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Croberts

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About Croberts

  • Birthday 04/03/1953

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    croberts@fau.edu

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  • Location/ZIP Code
    Palm Beach County, Florida
  • Interests
    Born in Heights Hospital, delivered by Dr. Mylie Durham (Durham Drive) named for his son, Dr. Charles Durham Grew up in Lamar Terrace, Willowbend and Westbury. Graduated in 1971. Moved to the Montrose area after high school, and lived intermittantly in Houston and Austin till 1979. Worked at Hobbit Hole and Rainbow Lodge in the mid and late 1970s.
    In 1979, I got a scholarship to Vassar College, where I earned a BA in Geography-Anthropology, I then went to Penn State and got an MA and a PhD in Geography. In 1990, I took a position at Florida Atlantic University, from which I retired in 2017.

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  1. Hi,

    You delivered papers to this apartment? Yes, there were a lot of wild and crazy young people who lived there. Not me though. 

    A couple of my friends from high school  got married and moved there and told me about it.  I live there with my Girlfriend in the summer of 1973.  Big swimming pool. Cost 99 dollars to move in. Utilities included.  

    I lived near the office and you walked upstairs and on the right was my one bed room apartment. Yes, the sliding glass door was my front door.   I used a broom stick to stop someone lifting off the rails and walk in uninvited. Later, I moved into a two bedroom apartment and shared the rent with another couple. My bedroom had no window. Great for sleeping late. 

    I did not have a car and did not need one. Beautiful movie theater nearby. I watch a James Bond movie there. Live and let die. No one can forget that movie and that theater!

    Walking to the galleria was easy and what an incredible place. Ice skating was a big hit with the locals. What a summer to remember. 

    I see you are really into Geography.  I went to La Tech. Professional Aviation Department. My minor was Geography. 

     

     

    royalwindsorsm.jpeg

  2. I worked plays at the Houston Music Theater (theater in the round, Sharpstown) in the early 1970s, doing sets and lights. I believe it was an organization set up by Chris Wilson, but I do not remember the name of the theater,company We did childrens plays and there were also concerts, I remember a Moody Blues concert.
  3. Second empire was popularized in the US by the building of the Philadelphia city hall, on the citys central square. It became the model for the central square courthouse across the nation. We have several in Texas, such as Lampasas.They were called in the midwest General Grant courthouses, because they were popular in the building boom of the 1870s, and the Texas ones come in about the time the carpetbagger railroads arrive after the civilwar. Consequently, it was not a popular style, and I agree that Houston would have had very few, if any. perhaps some in San Antonio or Dallas or even Fort Worth. The style mainly shows up in courthouses, and most of them are mediocre examples of the style.
  4. In fact, one of the first cases tried under the fair housing act was on Arboles street in about 1969-1971. A realty company told a neighborhood group that if they did not pool their money and buy a house, a black family would close on it the next day. They purchased it and were subsequently sued for discriminatory housing practices.
  5. Here is the 1964 photo-with an enlargement of the end with the car. This was just north of Main and just west of Fondren. Nothing survived by the 1970s and there is no sign of it on google earth.You can see the shadow of the elevated trackway, the rail and posts that hold it up. The car straddles a steel beam on a concrete wall, with tire trackways on either side. I remember holding the beam and walking up the trackway till we were at the full height of the trackway.I remember driving down main and looking out the window at the trackway. It was very close to Main, sitting on a prairie.
  6. I used to have an album on here with these in it, but it seems gone now. Here is is from the 1964 image, which I posted on Facebook. The B+W image shows the whole thing, the yellow and brown is a zoomin of the monoral car. Note that this never was associated with the arrowhead park one, which hung under the rail ( I once thought the two were connected.) It straddled the rail, like the one at Disney world.
  7. I just saw the post about red elementary school...this must be the one I remember, 6 blocks away.
  8. I lived on Redstart street, east of Post Oak, 4700 block, I believe. I used to climb up on our swingset in the backyard to watch what we called the "friday noon whistle" which was a yellow-orange, rotating siren. I thought it was at a fire station, but I do not see the location today on google earth. I could see it rotating. This would have been 57-59.
  9. Today, while driving through Palm Beach Gardens in Palm Beach County, florida, I encounted a gingerbread house. Built in the early sixties to early seventies, this one had the same facade: faux board and batten siding on the upper portion of a first floor room with a wooden gable (rest of the house was brick). It had the faux diamond shaped windows. Makes me think an article in a trade magazine about making a ranch style distinctively different must have inspired both. I only saw one, but it was in the same kind of development where a builder would buy a lot on a street, and each house could have a different builder. I will look for more.
  10. An old way of copy writing street maps was to add short streets that do not exist. Usually these are dead ends, short extensions of existing streets, or short streets connecting two other streets. Sometimes they would be given fake names, sometimes not due to the short length.
  11. An old way of copy writing street maps was to add short streets that do not exist. Usually these are dead ends, short extensions of existing streets, or short streets connecting two other streets. Sometimes they would be given fake names, sometimes not due to the short length.
  12. So there were at least two monorails on S. Main. The Fondren road monorail, just west of Fondren and north of Main. The car road on top of the rail. This is clear on the 1964 aerial photograph. Then there was the Arrowhead Park monorail, which hung down from the rail. The two could never have connected, I was wrong about that. they were totally different systems, one part of "Space City" that never got implemented.
  13. So there may have been two futurist graphics designers that were influenced by what I call the future in ruins. And probably more. We climbed up the trackway from the ground, on the 1964 aerial photo discussed above, you can see the car parked at the east end at ground level. Then the trackway rises,you can see its shadow cast by the morning sun. It looks today and felt then like it was more than 20 feet high. We rode our bikes there, and I remember riding through the grass.It was in 64 or 65, and I was 11 or 12. And this was after years of passing the long dead end elevated trackway on the way to richmond, always asking my parent about it. I heard the story that some investor went broke trying to convince the city that this was a good idea. What I have learned since about monorails is that the can only carry small numbers of people relative to surface trackways, and yet any transit way will stimulate land use intensification, so they are not cost effective.
  14. The monorail that was just west of Fondren and just south of main had rubber tires, and rode on a central rail. The car sat on top of the rail, with wheels on either side. I remember climbing the long track, hanging precariously onto the I-Beam that was the central rail, There was a car parked at the far elevated end of the trackway, you can see it in that historical photo. The other Houston monorails hung down from the track, this one road on top.
  15. What I remember about them is they were ranchers with board and batten looking siding, and ornamental fake shutters that had jigsawed shapes like hearts in them. In westbury at the time, construction companies would by several lots, and apparently one builder made about half a block of these houses. Pull off the trim and they are the same as the other houses on the street. Everyone called them Gingerbread houses though, because of the extra work on the facade trim.
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