editor

YMCA for girls is called YWCA. This may be a different organization.

Ossim. Thanks!

Recently I saw an article in an Indian newspaper about cricket in the United States, which identified Prairie View as a neighborhood of Houston.

I'm sorting through some old pictures and came across one of a building that I can't identify. It's in a folder marked Houston 2003. I suspect it's near the Galleria, but I can't be sure. Any guesses?

You're right — downtown is worse today than it was six months ago. But it's better than it was when I first moved downtown in 1999. I think the problem is three-fold: There are fewer "normal" people downtown (see #2). When there's lots of regular people around, the drug addicts and vagrants don't stand out as much. But that's true in pretty much every city I've re-visited in the last five years. Perhaps if there was more for regular people to do downtown, then people would come out of their apartments in the sky and give the neighborhood a more vibrant feel. And there are more and more opportunities to do so, like the occasional Discovery Green night market, and the innumerable events at Market Square Park. But it has to happen all over downtown, and not just in two locations. There's a lot of street drugs available downtown, especially in the area of Rusk and Main. When I first moved downtown again a few years ago, I was approached a couple of times by dealers who look exactly like the stereotype you'd expect from watching TV crime dramas. But lately I've seen a pair of 20-something preppy-looking white kids dealing. They walk the streets in a regular pattern. One has a backpack, and the other approaches druggies one at a time asking if they need a refill, or a top-up, or whatever they called it. They act very corporate. It's weird. Metro seems to have reduced its policing of the trains. There are often fare inspectors standing on the platforms, but they hardly ever get on the trains anymore, I suspect because so many of the fare machines are broken and they can't legitimately write a ticket to someone who got on at a stop with a broken machine. Just yesterday I had a fare inspector stop me from scanning my Q card because the machine was broken, and he told me to just get on like everyone else. And I don't think I've seen an actual Metro police officer on a train in over a year. This past Friday a guy was having a seizure in the first car of the train, and someone pushed the emergency button. When the train driver opened his door and asked what was going on, someone told him not to worry about it, the guy was just overdosing. So the driver shrugged his shoulders and went back to driving the train. The train shouldn't have moved until an ambulance arrived. Maybe the driver called for one to meet him up ahead somewhere, but I stayed on the train for seven more stops, and no help arrived for the guy writhing on the floor just a dozen feet from the train driver.

It's been probably ten years since I was a semi-regular, so the menu has probably changed a lot. Plus, a lot of the inventory is seasonal. But if you like Dunkin', you'll like Tim's. I'm not sure why people who have access to both bicker about which is better; I like them both. The nice thing about Tim Horton's is that it's open 24-hours. I'm surprised how few places of any kind (doughnut shops, taco joints, pharmacies, supermarkets, bakeries, bowling alleys) are open 24 hours in Houston. When I lived in Chicago, I'd sometimes get off of work at 11pm on a Sunday night, walk to the bowling alley, take a bus to a sandwich joint, then take the train to the pharmacy and then grab a newspaper on the way home. If I can't sleep in Houston, pretty much all I can do is drive in circles around Beltway 8.

The Magnolia Hotel Cafe Paris (inside the Magnolia Hotel) During Mikuláš Market at the Czech Center Museum Houston: JW Marriott downtown: 811 Main: Buc-ee's Baytown

I wonder if that's a sign that the frosting is made with butter or lard or something else that's not stable at room temperature like artificial equivalents. I'm a fan of Tim Bits. I'll have to check this out the next time I'm in Katy. But to be honest, I'm more likely to end up at a Tim's in Toronto before Katy.

I saw this posted on the front door of Fifth Vessel last week. Interesting. I'm always surprised that people feel unsafe downtown. Just because someone asks you for money doesn't mean it's not safe. It means that there are poor people in the world. When I see an item in the newspaper about a murder, it's usually in Conroe or San Jacinto County. It's almost never downtown. There was a guy on the train a couple of days ago ranting about "Man, downtown is hard. It's so hard. It'll eat you up. It's just not safe without a gun." I wanted to say to him, "Dude, calm down. It's Houston. It's not Atlanta. It's not Chicago. It's not that bad. Get a grip."

That's sad. I loved getting a chicken pita sandwich there on lunch hour and just watching the world go by. I wonder if they couldn't make enough money, or if their lease wasn't renewed. Ordinarily for places downtown, I assume that the foot traffic wasn't enough, but it's always seemed to have customers. And I imagine it gets mobbed with all of the events that happen at Market Square these days. Maybe it didn't have the surge capacity to capitalize on those rushes. Sad, either way. On a related Market Square note, on Friday there was a half-dozen men working with concrete on the fountain next to Niko Niko's, so maybe that project is nearing completion.

I looked on the maps and street views, and I think it's gone.

I think "wellness focused apartments" is just a rebranding of something that some developers have been doing for years, and it's also part of the amenities race. It seems to happen when developers hire higher-end interior design groups to kit out their buildings, rather than doing it themselves. It's a big change from the "poor person's view of how rich people live" that many apartment buildings employ. One example: Flat screens in the lobby and common areas. When I come home from a hard day at work, I want my building to be welcoming, not cosplaying a sports bar.

Silly branding that makes it seem like they're chasing trends, instead of focusing on their core business. At least they skipped the whole "My" fad, or we'd end up with MyDowntown Houston the way we're still saddles with MyNetworkTV. Or maybe they should go retro and be "eDowntown Houston?" I think it was Apple that started this mess with Apple News+. But now everyone is doing it. Monkey see, monkey do. I even watch WGN-TV+ in the morning. Maybe I'll re-brand Ad-Free HAIF HAIF+.

Interesting that the FT would pick Houston and not Dallas. I've noticed that Dallas seems to be slipping off the radar, internationally. In weather forecasts, both Sky News and NHK have dropped Dallas from their forecasts. One uses Austin now. I think the other uses Houston, but I'll have to pay more attention the next time I watch TV.

I'm not sure they should be so proud that it took them a half a century to renovate a cluster of warehouses. And it isn't even done yet. It's not like they're digging a tunnel through the Himalayas, or putting a bridge across to Cuba.

You are correct. Every time there's a big event, I see tourists clustered around the awful Q-Card machines trying to figure out what to do. The process is absurd. The key is for Metro to let people other than current Metro users know about the tap-to-pay phone integration. On iPhone, you have to go into Settings to activate it. I don't think infrequent transit users know that.

Notice how the keys N E W and S have circles on them. That's how you know it's part of the Big Media™ conspiracy!

I'd avoid using heights from either Skyscraperpage or Emporis. As @Montrose1100 noted, the information is partly or mostly crowdsourced, and therefore inconsistent in its reliability. The same is true for Wikipedia, for the same reasons. Notably, even architecture firm web sites can sometimes be wrong. This is because the web sites are often outsourced to marketing companies, or simply not updated regularly because architecture firms have more important things to do than update web sites. HAIF's sister sites used to use building permits whenever possible for building heights. In cities like Chicago, building height changes of even a couple of feet require city approval, and the information is readily available online. I don't know if Houston has anything similar. FAA records are usually good, but can be hard to find, and only cover the tallest structures. I consider The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat reliable. When new buildings go up, sometimes it actually sends people onto the roof to measure them. You can see a Houston list here. The problem with CTBUH is that to get at all of the information, you have to be a member. For older buildings, historic fire insurance maps can be useful. The Library of Congress has a number of them online. Here's the ones available for Houston. For buildings on the National Registry of Historic Places, the heights are often listed in the nominating documents, which are usually online, especially if the nomination was in recent years. Federal government office building heights can sometimes be found in the documents of the General Services Administration. The feds hold onto buildings for a long time, so they are often renovated, and that's one of the opportunities for documentation to be created. All of this information used to be on towrs.com, but I closed that a few years ago. I would like to revive it some day, and I still own the domain, but I simply don't have the time to do it.

Word on the street is that it's already long closed. They had a 70% off sale, and everything went in one day. I haven't been down there to confirm.

I noticed that Randalls now charges 50¢ to get cash back. Yet another reason 93% of my grocery shopping is done at HEB.

Yeah. It looks like they moved a couple of blocks away to 30 West Monroe. It's fitting, I guess. That's the former Inland Steel building, and something of a shrine for skyscraper architects. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inland_Steel_Building I've had more than one architect tell me they wished they could move there.

Designed by AS+GG. When I lived in Chicago, I was friendly with a lot of the big-name global architecture firms, and spent a bit of time in AS+GG's offices, so I dug up some pictures I took. When you design buildings on the scale of AS+GG, building a regular scale model doesn't give you the detail needed to understand the building the way you need to, so you have to build them extra large. Some of AS+GG's models are seven feet tall. Here's its Burj Kahlifa model, which is what became the Burj Dubai: I don't remember her name, but she's explaining the Jeddah Tower. I believe these are all Jeddah Tower renderings on the wall. I was into architecture models at the time, so I took a lot of pictures of the models around the office: This is a bunch of options AS+GG came up with for one tower. I don't remember which version got built. And because creative people thrive in a creative environment, there's a piano in the lobby for lubricating the brain cells: The lobby also opens onto a private rooftop garden about 25 stories above the street.

I've seen people reporting blocked sidewalks in the city's 311 app. I'm sometimes tempted to do the same since more often than not, when I walk past the night club on McGowen and Travis during the day, it has trucks and sometimes construction equipment parked all over the sidewalk. But considering how quickly the city responds to 911 calls, I imagine by the time a 311 complaint about a blocked sidewalk was addressed, the offender would be long gone.

Yeah, it's a bit confusing. The post card published in Houston Post Cards shows a very different building for the 1866-1894 Saint Joseph's Infirmary. It also states that while two nuns died in the fire, that the blaze only partially burned the campus. It wasn't destroyed, according to the book. It also shows the 1919 Saint Joseph's Infirmary, so I wonder if either your photo, or the one in the book, is actually where it operated from between 1894 and 1919.