FIREhat

On 8/18/2023 at 11:11 AM, hindesky said:

"The University of Houston plans to re-open Agnes Arnold Hall for the fall semester, which had been closed since March after two separate incidents of students who died by suicide last school year. The building will now have temporary fencing around its verandas, stairwells and walkways. The school said it plans to install more permanent, vertical cabling in the areas next year."

https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/houston/2023/08/17/459815/university-of-houstons-agnes-arnold-hall-to-re-open-with-temporary-fencing-after-student-deaths-last-school-year/

The only thing pleasant about that building was the breeze and feeling of openness. Rare for a pseudo brutalist midcentury bunker. Now they’ve made it look like a jail. 

Yes, it was bought by Methodist and closed about 2002 or so. During Hurricane Rita (2005) it was used as a shelter for Baytown Fire and Police. All the utilities were still on. There were some Red Cross relief offices in there briefly after the hurricane. After that left it just got worse and worse and became a target of URBEXers and less savory characters. They finally tore it down after it became a nuisance. 

 

can we treat this as a Hartman Bridge thread or should I start a separate one? It's quite a photogenic structure  

The museum shared this photo of their old building on Instagram. I read this was in the Zoo. Does anyone know where, exactly? I'd love to see more about this building. 
 

Houstorian has some old topo maps that you guys might find useful along these lines: http://houstorian.wordpress.com/old-houston-maps/

I like it. Light, airy, bright, clean, open, just like the new terminal entry. Hobby continues to open its lead on my personal list of favorite airports.

NASCAR may not have, but stock car racing dates to Prohibition. Stock cars still race on dirt tracks across the country, including in Harris County.

A marketing firm is restoring old Station 6 for use as its offices. This is the station on Washington closer to Houston than the current Station 6. Incidentally, the station used by 6's between this one and the present one is still standing as well. It's really nice to see this kind of attention to historical structures.

It's funny to see this as I was just giving my girlfriend a tour of campus today and we were wondering about this very question. I always had the impression that is was moved to campus after the war (and after looking at aerial photos from the 1930s I think it's safe to say that there was never an airfield there).

Yes, Bissonnet west of Edloe was Richmond Road and Westpark was Old Richmond Road.

There is one one-block-long street in Southside Place that changes names every year. The parks association auctions off a year's naming rights to the highest bidder for fundraising. It's the street on the east side of the park.

A number of streets in Baytown have been closed by expansion from the Exxon refinery, including San Jacinto, Brunner, Baytown Avenue, and a few others near the ends of Market Street and Bayway Drive. The Baytown Nature Center also has a ton of old roads, most overgrown, from when there was a neighborhood there. Other renamed Baytown streets I can think of:

-Park Street used to be Wooster-Cedar Bayou Road

-ML Wismer used to be South Main Extension

-Avenue J and Harkins Street were both covered over by 146.

Woodway Square is still open in truncated form. The fire was so big that HFD requested mutual aide from a number of nearby departments (something they don't often do). I've seen pictures of pumpers drafting out of swimming pools, presumably because all the nearby hydrants were already taken or too far to lay.

You guys are talking about some great music. Sand Mountain and The Jester were well before my time, but I read a lot about them in TVZ's biography, which I highly recommend to Texas Music fans, A Deeper Blue by Robert Earl Hardy.

One tidbit on this station: it was the reportedly the only one in Houston with brass poles. Because it was built by another department (the volunteer department whose territory Houston annexed) it was built with the more common brass poles. IIRC, Houston poles are usually zinc.

When they say the neighborhood fire stations are disappearing they're referring to a trend in fire station placement and design. In the 1910s, '20s, and '30s it was common in cities to build bungalow fire stations that blended in with the neighborhood. Often the bays that held the engines and trucks looked just like slightly oversized garages. Austin was and is king of this design in Texas, and many of their fire stations are still bungalow style.

An example:

Houston didn't get into this style so heavily, but they did and do have a lot of stations built on standard-sized lots within neighborhoods, 37's (Braes Heights) being a perfect example.

Fire stations, like fire apparatus, have gotten much bigger in the last couple of decades and no longer fit on regular lots. Two major drivers are truck sizes and NFPA standards. The National Fire Protection Association standard on station construction now forbids back-in bays, requiring a drive allowing vehicles to pull through the station. NFPA standards now forbid poles so new two-storey stations have all but disappeared. Trucks are a lot bigger too; here are two Baytown engines, one from 1947 and one from 2008:

Before the '40s trucks were even smaller, about the size of full-size pickups of today. Southside Place's Fire Truck Park has raped converted Southside's first fire engine into playground equipment, but you can still see the size difference. This is a 1936 Seagrave Suburbanite on a REO chassis:

So a lot of these stations that were built up into the '50s could stand to be a lot smaller. Now they have to be so big that they can't fit on standard lots and the trucks are so heavy that many residential streets can't handle them. As a consequence they have to move out onto major thoroughfares in commercial areas. Thirty-seven's is a perfect example.

I'm a terrible photographer but I thought these three pictures looked pretty good.

I'll also add that a great place for people interested in street name changes is Baytown. Because Baytown was formed by the merger of three other cities a lot of the street names have changed or become muddled. An example is Market Street still having curb terrazo markers saying Pelly Rd..

Adding to the confusion is the ever-expanding Exxon refinery that has bought up quite a bit of land as buffer. Whole neighborhoods are now on plant property and the streets are more or less intact. Baytown Ave. and San Jacinto Ave. are two of the older examples while Aves. J and K are more recently acquired. The streets are mostly still there and either used by the refinery or, in some cases, still a few holdout homeowners.

Also in Baytown, Eugenio Santana was once Cedar, M.L. Wismer was formerly South Main Extension, and there are dozens of abandoned streets in the former Brownwood neighborhood that is now the Baytown Nature Center.

Probably the most frequently changed street name in this whole area, maybe state, is in Southside Place. The one-block street that runs along the west side of what is commonly called Fire Truck Park has a new name every year. For a long time it was called Childs St. but I don't know what it was originally. As of a few years ago the city began auctioning off annual naming rights to the street to raise funds for the park. The sister one-block street on the other side of the park is called Lew Hill, named after a long-time resident of Southside who was fire chief, fire marshall, and city council member at one time or another. There is also a hill on Lew Hill that is rumored to contain some of the detritus from the original Southside Place pool, which was fed by an artesian spring.

Someone also mentioned Holcombe in a reply above. Holcombe and Bellaire change names at Buffalo Speedway according to the most prominent signage, but if you look at teh side streets you'll notice that the West U street signs on the north side continue to say Bellaire all the way to Kirby. The north half of the street between Buffalo and Kirby is in West U and retains the old name of Bellaire Blvd. while the south side is in Houston and was renamed Holcombe with the rest of the street going eastward.