Croberts

The idea of MacAdam roads were that they were paved with stones in layers of different sizes, and at the top, steel shod wagon wheels would pulverise the stones, and the dust would wash into the cracks, and form a binder. The advent of pneumatic rubber tires with tread destroyed these roads because the tread sucked the binder out and the roads would unravel. This lead to oil roads, asphalt roads and concrete roads, and occured after rubber tires became common, ie 1920s.

Brick for streets was around a long time. Philadelphia streets had slate tracks for wagon wheels, granite curbstones and granite bricks for pavers. Sometimes brick was used, it was plentiful because it came in as ballast but was mainly used in houses. In the post civil war boom (the mcmansions of the industrialists who manufactured for the war, around rittenhouse square) georgia pine was cut into bricks and treated and used as pavers because wooden bricks made less noise that clay or granite bricks.

When and why houston started paving with bricks I do not know. I know of no brick streets in austin, but corsicana has a lot of them still. Seems like my mother used to take me past one in the heights in the 1960s.

Three Brothers Bakery is on S. Braeswood a block or two up from Stella Link, been there over 40 years.

THats the one! Thanks, I would have never remembered it.

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We regularly rode for miles on the flat concrete bottom of Brays Bayou, occasionally taking side "hikes" into the storm sewers that fed the bayou. There was one big pipe running up the middle of Stella Link in which you could walk (standing) all the way to Bellaire Blvd.

I remember riding from rice to Herman park, stoping somewhere near stella link for bagels at a bakery I dont remember the name, and again near ost for antoines poor boys, then spending the day in the park and riding back. I never new that these woods had a name. I must have done this 50 times between about 1968 and 1972.

I was wrong. I just asked my dad and he said that he didn't take pictures. I guess that's why I never saw them.

He said that the plane crashed just on the other side of Braes Bayou. He and the neighbor were approaching from the south and as they reached the bayou to cross over, the plane exploded. It's a good thing they hadn't crossed it yet. It would have been somewhere between Chimney Rock and Hillcroft.

I found info about Gary Herod on wikipedia, but it says that the plane crashed in the area that now contains Meyerland Plaza. Of course that is wrong. Meyerland was built in 1957 and the crash was nowhere near there.

Yes, I agree, I saw pieces of the plane the day after, and they were perhaps a dozen yards north of the bayou. We got their by driving up hillcroft, and my memory may be wrong but it seemed like the pieces were just west of hillcroft. I think I was attending St Thomas Episcopal school in Meyerland, and I remember a kid talking about hearing the crash.

The arrpwhead park monorail was totally different from the Fondren road monorail (see my description in the previous posting). To get to the car I had to walk on the rail itself, wrapping my arms around the girder that the car road on-so the car was above and sitting on the rail, rather than under the rail, as in the pictures of the arrowhead park monorail. So there were two different prototype monorails and three altogether, county the hobby airport monorail.

At least two others have mentioned this somewhere, but there have been no photos so far. I remember that it stridled the rail, which appeard to be a single girder on a concrete wall, it had rubber tires like a car on either side of the rail, the operator had a lever with a grip that presumably was the brake, it had thick plexiglass windows-would have been amazing to ride in, especially in a storm. The Fondren road section started on the ground and rose up 15-25 feet (im guessing) and there was a couple of hundred yards of elevated track, i would guess. I last visited it when in the 5th grade, around 1965.

I was in kindergarten or the first grade at St. Thomas Episcopal School in Meyerland. We were told to walk straight home, to never talk back to teachers, and to obey their orders immediately. We were told by teachers and parents that the children that were killed would have been saved if they had listened to their teacher and gone back into the classroom. These lessons were repeated for several years, and whenever I heard sirens during school I suspected it was a school bombing.

The poster from the "Rock Jubilee" at the Coliseum on Oct. 5 (1969) brought back memories. My wife and I attended that show (Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Byrds....), it was shortly after Woodstock.

I was there too. They used the sound system from Woodstock, and it was late arriving so the concert was delayed many hours. Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters were there and circulated amoung the audience keeping us entertained. That was the first time I saw Wavy Gravy.

I did not see the poster from the second similar concert, which featured quicksilver, john mayall, a third band I dont remember and the greatfull dead. At that concert there was a minor riot when the dead broke into love light, and the crowd rushed the stage. The police were beating heads, and the drummer from the dead got involved. They cleared the auditorium but before the dead left stage they said "we will be back when we have a place of our own," hence the name of the later club "Of our Own"

Wow, I havent seen these posters in decades! This is the first reference to the Family Hand "earth foods" restaurant I have seen on HAIF. I wonder what ever happened to Ricky Sharp and Kerry Awn, two of the houston (and westbury?) artists that did some of these posters?

The second bayou that Stu mentioned and I discussed in a previous email is visible on Google earth. The portion south of main looks similar to the way it looks in the 1960 photo. The portion north of main is buried or doesnt exist between main and westbury high water tower site. However, north of Chimney Rock on burdine, alongside the wesbury square site, it exists as a drainage ditch again. It appears to be buried, but exists as a right of way covered in grass up to willowbend blvd.

Makes me wonder who built this and when- Its not there in 21, but is there in 60, and runs from at least willow bend to somewhere south of West Orem Drive. Too long for one landowner to have built it, I think, I wonder if it was not some part of flood control projects from the 1940s, that helped drain the westbury area for development??

In regards to the elephant bones, I have searched for them for years, but they dont seem to be on display in texas. Perhaps there was not enough to display, the texas memorial museum has a larger collection in warehouses than they have on display. That is where I heard they went.

A. you cannot actually see willow waterhole, but rather that place where willow bayou bends north northeast, west of where chimney rock is now. in the pic it appers to bend to the left. That bend is between where Landsdown and Chimney Rock are now. Does this make sense? Is this the same bend?

It looks to me like the bend is larger, possibly going from landsdown to gasmer, as nmk5 suggests. When I get the 1921 topo scanned and put on a server, we can compare the prechannelized map of willow waterhole with the one on the 47 image. Apparently the trees were removed to increase flow at the time of channelization, which we now know from this 47 photo to have occured after the photo was taken. The tree coverage is evident on the 1921 topo, and it continues west to the approximate place where the waterhole dissapears on the google image.

(Actually, now that I think about it, there are two bayous there, starting at about Westbury High. What's up with that? One leg goes up by Johnston alongside Chimney Rock, while the other, bigger one cuts through the neighborhood farther to the East. Was the alongside Chimney Rock one man made? It appears in the 1960 map to go from the water tower on..?)gotta look at older maps..

The second bayou appears to be a drainage ditch. If you look on the 60 photo you will see that it begins on chimney rock near the high school waster tower and runs north. I think the small road you identified near the water tower running towards main is actually the same drainage ditch. If you look on the west side of this feature there is a light, whitish line paralelling the bed of the ditch- this is likely nearly bare soil representing the side of the ditch or the fill excavated from the ditch. On the west side of the ditch near johnson jr high, a wooly mamoth or masterdon skeleton or fossil was found in the early 1960.

When I lived in Westbury South in the early 60's, there was a nursery on Gasmer, just west of Post Oak, and a bar-b-que place at the southeast corner of Post Oak and Benning. Are those the ones you refer to?

Yes, the nursery was huge, and the bar-b-que place was great, it had wonderful fries and chopped beef sandwiches. I believe that there was also a bowling alley and a burger king on that stretch of post oak, and the burger king must be one of the originals. I think the firm (based in miami) started in 65 and that is about the time that we started eating whoppers.

I remember after the oil embargo in the 1970s, when regular went from 29 cents a gallon to $2.50 a gallon, everyone wanted to move "inside the loop". I expect that will happen again, only this time, gas prices are unlikely go down that much. My best childhood memories are from living on redstart, and the houses, though small, were in many ways, jewels. I hope that this time, willowbend will seem to Houstonians to be close to town, and you will experience a boom. If they build the wetland marshes off gasner (sic) for willow water hole, you will have a lot of preserved open space nearby. Cant say anything about Westbury high though.

My 1921 topo shows that there are no roads between brays bayou and s. main, nor are there any west of the n-s rr track to the east of you. Neither willow waterhole nor brays have been channelized yet. There is only 1 house shown west of willow water hole and south of Brays.

In 1956 I moved to redstart in Willow brook??. I remember that the houses were small, and not really ranch style, though what they were escapes me. They had some interesting design elements. Mine had a patio and a partially flat roof with gravel on it that came off on the patio when it rained. The house was small, and in 1959 we moved to Arboles in westbury.

Most of the fencing was redwood lattice, which turned out to be a bad idea. It did not weather well, and looked ratty after a couple of years.

Post Oak must have been the biggest n-s road in sw houston at the time of construction of 610. I remember the Zindler mansion was torn down to build the freeway (Marvin Zindlers family owned a chain of clothing stores, Zindlers).

Post oak south of braes bayou was rural like, and in westbury there was a large nursery and a dynamite bar-b-que place. When they built 610 it initially did not enterface well with post oak, but in the late 60s or 70s they built the current post oak ramp.

The sound wall you mentioned I do not remember but I was last there in 1979.

In fact, that is the only photo I have ever seen of Willow Waterhole prior to development. Looks like a gallery forest (of willows?) on either bank, with open prairie (or ricefields) otherwise.

Maxconcrete, you seem to have an experts handle on historical media coverage of houston!

Even though it's only been gone a short time, I miss the original Antone's on Taft. The chain Antone's pale in comparison to the original locations. I don't even know how many 'original' stores exist.

There was one on OST and main, the Taft store, and another one around 390 and voss or bingle, somewhere. The OST and Taft stores were around for a long time, one of them since the 1940s. Antones blues club in Austin was another family venture, and the original restaurant is I believe the oldest one in the French Quarter, around since the 1840s. I make the poorboys myself, have for years, but I really miss the original stores.

I posted in another thread that I have just purchased an aerial photo of S. Post Oak/Willowbend/Westbury at a place called Positive Image on Stella Link. I had a great learning experience looking through their photos and choosing one to buy. They aren't cheap ($60 for 11x14), but I'm going to frame the pic I bought as art, so it's not really that expensive either...

I have some historical aerial photographs I would like to post, but I have had no success in including imagery in my posting. Can anyone tell me how to get it in here, and what the size limit is?

Please forgive the length of this post..

You guys are bringing back incredible memories. I found this forum searching "Westbury Square", hoping for a nostalgic look at the square. We moved in August 1957 onto Arboles Dr., fourth house from Atwell, five minutes walk from the square. Anderson had an annual Halloween Carnival that is so vivid in my memory. Every class prepared for it, and we all looked forward to it. When Halloween came around, the whole place would pack out with dressed up kids and parents, and we'd go from classroom to classroom, one with a cakewalk, the next with a 'spookhouse', the next with a make-up table, etc..what

With all due respect, the person above who suggested that a TARGET would help does not realize the sense of class and vitality that the square engendered in its day. Maybe you just had to be there. No soulless Target could ever hope to do it. It can never be like it was. Not even close. Compared to a Target it was like magic.

Hello Eric, the funny thing is that when I posted my reply a week or so ago, you were one of the people that I thought of. I am Charles Roberts, and we were in the same class in the 4rth, 5th and I think 6th grade. I lived on the other arboles, 5807. We graduated from Westbury high the same year, and the last time I saw you (I dont know if you saw me) You were playing in a club on richmond near the montrose area a few weeks or months after graduation. I was there with a group from Sharpstown high, but at the table next to me was Trudy Hilton, who was also in our elemetary classes.

I also remember the halloween carnivals fondly, and think about them when I do things with my children.

You are right about the ambiance of Westbury Square over big box retail. I remember the square as one of my most wholesome activities-now as an adult I can see that hanging in the square as a teen beat out any other activities, which were mainly cruising and looking for places we could engage in deviant antisocial behaviors. Today, In spite of the instore starbucks, pizza huts and mcdonalds, no one meets friends for an evening of fun relaxation and conversation at big box retail, or in their parking lots. I remember the exciting smells of the different one of a kind shops, the diversity of cultures represented by the retail sector. Even today in the New Urbanists communities, which are often like the square in terms of establishments, it is still all a mixture of corporate retail establishments. Take the list of merchants and it could be any shopping mall anywhere- and the smells that eminated from the chemist shop, the eletric paisley, the candle shop- it was probably a combination that we will never see again.

Charles Roberts

Croberts@fau.edu

Marini's Empanada House early-mid 70's - on Westheimer near 'the curve' just before the Tower Theater - my introduction to empanadas, they had meat, vegetable, and dessert versions that were wonderful (seems like they had a location way out Westheimer much later on)

Udder Delight early-mid 70's - ice cream place next to Marini's, my lil sis knew the guys. Still remember the day we got the call to come try out their new Avocado ice cream (it sucked large, they had to put too much lime juice in to keep it from turning brown)

La Bodega Bar / Harvst Moon Cafe early-mid 70's - @ Fairview & ??? - La Bodega was downstairs, wine bar, had stunning wood walls done by Yost & Company. Harvest Moon was upstairs, great veggie place

Marinis was my introduction to empamadas too. Early 70s. Been dissapointed ever since with others.

La Bodega for breakfast and Harvest Moon for dinner. I used to work at Hobbit Hole on Shepard, and some of the waitresses also worked at Harvest Moon.

Don't be sorry for posting, we like that!

I didn't Know Houston had Steak N Shake,

And I thought I remembered White Castle.

There was a steak n shake on Kirby between alabama and richmond, I think. in the mid 1970s. I used to eat there regularly.

I remember the monorail well, it was very close to where OST intersects with S. Main....

The other end of the monorail, which never connected to the arrowhead park end, was on main, just west of fondred. I used to walk up the rail and play in the ruins of the car in about 1965. It was an interesting experience-smashed plexiglass windows and weeds growing in the ruins of something too futuristic for houston at the time

We lived just a few blocks from Westbury Square when it was built on Atwell Street. Used to ride our bikes up there and watch the construction.

Rumpleheimer's was the best. That's where I got turned on to cinnamon toothpicks. Every spare penny we had went to buying them.

There were very few stores int he begining. There was a restaurant (Lantern something?), a photography place, a party store, maybe a fabric store. . I'll have to take some Gingko Biloba to remember the rest.

To the person who lived on Arboles....my sister and her husband lived on that street at about the same time you did.

Becky

We were one of the first houses completed, though not the first. I went to Anderson, Johnson Jr. High and Fondren then finally westbury high. I used to ride to the square, but no earlier than 65- we would do dirt bike trails in the excavated trenches behind the square.

Hey! I jog at Mason Park every afternoon!

Manatees from Florida occasionally venture as far as Houston or Connecticut- about the same time that one was seen in Texas, another was seen in Connecticut, and moved back to Florida. It was tagged, and it has made the trip twice up north, and gets shipped back.

I don't know where Mason park is, but in the early 1970s, I was on Braes Bayou west of Fondren at night, and we observed what we thought were small turtles on the concrete walking in circles- approximately 10 of them, walking in a big circle. We watched for perhaps an hour from the top while we talked, and then went down for a closer look- they were wood roaches, and they were holding their wings up perpendicular to their bodies and flapping them as they walked in a circle of perhaps a meter in diameter. Never seen such behavior before or since.

I add my wild speculation -- alligator gar. Makes a catfish look like a beauty queen. . .

The san francisco aquarium used to make a joke about everything being bigger in Texas, and claimed that the largest freshwater fish in the world were alligator gar from San Jacinto bay. In the 1960s there was a catfish restaraunt on the eastern end of lake steinhagen that had a mounted alligator gar that was between 8 and 10 feet long.

A friend of mine mentioned a kiddie place called Wee Wild West. I went there as a kid (60's) but have no idea where it was. Anybody remember that one?

It was in the lamar terrace area, south of westhiemer and west of post oak or even chimney rock I think. I went there in the 1950s, and lived in Lamar Terrace till 1958.

I lived on Arboles street in Wesbury from 1958 till 1977 (At least my family did). I rememer watching them pave Hillcroft, hearing cows at night across Hillcroft, and watching the lights from the train from Arboles street, when there were few houses between that street and Main. I used to play on the ruins of the monorail that was near the corner of Fondren and Main. I remember "wolf corner" and the last of the red wolves, and the blue light cemetary (neither one are in westbury).

Westbury Square was great in the 1960s. I remember buying posters from concerts at the Fillmore in San Francisco at Cargo Houstons, and Electric Paisley was my favorite shop. I was a blacklight artist for a number of years. I made sand candles with wax from the candle shop and scents from the "scent shop"- whose name I forget.

I recently added a discussion in wikopedia on westbury square. It is interesting to note that the New Urbanists are now espousing westbury square type designs even in houston, and claiming to be the first to advocate pedestrian friendly cities inspired by Italy, and townhouses. The square was a good 40 years before its time.

I remember the parking lot that was in a big hole, and I heard as a child that there was going to be a lake on the east side of the square. Does anyone know anything about this?