dalparadise

I worry about developers who want to put up condo towers with units that start around $1,000,000, but don't know how to market themselves very well. Turnberry doesn't even seem to know the market into which they are coming. Their tower does seem luxurious, but their materials are terrible. Points: Their ad in the Playbill for the Houston Ballet has a typo. They need to inspire confidence that they pay attention to details when asking for millions of dollars from potential customers. The Flash presentation on the site inexplicably opens with a couple of shots of cattle -- hardly the image I associate with high-rise living in a major city -- but exactly the image I associate with someone's perception of this town who has never been here. That may be fine for marketing to out-of-towners who, perhaps, share this perception. But, what about Houstonians who might be in the market? Do you really want to give the impression you know nothing about this city? They go to the "everything's bigger in Texas" tired old routine. Sigh. They use stock photography from the 80s to show what kind of ladies might live here. Seriously, I think the one in the silver dress was Kelly LeBrock from the Weird Science days. There's also one by the pool, where the model is sneering at the pool boy as if to say, "leave the towels, you insignificant piece of feces." It's pretty amusing how hard it's trying to show pretentious luxury, while I think the shot was actually meant to be comical or ironic in nature. In the location tab, they acknowledge Galleria I,II and III being just a block away, but fail to point out that Galleria IV is right across the street! They show Nordstrom as just some anonymous building right next door to the site. Does the marketing team know their own site? Is it stronger to represent your location as a 5-minute walk away from The Galleria (with entry via a not very pedestrian-friendly area across busy streets and through massive parking garages, by the way) or as having access to the street level entrance to Nordstrom right outside your front door? Looking at the Flash presentation, I'd assume Turnberry Tower was Williams Tower. They say it is "rising to the sky" with a shot of Williams. They offer its location as prime, with a shot of Williams. They circle Williams Tower from the air. I understand the limitations using stock photography puts on creativity, but again, it makes Turnberry seem like they don't know what they're talking about. They represent Uptown as the place for the ballet and symphony, calling it the city's premiere entertainment district. Well, I was in The Galleria Friday evening and went to the ballet. With traffic and a stop at the Pulse machine, plus parking downtown, I was able to make the curtain by just 10 minutes, leaving 55 minutes before. Again, I don't think Turnberry knows where they are. Great shopping, yes. Entertainment? Culture? Performing arts? That's a different neighborhood. These seem like small gripes, I'll agree. But, together, they paint a picture of a developer that's out of touch with the location and stereotypical of his view of Houston. In the past, that hasn't been a good sign for the success of business of any kind in this town. I'd recommend they spend some more time here, or at least hire some local marketing experts to help them get it right, before perception becomes reality.

INSIDE. Inside it's one of the nicest places in town. There's a Bellagio meets W quality to it that clearly makes it a Hilton flagship.

Yes, but everything inside the loop and nearly everything inside the beltway from north to south is class Bravo airspace from the surface up to 10,000 ft. There's a small corridor between I-10 and the North Loop, over The Heights, where planes and choppers may fly without ATC clearance under 2000 feet. Otherwise, anything will need explicit ATC clearance and radar guidance from ATC to fly. There are "shelves" of airspace beneath the class Bravo that encircle the two airports at about 8 miles out, starting at 2000 feet and stepping up to 4000 feet. That's where the news choppers usually stay. But, with the two airports being so close to one another, the surface ring is almost conjoined north of I-10. It's no big deal to enter Bravo airspace -- it isn't "restricted", but doing so requires strict compliance with ATC guidance and quick pilot response to their commands. That's definitely not the place for some cop to be trying to fly multiple drones.

Holy crap! Was that Marty in there?

Really? It looked pretty anonymous to me.

If you mean Wagner, he's been closing for the Mets since 2006.

The new HS will be built in the new section being developed by Hillwood -- the same group that developed Victory Park in Dallas, among many other prime DFW developments. Hillwood has big plans for Houston. They are going to do a lot for this city and the new section of Sienna is just the beginning.

If Houston drivers can't handle a train in their streets, I doubt they'd ever be able to abide by hold short lines on 1960 as landing aircraft speed by.

I've arrived at Hobby on Southwest out of both Phoenix (after an LA layover) and Las Vegas at around 1:30 - 2:00 am. Is Southwest more liberal in its scheduling?

Yeah, it looks great. Let's just put a lid on the Central Park stuff, so we don't sound like a bunch of hayseeds.

Not this again... but yeah, I agree with you, it's going to be nice.

Isn't all the area around and on the Memorial City property redeveloping? This isn't a mall aquarium. I think it's part of the larger vision for the mixed use development of MC. There will be highrise residential, office, medical, new open-air retail, restaurants and plazas. I think the vision is to try to integrate the streets into the surrounding area, too, so it's not just a shopping center in a parking lot, like so many "town(e) cent(re)s" are these days. I think the developers have their sights set on a mini Uptown.

Double Dave's blows. Pep rolls are interesting, but too greasy. The pizza is on par with Chucky Cheese. The others on your list are all among my favorites, though.

I think Hogg Palace is in there, too.

Metro consistently demonstrates that it has no idea where it's going. That train has "Fannin South" on it, yet is clearly going North.

Yeah, Harrisburg is probably much closer, but North Main just past the tunnel is what I was talking about. Not far up, where that photo is taken. I agree that it isn't really all that comparable -- proportionally it seems like a comparison, though. LA is about 3 times larger than Houston. Those shots seem about 3 times more built up than the areas I was talking about.

Yes, on all these points we are in complete agreement.

Actually, minus probably 3/4 the people on the street and half the "retail", those photos look like Main St. Houston about twelve years ago. I believe I remember your saying how terrible that was in another thread. No caucasian calamity here. I don't find those pictures particularly appealing, though. The streetscape is similar to North Main, just across the bayou from Downtown, or maybe Harrisburg Blvd. -- both areas similar, proportionally and logistically speaking -- to the area of LA pictured. Yeah, it's sort of Downtown, but it isn't really what you go to for the "Downtown experience". It also isn't the Downtown people are really talking about when they think about building in new residential and retail. Whether it should be or not, is probably another discussion. LA doesn't currently have an area central to Downtown that's like Houston's...holy crap, now I'm starting to sound like those Dallas posters...

As for "inhuman environments at street level" I'd say that Pennzoil and Chase do an amazing job of humanizing their scale and sites without turning them into strip centers. The entrance to Pennzoil is almost on the scale of a private residence, the way it slopes down to sidewalk level and brings people inside before they actually enter the building. Chase actually made a large city square with sculpture the justification for its massive height and edge siting. You walk up tiny steps with long runs to get to it. I'd say that is a pretty good urbanist's approach to humanizing the scale. BofA is a scaling disaster, I agree, but it was designed to be freeway architecture at the height of that movement's heydey in the epicenter of its most prominent city. Plus, it's so beautiful, I think most give it a pass for the damage it did to the sidewalk experience. Regardless, there's an entire city block-sized park across the street where you are free to be as pedestrian as you want. Calpine I don't consider a major building in any regard, except that it is very new. It does happen to be in probably the most walkable areas of Downtown, near several cool eateries and bars and adjacent to major performing arts centers, so I'm not sure what your beef is there. I walk around it all the time and find it neither inhuman nor forbidding. 1000 Main closed the entire street in front of itself to make a pleasant pedestrian plaza. How much more freaking human can you get?

I think Downtown Dallas is cleaner at the street level and that DART is much better integrated into the Downtown infrastructure, meaning it causes less of a disruption of vehicular or pedestrian flow through Downtown. I think the historic buildings are better preserved and presented in DT Dallas, as well. I believe the perception of this, to an outsider, might represent a more vibrant downtown during the workday. After 5:00pm, though, DT Dallas looks like a neutron bomb hit it. The West End is a ghost town. The southeast portion running into Deep Ellum is a haven for junkies and thugs. The central part is all offices and closed lunch spots. DEAD. The northern portion, leading into Uptown and Victory and making up the new Arts District is showing a lot of promise, though. It's looking nice and is something to be proud of. I just think the comparisons to the vibrancy of Times Square or even Downtown Houston are very premature.

Well, I was not trying to fuel a Dallas vs. Houston contest, but rather to answer some of the points made above in the thread -- which included Dallas comparisons that, to me, sounded a little off. The main comparison I was addressing was the one made to Los Angeles. Dallas was mentioned in a group of cities compared to Houston. It was also mentioned in several posts about its "Times Square" vibrancy and larger, busier downtown. Dallas and Houston are almost identical in many ways, but downtown life is not one of them. Even a declining Downtown Houston has tons more going on. That's not meant to spark debate. I don't really think it's debatable at all.

DT LA and DT Houston are really quite similar in a lot of ways. Both are very much business centers with very few residents. LA has enjoyed a small renaissance in their DT area around Staples Center, with a lot of dense, mixed use residential/retail popping up around the arena. It's not unlike what's going on in Midtown Houston, just on a larger, denser scale. It's also happening much faster in LA. Figueroa St., which fronts Staples Center is developing very nicely and connects the USC campus, the Staples Center area and the heart of Downtown. Everyone knows that USC in in the middle of a ghetto, and that southwestern DT LA was always fairly poor and underdeveloped, much like Midtown was to Houston. I'd say, just as in many cases, we can look to LA for how we will one day develop, as we seem to follow in that city's footsteps on a smaller scale. One point should be noted, though, LA has not done much to develop DT retail or street life in the DT area proper. It's deader than dead seven nights per week. As far as large cities with more vibrant DT pedestrian and retail environments, there are plenty of larger and smaller metro areas that fit the bill -- San Francisco, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, Denver, Seattle, Cincinnati and others. DT Houston is more vibrant than, say, Dallas, Salt Lake City, Detroit or Phoenix, but of those, only Dallas seems to constantly crow about how Manhattanized it is.

Well, I believe the market is the best determiner of whether non-smoking establishments are the way to go. So, I end up on the side of allowing bar owners to set their own policy and letting employees and patrons to decide for themselves if they want to be in the particular environment. I'm a non-smoker and prefer non-smoking restaurants. For bars, I see both sides. Sometimes I go to smoky drinking bars. Sometimes I like clear-air wine bars. But, I have a choice. I'm an adult. I can weigh the options and decide. All that said, I like this Reefmonkey guy. Good arguments presented in an articulate manner. This site might be getting fun again.

While I agree with your take, it's a tad bit on the dramatic side, don't you think?

Roscoe's is an LA institution. People in the production industry swear by it. It's also a place where production companies take their out-of-town visitors to show the "other side" of LA hip. I'd think people here would be all over this. Breakfast Klub was compared favorably to Roscoe's when it opened. The popularity of Roscoe's outside the Deep South was used to explain Breakfast Klub's unique offerings.