H-Town Man

I'll never forget the carousel scene at the end of Catcher in the Rye. Sometimes a carousel can be just the thing to stamp a lifelong memory of a place on a person. They also offer a kind of classic look.

In 1985, Transco commissioned a local press to do a book about the building. The result is the most visually stunning (and collectible) book ever printed on a Houston topic. You can order a copy here: http://www.herringdesign.com/herringpress.asp In a foreword by Philip Johnson, he talks about being inspired by Chartres Cathedral - it is the first thing you see of the town when you are approaching, and its looming presence is with you the entire time you are there. He wanted something that would stand alone and be an orientation, a reference point, for all Houstonians. I have read elsewhere that he was inspired by the Nebraska State Capitol, and by other art deco skyscrapers of the 1920's. He liked the idea of the traditional, iconic stone tower, but he thought it was silly to make a building out of stone in an age when you could use glass. Thus he used glass, but dimensioned the windows in such a way as to recall stone. The building was made 64 stories tall to match the highest stock price reached by Transco (too bad they didn't hit 90 or something). The Waterwall is 64 feet tall. The building's slender profile was made possible due to sacrifices on the part of the CEO, Jack Bowen, in terms of rent and convenience, for the sake of creating a work of art. Philip Johnson has called him one of the few "true patrons" of art in the corporate world. The developer Gerald Hines, whose favorite client was Johnson (they had done Pennzoil Place, and would do Bank of America together), wanted to have his company's offices in "the finest skyscraper that anyone could build in America." The building was thus the product of three personalities, all dedicated to the idea of art transcending any practical rationale. The result is one of the half-dozen truly unique, truly classic skyscrapers in the United States. As to the lobby... I went up there several times as a courier a couple years ago. I think anyone who went into the building would stand a decent chance of getting in an elevator and going up there without being stopped. There is a little room up there with glass walls, always vacant, that has a three-foot model of the building sitting on a table and some windows with westward views. The elevators are neat - each is panelled in an exotic marble, with a small plate telling the location where the marble was quarried. There are usually a couple of art exhibits going on in the lobby.

I never saw the old lobby or the mural... although I believe when I was a kid my dad used to take me to some Christmas thing they did in the lobby there, where they gave out wassail. But I remember the new lobby from when I was a courier, and it was still kind of nice to walk into. The older lobbies, especially of the banks, had more of a public feel than the newer ones do. Hate to see it all go.

This is really a shame. 910 Travis has one of the more beautiful downtown lobbies, and one of the only significant ones from its time period. Made it one of the nicer buildings to go into. We can forget our dreams of street level retail and pedestrian activity if the bottoms floors of downtown buildings start being turned into parking. Hey Subdude, I don't suppose you have a postcard of this building when it was Bank of the Southwest?

The library boasts a high volume count and calls itself "world class," but statistics like that are misleading. In terms of the depth of serious reading you can do there, it is roughly the equivalent of a good high school library. Someone should take the Modern Library's poll of the 100 best fiction and 100 best nonfiction books of the twentieth century and see how many show up in a card catalog search. I bet only a small portion, and the ones they do have are probably scattered all around the branch libraries. At some point very early on, somebody in the library decided that building a serious collection of volumes was not a priority. I'm not sure where the money goes - probably technology and interactive crap. Luckily the Fondren library at Rice is open to non-students, so that is usually where I go if I am looking for a book in Houston. I once saw a website that overviewed the serious libraries in the United States, and the only two in Texas were located in Austin and in College Station. It's sad - Houston is probably the largest city in America without a great research library.

I think that if the stadium were built there, it could be offensive to Hispanics. After all, this was the place were the Mexican army lost a battle to the Texas forces. How dare the people of Texas do what they want to on the spot where the Mexican army lost a battle.

With a few drinks and some cynical laughter.

Santa Ana really has no one to blame but himself, for parking his troops right next to a huge monument that could be seen from miles away.

Hey guys, If you read the initial post carefully, it doesn't sound like they're going to build a new tallest building. It sounds like they will be adding new amenities to the Bank of America building. Of course, BoA is not the tallest anymore, which makes me wonder how old that is. The ZOM looks cool. About small towns turning into big cities... yeah, I know the feeling. College Station is starting to feel a little big city to me - not like it was in '98 when I first came here. Oh well, at least there's still Snook.

Or, the more surface lots that are turned into garages, the more downtown becomes an inhuman and forbidding environment where nobody will want to go. That's a good point, and I thank you for calling it to attention. It really bums me out that they're able to squeeze so many people in like that, and that none of the growth in our downtown workforce is creating any need for new space. I wonder how much bigger our skyline would be if we had the same number of people per floor that we had in the seventies. On the other hand, I wonder how much smaller our skyline would have been back then if people were as compressed as they were in other parts of the country - since I hear that the oil industry was unusual in the number of independent offices it gave people.

If just ONE piece of new residential construction were going up on Main Street in downtown or midtown - ONE - then I wouldn't be so doomy and gloomy. How many buildings have been built to hold cars downtown in the last twenty years for every building that is built to hold people? Half a dozen or more? Also, when was Pennzoil Place built? 1976? And they just now, after thirty years, need more parking to attract tenants? Where were all those people parking before? And what does it say about the prospects for downtown that building owners are having to invest money in newer, more convenient garages just to rent out the same space that they were able to rent before? The same thing has happened at First City Tower and ChevronTexaco Heritage Plaza.

Come to think of it... after this gets built, how many blocks will there be of Main Street in downtown Houston that don't have either a parking garage or parking spaces fronting the street? Two?

Good point, but I was thinking of developments that tended towards an urban lifestyle. All of this, except for the building renovations, would have happened anyway, and haven't made Houston any more urban.

Now where are all the naysayers who said that building a light rail line wouldn't spur new development? Come on! You know who you are! How embarrassed you must be now to see that, in just two short years after the line took off, we now have, going up in the heart of downtown on Main Street, a... PARKING GARAGE!!!!!!!! Forget all those other projects we waited for, but didn't see. Forget the Shamrock, forget HoustonPavilions (still waiting), forget that corridor of high-density apartment projects in Midtown envisioned by the Main Street Master Plan, forget the Main@Wheeler development, forget the West Building, forget Point Center Midtown, forget Midtown Green... You can put all those disappointments to rest, for in perfect accord with the old saying, "He who has patience is rewarded," we now have A PARKING GARAGE going up on Main Street in downtown. All right, I'll cut the sarcasm. I know this isn't what I, or any of us, wanted. Clearly, having one street that is a better candidate for urban development than any other in the city, and getting nothing after ten years of renewal but a feeble parking garage is disheartening to say the least. But hey - at least there's still hope for that sleek new urbanist building proposed for the new Midtown headquarters of Morris Architects. OH WAIT: Morris Architects, a design firm itching to move into new digs along the rail line, has gotten its wish. The Houston-based company has leased 22,000 square feet of space in First City Tower. Morris was hoping to be in a new building in Midtown, but high costs kept the project from getting off the ground. "We decided to go ahead and take advantage of today's downtown competitive rates," said Chris Hudson, president and CEO of Morris Architects. Wow. I guess there's no hope after all. Fie on Houston developers for their brainless, gutless, ball-less approach to inner city development.

It's not an inferiority complex when you're not the inferior one. What Houston has towards Dallas is a superiority complex. In fact, why don't I just make that a new term? superiority complex - (suh-PEER- ...never mind) noun When one entity is clearly superior to another entity, but nobody outside of that entity ever seems to recognize or acknowledge it.

Now this, this is a cool building.

The M.D. Anderson buildings aren't that bad. They make a nice ensemble, and their facades present good texturing and soothing colors. They have shown their sensitivity to architecture with the Lake/Flato designed Nurses' building. They have also promised to replace the Prudential with a building of architectural distinction. Of course we are losing a piece of history, and combined with the Shamrock, that is really sickening. But they are saving tens of millions of dollars by starting over instead of renovating. I know, I know... what's money compared to beauty, history, identity? On the other hand, what's money compared to human life? Have you heard some of the stories of cancer patients who have gone to this hospital after being at some other hospital? I have a friend who is a cancer patient there, and he said going to M.D. Anderson completely turned things around - there was just no comparison in the level of care, and at that point he really started to have hope. Other things I have heard suggest that his is not a unique story. I will also just throw in that this is, in fact, the greatest cancer hospital in the world. It's possibly the one good thing that Houston can claim to be number one in. If that kind of institution can save fifty plus million by tearing down a decaying landmark, I say let them have it. It would be a serious compromise of their mission statement, I think, if they were to give up fifty million on the balance sheet for the sake of architecture. Everything they do is rationalized with the sole end of eliminating this disease. If they were to mix architecture patronage into their objectives, they would not be the institution they are.

I don't know about you guys, but I personally didn't need to know that the rat poison they put out causes the rats' lungs to fill with blood. Why couldn't they have just said, "The rat poison kills the rats"? Poor rats. Did anyone ever read Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh, or Racso and the Rats of Nimh?

Ha!

That is a very astute observation, lowspark. I remember having wonderful experiences as a kid at places that I am reluctant to associate with now, the prime example being McDonald's. My mom says that whenever we drove by I would shout "Hambuhgahhhh!" and I know for a fact that up until about fourth grade, a Happy Meal was the greatest meal on earth (I can still remember the smell of the food when my dad came to elementary school to eat lunch with me and brought a Happy Meal). **** WARNING H-Town Man is about to wax philosophical WARNING **** To me it says so much about the innocence of childhood that our standards were so low and a few colorful decorations and a man with a smile at the counter could make us so happy. Perhaps, if we were to step back far enough, we would see that the difference in quality between a McDonald's hamburger and a prime steak is really only very miniscule, and that it is the vanity and falseness that we have acquired that makes one so intolerable, and the other so essential. I know certain relatives of mine who have largely retained this innocence through most of their lives, and still happily enjoy certain things that I have rejected through my sophistication (especially after going to college with a bunch of rich kids). In a way then, we are the authors of our own misery, and even the most seemingly hideous conditions of life could be made happy and pleasant if we were to recover this innocence and naivete... This same idea could even be extended to... ARCHITECTURE. When I was growing up, I never noticed anything wrong with the "cheap," "bland," "prosaic" buildings of the suburbs where I lived. It was only after going to college in Chicago that I became a snob, and suburban Houston was ruined for me. I sometimes wonder if I would have loved a place like the Astrodome as fervently as I always have if I had not seen it until my critical faculties were developed. No doubt I would have found it overblown, and the firework show on the scoreboard crass and cheesy. Witness also how people from "sophisticated" cities like Chicago and Boston whine on and on about their architecture and neighborhood planning, while folks in Houston are happily oblivious to it. In a way, we as a city are still, for better or worse, in our childhood on this issue. **** WARNING H-Town Man has waxed philosophical WARNING ****

H2B, what can you tell me about Someburger? Do you remember where their locations were in the Heights? The reason why I ask is that back in the 50's-60's, an aunt and two uncles of mine used to run a Someburger in the Heights. My uncle still has jars full of the wartime silver nickels that he picked out of the change. They were Italian, if that rings a bell... perhaps it was the one you went to!

Ah, finally something from my neighborhood! What can y'all tell me about Monterey House? Was it very good? I know that when I was a kid, it was the only TexMex place my family went to - apparently the craze hadn't taken off, or there just weren't many options in the 1960 area. All I remember is that when you ate all your chips, there was a piece of Mexican candy at the bottom. I used to LIVE for that piece of candy!

Wow. Nice addition. Great pic, texasboy. It looks like that building shown in front of it will also receive a new wing, judging by the different pics. Awesome. There is no end to what these folks are building. This hospital is now the ultimate power in the universe.

Of the dozen or so condo proposals on the board, which one will actually get built?