Jump to content

rechlin

Full Member
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    850

  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    7

 Content Type 

Everything posted by rechlin

  1. rechlin
    The front was boarded up a couple months ago and I haven't noticed any construction workers on site since. Inside is gutted but with temporary construction lights lit up all the time. The roof looks a lot cleaner with the chiller mechanisms gone. Guessing they finished demolition and are waiting to start construction?
  2. rechlin
    I've noticed in recent months, this forum has been using a "lazy load" feature where it delays loading the images. This is presumably to reduce bandwidth, though with the images hosted off-site on imgur that doesn't really matter. However, I have found that it's sometimes "super lazy" and doesn't load the images for a while, so what I usually do is open the page and go do something else while waiting for it to finish loading, which can sometimes take several minutes. You might have to scroll down to that exact post with the image placeholders visible while you wait, to ensure it loads them.
  3. rechlin
    This is now dead, at least for the immediate future. The following letter was sent to those who put down deposits:
  4. rechlin
    Considering they are still planning to spend all the money to build a railroad bridge over the North Canal, it seems the proposal of consolidating the rail lines is dead. I don't understand why it would see much opposition, because it would be almost universally better to reroute it, so maybe it was a funding issue? Or maybe, because it would involve realigning the "Be Someone" bridge, the delay of the IH-45 rebuild made it no longer feasible to do this all at once?
  5. rechlin
    That article says it's one of only 2 golf courses in the city ("It's one of only two courses in the city, for example."). How do they come up with that? Even excluding country clubs, there are three city-run courses inside the loop alone (Memorial Park, Hermann Park, and Gus Wortham).
  6. rechlin
    Judy Cook is a woman so the term should be alumna.
  7. rechlin
    Something that came up in the news a couple weeks ago was that imgur is planning to be "removing old, unused, and inactive content that is not tied to a user account" on May 15. What exactly this means hasn't been clarified, but the assumption is that any images that were anonymously uploaded to the site will be deleted. A lot of us on HAIF have been using imgur for image hosting due to the limitations of HAIF's image hosting. I know some are uploading them with an account, but many (myself included) have not. This presumably means that the 500+ images I have put on my posts here over the last 10 years will be deleted. I have gone through and backed up all my images from my posts, so if they do get deleted, hopefully we can get access to edit our posts again so I can fix the broken images. I encourage anyone here who is using imgur for image hosting to verify that they uploaded their images to their account, and if not, look into backing up the images they posted so they can be reuploaded if they are lost. And going forward, make sure you are signed into imgur when uploading images so they will be tied to your account and not deleted. Some of the images will be backed up on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, but that tends to have large gaps where it misses posts and can't be relied upon. Source: https://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/articles/14415587638029 Also, a news article: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/04/hosting-site-imgur-will-remove-explicit-and-anonymous-content-next-month/
  8. rechlin
    After several more times going by Main Street Square and still not seeing any of the fountains working, I was beginning to think I was going crazy, but I went by again today and finally they were working. Also, although the screen wasn't running, I saw evidence (water on the ground in front of it) that it had been running recently, so I guess that indeed is operational even if I still haven't been able to see it. So clearly I've just had really bad luck with these fountains!
  9. rechlin
    To add to the list of non-functioning fountains, I have to mention The Water Screen, at Main Street Square, which hasn't worked in years (pictured below; photo taken today). Also, although the fountains behind it have water, the jets haven't operated in a while -- maybe they are still off from winter, because they never seem to have been operated year-round, but it's been some time since I last saw them spray too:
  10. rechlin
    Elevated above the many wide arterial roads throughout the metro area. People in Houston are very opposed to elevated transit. Metro has even postponed a decision on this line as a result of opposition to the overpass over the railroad tracks (see a few posts back). So I suspect that's a non-starter. But I agree, it's way cheaper than a subway and would work well for speeding up mass transit while minimizing ROW acquisition.
  11. rechlin
    This sounds like ChatGPT being confidently wrong, again. While it's true that BRT is less expensive to build than LRT, LRT is usually cheaper to operate. And there's no reason LRT would operate in mixed traffic any more than BRT, so BRT should not be inherently faster. Both can operate in mixed traffic but it's a terrible idea (see the Green/Purple line downtown and the turn lanes along the Red line in the TMC). It's also totally wrong on environmental impact. LRT is normally electric powered, not diesel powered. And our BRT line is powered by diesel (I believe), not electricity. The advantage of BRT is it is cheaper to implement than LRT, while providing some of the benefits of LRT. LRT still has a smoother ride (due to using rails), handles more riders (at least in our implementation), is better for the environment (because we aren't using electric power for our BRT buses), and has lower operating costs, though. But BRT has the advantage of being able to divert to route around incidents, which LRT cannot do (I'm surprised the bot didn't mention that).
  12. rechlin
    These photos are great; thank you for the update. However, it seems your earlier photos (like from earlier this month) are no longer coming through. Could you please check what's going on there? They say "The image you are requesting does not exist or is no longer available. imgur.com". This is also a problem on other threads. Thanks!
  13. rechlin
    You can't buy a house in that area for that so that's not a valid comparison.
  14. rechlin
    Looks like they rescued the F150 (with a nicely crushed roof) that had been buried under the rubble, and put a blue tarp on the damaged shed. That must have been a big "oops".
  15. rechlin
    The new coffee shop now has a nice new mural next door on the Sam Houston Hotel:
  16. rechlin
    It would be a surprising place for residential. The area is commercial but with a bit of an industrial feel. The building next door is brand new but has an enormous setback for parking, which just continues the unfriendly feel. Once RO goes up this could be better, though, and maybe that's what the developer is thinking. However, what I'm not seeing is how parking would work. It could be plausible that the three approximately-windowless floors are for parking (with an entrance in the back?), but the floor-to-floor spacing seems the same as the upper floors, when I would expect lower ceilings for a garage. A ground floor entirely dedicated to retail doesn't make much sense either (especially the depicted grocery store). At least it has what looks like 4 parking spots at street level to serve that retail. The aforementioned office building next door with the giant parking lot could maybe share spots with this if operating hours don't overlap, but stilI don't see how this could meet any parking minimums for such a large building. If not for the large balconies on two of the upper floors, plus what looks like an expansive rooftop patio, I'd think it was going to be self-storage. In the old days I would have guessed it would be for telephone switching equipment, but the giant AT&T building is already vacant from that. Maybe a data center on floors 2-4 and offices on 5-6? Floor 7 with a patio and swimming pool as an amenity? Insert more random implausible guesses here... Nothing about this building makes much sense to me. I always applaud increased density, but this is just weird.
  17. rechlin
    From the rendering I was baffled as to what it was going to be. Almost no windows, but balconies? For years this location has been a rather sketchy-seeming nightclub with various names. Looking at the hours now it seems like an after-hours place. I wonder if this is now going to be a 7-story tall nightclub. That would certainly be unusual.
  18. rechlin
    Agreed, but unfortunately the bus route serving Memorial Park is so infrequent (every half hour) that it's not worth it for many to bother.
  19. rechlin
    This is now gone. Photo thanks to u/mborbey on reddit:
  20. rechlin
    Yet despite me repeatedly trying to mark its Google Maps listing as "Permanently Closed" for the last 6 months and even trying to add the Cajun place (with photos), Google still shows only S&T and not the Cajun place. Sometimes makes me wonder if there's even anyone at Google looking at these requests...
  21. rechlin
    Stopped by here today for lunch and it's looking very close, finally:
  22. rechlin
    I think there might be something with the Montrose bridge affected, but the other bridges should not be affected.
  23. rechlin
    Looks like the proposed reroute of the UPRR line is dead, if they are going to be building a new bridge for it. That's unfortunate.
  24. rechlin
    Unfortunately, at least in my part of town, the December 2022 hard freeze was just as cold as the February 2021 hard freeze (16.7 degrees F). All my vines were killed above ground in 2021, and what had grown back (not even 10% in some places -- it takes many years to fully cover a building) was killed again last month. I can understand their frustration, if this kind of extreme weather is the new normal meaning vines are no longer practical in our climate, but I'll admit the artificial turf looks terrible.
  25. rechlin
    Somehow I missed this before, but METRO ordered 14 new rail cars for the Red Line, which went into service this past week. These are Siemens S700, very similar to the second generation S70 cars that they have been running for the last 10 years, but with the middle section using seats parallel to the sides of the train rather than in rows, making for a wider center aisle. More information from the press release here: https://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/TXMETRO/bulletins/3319e04 I only found out because I rode one of them tonight for the first time, and was surprised by the different appearance inside. These are the "400" series, and I was in car 408:
×
×
  • Create New...