Sunstar

According to the new East Sector Plan, there will be a promenade on the North Canal similar in appearance to what was depicted for the Commerce street promenade in the original Master plan. Interestingly the North Canal would give the warehouse district a riverfront.

From BBP Website: “The trail will begin at Allen’s Landing Park and continue east under the Fannin Street Bridge, transverse up the slope along Commerce Street before passing under the San Jacinto Bridge to the Wilson Building on Commerce Street. The trail will continue through the second basement level of the Wilson Building and under the Harris County Sheriff’s Inmate Processing Center.“ https://buffalobayou.org/construction-begins-on-key-buffalo-bayou-trail-connection/

I wonder if BBP managed to acquire the old Gable Street Power plant property from Centerpoint? Would be great to turn that into a recreational area.

Why can’t both be important? Glibly writing off people that care about how our skyline looks as suburbanites going to an Astros game runs contrary to the many skyline pictures I see on this forum every day.

This building is staying fairly close to the renderings from what I can see. I like how the angled line of the tower extends itself into the base as a demarcation between the stone and glass. The one part I cannot get a feel for is the side facing the Calpine building. It’s vague from the renderings but appears to be recessed grating with some sort of stone outcropping as an accent. It’s very had to make parking garage bases look nice and it looks like they gave a strong effort here. The alternative would have been to bury the garage, but then I feel like they would have needed to cut budget on the high rise portion, which would be a shame. My only complaint is that the most interesting angle of the building faces into downtown and won’t be outwardly visible. It would have been a nice touch to our skyline, but from the freeway angle it will look like aBother fairly boring building. That feels like a missed opportunity to me as this building is on the edge of downtown and will be prominent in the skyline. Plus the Texas tower will block the view of this angle from within downtown.

Oh well, I had always hoped this building could somehow be incorporated into BBP’s design, but I understand that downtown is probably better off without it from a flood control perspective. Also, the south side bayou trail can now continue East, although the next barrier is right across San Jacinto at the Harris County inmate processing center. I was hoping.that would meet the same fate as 1119. All that land plus the adjacent parking lot would open up a nice bit of green space along the bayou.

Metro hints at a future light rail extension along 90a, but the only substantive thing I can find on the MetroNext plan is two way HOV. Missouri City is part of Metro’s service area and voted in the bond referendum, but light rail is unlikely unless Sugarland and other Fort Bend towns are willing to chip in. This feels like a big miss to me, but I’m not sure what the projected ridership for such a line would be even with full participation from Fort Bend county. I’m also curious If Metro could purchase their own ROW inside the existing Union Pacific ROW when the time came.

the good news is we got the Julia Ideson building as our new library. In the above picture it’s interesting that it seems like downtown more or less ends at McKinney. Not sure if there were any notable buildings south of there at that time.

Seen in the lower left.

Chevron will never develop anything on that lot. Perhaps they would consider selling it or gifting it to the city instead of just keeping it as an empty field.

It seems like they've stripped out more of the original building than the renderings had indicated, unless the plan is to build it back similar to what was there.

I thought so too at first, but I pulled this aerial from 1962 not long before Grand Central Station was torn down and you can see the western edge of the building comes very close. Maybe it's a newer section that was added to the original structure later on. Sorry about the copyright markings, I can take this photo down if needs be. This is a very interesting site, Houston has had a train depot here pretty much back to the beginning:' In this photo you can see the old Brazos hotel across Washington Ave, which was later torn down to make room for the last Grand Central Station:

Found this old aerial of Grand Central. I can't make out that old post office building in this photo. If it was built back in the 30s, it should be visible in this picture, slightly to the east and right behind that other building.

If it's contributing to flooding downtown then I agree it needs to be removed. The building had some unique character to it, but I also think turning that whole section along the Bayou from Fannin to Elysian into green space would be quite nice. I'm guessing they were never able to purchase the Centerpoint property on McKee since I don't see it incorporated into their plan.

I was hoping they could somehow incorporate 1119 Commerce into the design, it's a cool old building they way if backs right up to the Bayou.