cottonmather0

Those apartments are really out of place there and I expect something bigger and higher priced to be built eventually on that site. But I do have a lot of personal memories of that complex: old friends, ex-girlfriends, pool parties, crashing after a late night at the Fab Sat (itself a loss)... it will be sad to see it go when it finally does.

Funny to see this thread, I drove by there today for the first time in a while and the grass is THICK. It looks like a lush pasture out of a romantic painting somewhere. The novelty of the apartments being gone has just about worn off, but I couldn't get over how the lot wasn't overgrown at all with weeds or trash, it's just very very thick grass and looks quite odd to my untrained eye.

That store is mostly weekday business and it's huge in that regard, but I'm pretty sure the answer to your question is no.

I went into that mall one time about 5 years ago and went out of that mall shortly after. Sad, because you can tell it did indeed used to be a big deal, but now it's grungy and grimy all over. The Chris Rock quote is dead-on.

That Target has really become a convenient destination for us coming from Timbergrove and now that we have a 8 month old in the house we make a lot of trips to Target. The store on San Felipe required negotiating the Loop and the store out 290 required... well... going out 290. It will be nice having even more options in that area besides Target, especially the restaurants.

That's right... Kips. Now I remember.

Went to Central Market last night and saw the empty lot. The space looks weird with nothing there. I believe that before Central Market was built there was an old-style coffee shop next door to the Shell station. Maybe I am misremembering and the gas station replaced the coffee shop, but there was definitely a greasy spoon type restaurant in that location 10 years or so ago.

Depends on where you are. That area is "more Houston than Houston" so to say. You can be drving through a rather poor and beat-up section of crappy apartments and pawn shops and then two blocks later you're looking at $800,000 homes. For this reason there are a lot of little gated streets and cul-de-sacs, which makes the area seem a little bit segregated to me. A lot of people don't like this but if you are willing to live next to something a little less desirable, you might find a bargain, especially considering that there is a lot of redevelopment going on similar to what's happening in Meyerland and Oak Forest. Generally speaking , the closer to I-10 you are, the nicer the houses and businesses and Westview is somewhat nicer than Long Point. The further west you go, the area also deteriorates a little bit, especially between Campbell and Gessner, which somewhat corresponds to the dividing line between Memorial and Spring Woods high schools.

Safer for the cyclist, maybe, but definitely not safer for the pedestrian already on the sidewalk.

Oh, how we can only dream. Not to mention tickets for bicyclists running red lights and stop signs, going the wrong way on one-way streets, and not wearing helmets. Cyclists bring a lot of grief upon themselves when they flaunt traffic laws and then get mad because cars won't yield or steer clear. It makes me embarassed every time I get on my bike.

"White Oak Drive" sounds so much nicer than "TC Jester Boulevard."

I remember when the midtown Randall's opened way back when - my wife and I had just started dating then and she lived in midtown - and it was a big deal that there was going to be a grocery story downtown. But the parking situation sucked (the underground garage was a pain and the few spots in front were cramped and hard to get in and out of), the prices were high, and it was full of panhandlers. Granted, part of the "allure" of midtown was walking everywhere and living amongst panhandlers, but it has just never really clicked apart from the weekend nightclub scene. Someone mentioned Specs - I have NEVER had a problem with panhandlers there, either in the parking lot or inside. But every other place in midtown seems to have a problem with thugs and street people. Why is Specs different?

If you are talking about the space that used to be Krispy Kreme, I noticed that too today. Not sure what it might be, but fast food or semi-fast food would be likely.

This is really off-topic from the direction this thread has gone since it started, but did anyone else notice the mustache on the kid's mom? She was on TV sitting next to Publicity-Whore-And-Apologist-For-Criminals-X and tearfully asking for people to forgive her son and all I could think about was how she really needs to get a wax job or at least break out the razor before having a televised press conference. Seriously, it was that bad.

Yes, those tributaries still exist, especially the one that drains the golf course. It's very hard to tell when you are driving along Memorial, but if you ever run along the jogging trail if you look over you can easily see how deep the ravine is on the north side (towards the golf course) when you get to the bottom of that low spot on Memorial between the circle and Picnic Loop. The water flows underneath Memorial Drive through a big culvert and then along the east side of picnic loop, just inside the tree line. It's a HUGE gully on both sides of the road and the dropoff from the trail is very very steep for a few feet right at the very bottom. On the other side of Memorial at the same spot, the (relatively new) paved bicycle path on the south side of the road has a wooden bridge. This is the spot where the running trail usually washes out, for obvious reasons, and lately there has been bright orange safety netting on the side of the trail. I have always thought that it would be pretty easy for someone to slip and fall a long way, so that netting is a good idea. If you are a golfer, this is the large ravine that enters the golf course just east of the clubhouse (it is heavily landscaped here) and flows across the 9th fairway and forms the lateral hazard along the left side of the 1st fairway and the left side of the 9th fairway. You hit across it (or an arm of it, at least) on Hole #2, then it forms the VERY deep creek/hazard that flows across Hole #7 (the long par 3) in front of the tee box. It is heavily wooded between the cart path and the jogging trail, but the small wooden bridge that you cross in your cart is not far at all from the jogging trail and the culvert underneath Memorial Drive, you just can't usually see it (or think to look) when you're playing golf. As far as what's on the upstream side of the park, I can't really say. I am sure that in the past it went further up towards Washington Ave, but nowadays it just looks like it starts at the ditch across the street from the golf course.

I think this chart actually proves my point. Sure, it was majority hispanic before Westside opened, but it went from 19% white to 8% white and almost all of the white kids who were lost came from the more upper and middle class neighborhoods on the far west side.

Those pictures are incredible. I sure hope they eventually do something about Waltrip, too, before my kids get there. In response to the OP, the school has definitely gotten worse but I doubt the name had anything to do with it - in fact, I would have argued that the school probably gets special attention (not that it matters) precisely because of PCness with all of the poor ethnic kids there. I moved to Houston about 10 years ago and am friends now with quite a few guys who are around my age and who graduated from Lee back in the early 90's. They're all pretty opinionated and bothered that it's gone downhill but they tend to blame the kids going to school there now, and thus they indirectly blame the opening of Westside - the same lower income kids from the Gulfton/Southwest Side that are at Lee now were also there 15 years ago, except that before Westside was constructed, Lee's attendance zone extended past the Beltway and in some places went all the way to Highway 6 . It included all of Briar Forest and a lot of far west Westheimer. Many kids who lived just on the other side of the bayou from kids at Stratford, the guys I'm friends with now, instead went all the way to Lee. Now those kids go to Westside and there's nothing left at Lee but the poor immigrant kids.

A thousand times NO. We don't need it.

This reminds me of a story - When I moved here from Boston almost (gulp) 9 years ago, I met a girl at the office on my first day of work who within 5 minutes was telling me about buying a new house in Cinco Ranch with her husband. She explained that they both grew up in Alief and were sad they couldn't live in the old neighborhood, but (she whispered after looking around to see if anyone was listening), "now it's all black."

When I was in college in Boston, our men's and women's track teams would come to Houston every year during spring break and spend a week training at Rice. A couple of girls on the team ALWAYS wanted to go to Jamaica Jamaica but never did... then one night during our senior year we were given a night off to go out and these girls wanted to go to JJ on their last chance to do so - so we even told our coaches that's where we were going to be later that night if they wanted to join us out. Subsequently, some of the Rice athletes warned us away from there and we didn't go - but it was too late for our coaches - they showed up that night and went inside and had a drink and waited around for awhile before they decided they couldn't stand it anymore and quit waiting on us. Funny story, that's what I will always think of when I think of Jamaica Jamaica.