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IronTiger

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Everything posted by IronTiger

  1. At their peak, Kettle was massive, they had dozens of stores in the Houston area and hundreds more stretching out from Arizona to Tennessee. The late 2000s and early 2010s really did a number on the two dozen they had left, and the last one in Houston closed in 2011 (at the northeast corner of JFK and Beltway 8, now known as Hot Biscuit). The Laredo and Tuscon, AZ stores are all semi-independent franchisees that disconnected, but the Bryan and College Station ones had common ownership. Bryan's Kettle was not Kettle originally (it was a Denny's until the 1980s), and unfortunately, it's not open 24 hours anymore (COVID ended that). The menu between the Bryan and College Station locations was the same but I've heard the College Station one had better pancakes.
  2. >last visited January 8 2018

    It still hurts

     

  3. Surprising the Roy Rogers is still intact, and it's actually been restored from that fabric-covered roof Zone d'Erotica used to have. Me personally? I'm torn. Positives: a RESTAURANT again, restores signage, probably looks cool at night Negatives: pink is a disgrace to the stone columns, building once again flaunts the fact that there's no strict zoning or rules on building appearance
  4. Enh, I think that the "slip lanes are bad" rhetoric comes from the same "transit blogs" that hate private automobiles and work everything around that theory, even skewing data they don't like to promote their opinions. One thing to note about "pedestrian safety" in their world is that bicycles are never seen as a threat to pedestrians, despite the fact that a fast-moving road bicycle with considerable mass could injure someone, yet the only people who advocate for bicycle speed limits are governments with a seeming contempt for actual citizens, like Toronto. Besides, corner-cut slip lanes eliminate the idea that a car could not see a pedestrian waiting at the corner and cut them off in a right turn.
  5. I didn't draw in pedestrian crosswalks in my little mockup, the idea was to "improve the intersection without completely throwing it out". If such an idea was under consideration, it would have some sort of additional crossings for the corner cut there.
  6. Part of the problem with the existing intersection is I see is the insistence that eastbound Navigation has to have two lanes going continuous to the southbound part (requiring an additional light), which the roundabout would get rid of anyway. So if that were the case, I present to you a cost-effective alternative, for your consideration. http://www.carbon-izer.com/files/haif/jnavi-1.png
  7. Simplifying the roundabout to one lane may help drivers but I'm not sure if it helps traffic. Two lane roundabouts DO exist in Houston (ex. Washington and Westcott, which is a good example since it also includes of a single road going from north/south to west/east) but every time I see one of the "two lanes narrowed into one" design, it tends to affirm my belief that traffic circles are just form-over-function novelties.
  8. Problem with that if you block the druggies/alcoholics/the ones most likely to trash the place and start fires, those are the ones that stay on the street, furthermore it would just be a way to spend the night, while the day is spent panhandling (unless they are denied doing so, in which case it becomes a de facto jail). That's not to say that the homeless should get nothing, but building housing for the homeless is, at best, more complicated than it seems, and at worse, will just make the problem worse at the taxpayers' dime.
  9. In the days since creating this topic, I have an entire blog about the city and everything in it, and more than half of that is restaurants (pretty much everything on this page has been covered). The way you're describing the place is either (what is now) Grill at the Pavilion, which still exists (the chairs face toward the hallway) but I don't think the Pavilion was like that in the 1970s (I think it was rebuilt wasn't rebuilt as actual office space until the 1980s). It sounds more like the MSC, which had cafeterias and other small restaurants inside of it.
  10. Different companies (at the time) and different reasons. Safeway (original Houston) division failed because due to Safeway assuming lots of debt due to getting bought by KKR to "save" them from corporate raiders, and that meant a lot of divisions had to go, including the entire Southern California division (where Safeway had done quite well) to Vons. The "new" AppleTree chain in Houston failed because it had lots of debt and old stores, whereas Randalls and even Fiesta were zooming ahead with larger and nicer stores and getting attacked by newcomers Food Lion and HEB Pantry at the low-end. Albertsons (original) division failed because Randalls and Kroger already had lots of stores, and it would've taken a big investment just to get a fraction of the market share. (That and Albertsons had a lot of bad location planning). The company had also assumed a lot of debt through buying American Stores in 1999 and decided that trying to get Houston wasn't worth the effort. Randalls had been run into the ground by Safeway's leadership from the 1990s and a failure to effectively compete (including on price, selection, larger stores, etc.) and even after Albertsons' purchase of Randalls, the division was in bad shape (and again, struggling with debt), so it's dying on the vine.
  11. Houston Chronicle. They've got the whole thing digitized these days, so searching for many things is much easier.
  12. According to the paper, it opened in November 1967 as "Orlando's Lucky 7" (Lucky 7 being a grocer franchisee at the time, much like Minimax).
  13. Found 'em from newspaper microfilm. Luckily, the Houston Chronicle (but not the Post, sadly) has been fully digitized (ads and all) on the Houston Library website, all you need is a Houston library card.
  14. It's been there longer than that...records indicate it's been there since at least 1990.
  15. If I recall, the "1930" date used by HCAD isn't necessarily accurate because of lost/missing records in those days.
  16. Discovery Channel Stores were neat, I remember visiting one in New Jersey when the chain was winding down business. My father bought a clock that projected the time on the ceiling (still in use in his bedroom) while I got a novelty inflatable tongue (which sadly didn't last).
  17. None of the original Woodway Square buildings remain today. The fire destroyed a third of the apartments, and even by 1989 a new office building had been built on Woodway on the northeast side. In the early 1990s, the rest of the complex was redeveloped, except for a separate section that had been sold off as a new property (on the San Felipe side, my records say it was called "Woodway on San Felipe Apts."). The last of these were torn down in early 2004.
  18. I searched for the Jack in the Box in my "defunct restaurants" list, it wasn't there because it was rebuilt on the same site at one time. The fried chicken place is now a taqueria, and that other building between the fried chicken restaurant and the liquor store (notice it still has the same facade) was torn down prior to 1978.
  19. Unless the lens is extraordinarily screwed up, the intersection isn't perpendicular. The other road is wide, accommodating three lanes on each side, which eliminates a lot of options. There's also a movie theater in the background.
  20. I was always a bit fascinated with the Katy line, and until relatively recently, there was a user, @Purpledevil, who swapped stories about living in the Heights and many of his posts dealt with the Katy railroad, including some of the crossings (mostly crossbucks on a few crossings, but one had a big, overbuilt crossing with lights everywhere and gates, I think Houston Avenue). When I was living in Houston, I crossed the MKT trail near work (along Spring Street, with inconsiderate bicyclists) or if I was going to Walmart, on Yale (great ice cream nearby). Sadly, during that time, I was unable to contact Purpledevil despite being in the very areas we had discussed previously.
  21. There's probably still lots of remnants though, even over houses. A long-abandoned (from the 1960s) right of way near my parents house has had a road built over it for the last 15 years (and it was properly engineered to the point where it never needed to be resurfaced completely), but when expanding it, they dug up old ties and even a few spikes. Who knows how much has resurfaced when the original houses near the right of way were torn out for new buildings? They might have even had rails!
  22. The yellow pages (without the covers, as it's only microfilm) are at the downtown Houston library, so I don't think it would violate copyright. Modern AT&T cares about copyright (certainly the Warner Media division), but I don't think old yellow pages will cause any problems.
  23. It used to be part of a larger chain but they started expanding locally in the last few years. For example, a location opened in The Woodlands in a former Black Eyed Pea. By the way, in terms of Wienerschnitzel, there is a separate topic:
  24. I was rewatching some E3 trailers, and I noticed around 1:09 in the new Microsoft Flight Simulator trailer, you can actually see Minute Maid Park and the convention center. It appears only around a second, but it's definitely Houston.
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