TEC

"a stand-alone restaurant at the northwest corner of Gessner and I-10 (don't know name)" - Luther's Bar-B-Q "part of a strip mall at the northwest corner of Gessner and I-10 (the strip mall was completely demolished later, though unrelated to the consruction)" - included Cornbread Billiards & Bar, Cici's Pizza, a Chinese restaurant, and a Casual Male XL Big & Tall "Bennigan's - just south of Chili's (which survived)" - Demolition unrelated to I-10 construction. Bennigans/Steak & Ale went bankrupt and closed most of their locations. The building was demolished to serve as parking for the HCC campus whose parking lot it occupied.

No. You could say that the apartment complexes themselves are the "rough part of town" but other than that, no. Not at all. I've lived in the neighborhood west of Gessner, east of the Betlway, north of Westview, south of Spring Woods High School for 26 years. My dad's an HPD officer for the area, and my mom's a realtor. Between the two of them, I'm kept pretty damn well informed of what's what in the area. Basically, everything is pretty much just nice and quiet. It's not the ghetto either, by any means. Again, certain parts are. The various apartments themselves, and the chunk of neighborhood east of Gessner, north of Long Point, south of Neuens, west of Witte...THOSE are the ghetto. Everything else is basically just fine. It's mostly just Gessner and those storefronts themselves that make the area LOOK bad. There's lots of perfectly fine stuff on Gessner with lots of trashy stuff in between... *shrug* Nonetheless, a lot of it HAS been improving slowly but surely over the years. My neighborhood is rapidly rising in value as more and more doctors and Medical Center personnel move into the area. Examples of the various people in my neighborhood: One of our former neighbors is a geologist for BP. He and his wife loved the neighborhood, and the only reason they moved is because they were about to have a kid and BP was just giving him huge amounts of money not to go work for a competitor, so he felt it was silly NOT to get a house big enough for their new needs. My next-door neighbor's brother-in-law is an Archbishop, one of her sons is one of the Deans at the Art Institute Of Houston, and another one of her sons runs the River Oaks Country Club. The guy down the street from me owns one of the bigger inspection corporations in the state My OTHER next-door neighbors are a doctor and a nurse. Not exactly the ghetto. Sorry if I'm long-winded (that's just how I am). I've been reading the various threads about the development of the Memorial City District, and I just kept reading all these really stupid comments about stuff built on the wrong side of I-10 and having to put up with people from the north side of the freeway... Made me want to punch someone in the throat and give them a legitimate complaint... Finally had to say something since this is an actual current thread. I have all manner of friends who went to Memorial High School and live in that area. If I didn't already know people from there, those types of stupid comments would be enough to lower my baseline opinion of "Memorial area" denizens in general.