutting the wall was too much them game rooms died......the Randals was a Weingartens to start and never had a mall entrance....the Randals was origionally across Westheimer from the mall at the corner of Lakside drive on the west side....It was Two Pesos (not dos pesos) before the big Taco Cabana Two pesos lawsuit there was also a Bennigans just to the west of Two Pesos ....there was possilby a Gap in the mall and some other stores I can't recall....it was definately 100% what I would call a mall with stores on both sides of the interior ....some of the others were smaller womens stores like shoes for one and the one previously mentioned....I know there was one chain jewlery store if not two....there was some type of cookie store as well I think....hell for all the time I spent there I sure can't recall a lot of the stores, but like I say a lot were geared towards women...I am pretty sure besides the Target entrance there were only two other entrances into the mall....the floor tile was brown and there were planters just set on the tile, but they looked decent and were always well maintained as was the whole mall one of the stranger aspects is that the mall kind of never "died"....it lost stores and then it was VERY quick after that it moved to the strip center format.....a few of the successful stores moved to the front and cut exterior entrances and one of the big stores to come was Larrys Shoes....the grocery store was actually vacant for a longer time until Randals opened the Flagship there and closed across the street when we first moved to Lakside the mall was a cow pasture complete with stock ponds and the area where Randals origionally located was a dirt field with a bilboard for Lakside advertising it and a large hill of dirt about as high as the billboard that all the kids would ride bikes on....Westheimer was two lanes asphalt with bar ditches on the sides from at least where Beltway 8 was (long before Beltway 8 existed on anything more than a map and it was also two lanes on what was going to be one side of the access road and there were large hills of dirt all up and down between Westheimer and the Bayou that were in place to be the over passes for the freeway part)

that is probably to get the cars on the roof

depending on the race of the people sitting on those graves it would either be appalling or no big deal at all.....one large culture now in Texas sees nothing wrong at all with sitting on graves, stones, or markers because they view their dead and their observance of the dead in a much different fashion than many others do so while you might have seen it as disrespect to the graves or the dead they saw it as common ordinary behavior based on what they do as celebration in their own country and in no way viewed it as or intended it as disrespect to the graves or the dead in them

I believe technically the park is 100% private property since it is in trust for 20 years and because of that cops can tell people of any type they need to leave private property and this is the same reason it can be rented and parts or all of it closed for private events

go tell that to all the children they have treated fool.....do they ask for tax money like loser "community organizers" do for "projects" in the same failed ghetto slums over and over....NO have they taken money from you.....if not then it is none of your business.....you can go right down and join one and it will all be clear to you what they do and who they are.....much more clear than any "community organizer" type of scams that we are all forced to pay for through tax breaks and government grants that then disappear with ZERO accountability I would put their record against any "community organizer" types any day of the week

Houston already has the OTC (Off Shore Technology Conference) and there are dozens of other oil conferences already in existence so starting another is probably a non-starter to have a decent conference you really need to have something to conference about and you really need to get it going when the industry is getting going not 100+ years later when the industry is extremely mature A much better idea would be an expanded conference like the previous wind energy conference that went well beyond wind and LARGE wind and included small wind, large and small solar with both PV and heat concentration, geohydronic for large and small users, energy storage like flywheels, underground and above ground compressed air, pumped hydro, stored superchilled/heated liquids, batteries, green building and controls (that make sense besides the LEED BS), off peek usage strategies, and policy, research, development, and commercialization for these technologies

boy Gates was a real WIN for TAMU it is too bad he got away so soon.....I have met Murano in person and she is nice and has good experience but she will have big shoes to fill and I will withhold judgment on her until it is all done.....one thing I already do not like is she specifically told a LARGE NUMBER of people that the A in A&M would mean Ag again......then she came up with the totally stupid "agrilife" naming....and what was worse is it was only a short time after they had changed Ag Extension to Cooperative Extension to reflect all the damn food and welfare projects that are ruining extension agencies across the USA.....hell some trucks did not even have the Cooperative Extension stickers on them yet and they changed the stupid name again.....she had a lot of good will to get back after that poorly handled fiasco I hope TAMU and UT have not bid out all these buildings already and can take advantage of the reduced materials prices and building trades demand....it would be great to see them budget in the high price times and then build in lower priced times and have cash left over

I don't see any place for cars on the roof

I believe both had the puffs.....they were great

it might give you a satisfactory feeling of knowing why you have worked hard to earn what you are buying no different than actually driving the car and having some squeegee loser try and "clean" your windshield

WOW....I can see this getting off the ground in about oh.....well never!

I know multiple people in all three levels of the alcohol industry; manufacture, wholesale, and retail that have had a number of issues with them over and over and I also know someone who contacted them twice in regards to how to follow the rules for a college kid party only to be set up and then mocked after arrest for not contacting them about how to follow the rules......he did twice

I wondered how the whole "dry" thing came about.....I thought Houston never had any of that stupidity when I was a kid and they reserved that for dallas which has some of the dumbest wet dry areas around I thought all of Houston was wet, but the annexed part explains why the Heights was not usually wet dry goes by county precinct or city borders or county borders or a precinct in a county/city borders and it is either all that precinct, all that county, all that city, or none, but since I am not sure if the Heights is all one precinct then I am not sure how that would work for them since it it might not be its own precinct and is no longer a city of its own if you have memberships it can really be the same as wet (plus or minus package sales) and since there are no rules on membership charges they can be handed out for free or sold for a penny ect and since 100% of any revenue from membership sales goes to the fools at TABC there is no incentive to charge for them to the club owner....the only thing is since the TABC is a pack or worthless idiots they will check memberships even if given for free because idiots need to find a reason to keep their idiot job....but that usually only cuts down on the "pack them in bars" where a waitress will be so busy she will forget to check, get tired of checking, or give some "hipster" a break only to find she has been set up and the bar is getting fined if you have membership now and the heights is not its own precinct then it will probably be extremely difficult to change since in 90% of the cases dealing with anything other than sales to minors TABC can't even really tell you what their laws and rules are because they are all morons and their laws and rules are so poorly written that different areas will interpret the same rules and laws differently I know people that have sat in TABC meetings with wholesalers and the wholesalers (who are part of the reason TABC stays around and stays so stupid) would ask them about specific rules and the answer was (multiple times) "you don't want me to answer that because if I answer it then I will have set the precedent and it is much easier for you to just do what you need to and it will not be looked at and if it is then you can fight it based on not knowing the interpretation and then the rules can be set in the courts when dealing with TABC it is best to go with "if it is not broke and you can work around it then don't ask" because if you ask and they have to set a rule or make a change usually it will come out on the side of lack of common sense and stupidity....because that is what the do best!!!