dalparadise

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.

Stefano's in Friendswood is strictly a takeaway joint, but has very good NY-style pizza. The basic pasta and chicken dishes can be hit-and-miss, though. I've alternately had some of the tastiest and most mediocre chicken marsala from there. They don't really venture outside the staples of parm, marsala, picatta, lasagne, alfredo, etc.

This guy is good. He has her listed as "Jan Jeff Coat" next to her short bio.

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.

In "A Place of Dreams" or whatever that book is called, there are several really cool photos of workers on the Heritage Plaza skeleton, if I remember correctly. Really nice photos. I especially like the one with the lunar eclipse.

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.

Every time I see Houston photos from the '70s, I realize that must have been the best time ever to be in this city. I remember as a kid from Nacogdoches at that time, I would visit my uncle and he'd take me up in the Hyatt Regency or over the 610 bridge and tell me how one day, downtown was going to stretch from the Galleria to Interstate 45. I really think there was a sense of awe throughout the city at how quickly it was becoming a "world city". I think we may have lost that today...at least some of it. The media attention, building boom, population explosion, riches and growth all made people feel like they were part of the next Manhattan or LA. I sensed that, even as a kid. I used to remark to my parents how much I liked the fast pace and how exciting the city seemed to a kid from the sticks. Houston was going strong at all levels while most of the rest of the country was mired in a sluggish economy. Houstonians, the media and even a movie or two loved the dichotomy of a redneck town growing into a cosmopolitan city. They also loved to show off the skyline and the expanse of the sprawl. Most of all, at about 2,000,000 people in the metro area, Houston just seemed to work a lot better. It was kinda cool to burn up 75-cent gas to drive across fields of construction cranes on pristine, grey freeways. The early '80s were cool, too. Radio stations here were great and billboard advertising for them made them seem larger than life. I remember being amazed that there were so many to choose from and they were all so different. I also remember tuning in at about Livingston and listening the whole way down at "professional" radio shows, where the DJs were real performers -- not like the yokels in East Texas. When I was in 7th grade, the cable system in Nacogdoches added KPRC to its lineup, as we had no local NBC affiliate. I actually watched their news, to see big-time reporters doing their thing! I also remember every time we would leave to go home. I'd stay perched in the back window of our big GM car and watch until I couldn't see the top of the antenna of One Shell Plaza anymore. That's when I knew I had left. By the time I was a senior in high school, around '86-'87 I used to enjoy picking up a copy of the Houston Post on days I got out of school early to work at a Nacogdoches radio station. I used to listen to tapes of KKBQ FM and pay close attention to John Lander's reports to the Gavin Report (a radio trade mag) for ways to improve my show. That year, I made a trip down here with my girlfriend to go to Astroworld. We were 16 and this was the first time we had been out of town together, alone. We spent the day riding rollercoasters, then found a cheap motel on South Main (yikes!) to do what 16-year-olds do when they're not supervised. I remember the clerk smiling at me when I asked if he had an hourly rate available, because I just wanted to rest and take a shower to wake up before driving home to Nacogdoches. I thought I was being pretty smooth. He made me pay for the whole night -- about $20, if I remember right. Good times.

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.

Nice to see the voice of reason infiltrating the mod team.

When it first got going again, there was no charge. It was much bigger and rowdier. I think part of the admission charge idea was to curtail that. It's really lame, as Mardi Gras celebrations go. I think Disney throws one that's more fun.

Sure makes our $300 million palace look like a bargain, doesn't it?

Once again -- the only person who has made this a gay issue is Craig himself, with his "I'm not gay!" speech. It's as if peeping and soliciting in a public restroom -- which he freely copped to -- was okay, just so long as no one knew he's gay. As soon as that part got out, it was a "witch hunt". Well guess what, he wasn't arrested for being gay. Only Idaho newspapers, other Republicans and he seem to care about that point. There's nothing wrong or illegal about being gay (in most states, anyway). So what should we believe? He is a freaky glory-hole perv, and isn't a well-adjusted, law-abiding gay man? Okay, I guess I do believe him.

It wasn't that you merely followed my post. You quoted it. It is my assumption that veteran HAIFers would have figured out how to direct their commentary to the intended posters by now. No harm done, though.

Are you my ex-wife? Because I swear to holy God that she is the only other person I've ever known who liked to argue about nothing as much as you do. You even flip sides of an argument to keep it going. It isn't interesting. I have some stockpiling to do...

Mmmmm...pot.

Point one -- I am certainly not being a "Chicken Little". I'm not calling for panic. In fact, quite the opposite. Point two -- coming into a discussion without first reading the previous posts, then restating a point made by the person you're attempting to "call out" for being a time waster is the height of irony.

Dear genius, The context of this particular discussion is what we should do as individuals to prepare for a hurricane -- whether we should evacuate or not, specifically. So, if you think it's ridiculous to keep a gas tank full in case I'm ordered to evacuate or to stock a little extra food and water in case of a power outage when a hurricane enters the Gulf, then so be it.

Well, even IAH experienced gusts (not sustained) of hurricane-force winds. Alicia was a wierd one, because it exhibited a "double eye" at landfall, producing some of its highest winds and rainfall on its "weak" western side. The sustained winds at Hobby were, as you say, a Cat 1 velocity. However, gusts up to the upper levels of Cat 2, almost Cat 3 were measured at Hobby. I know that sustained winds are the measure of a hurricane's force, but it doesn't make those gusts any less destructive. I also believe that a 94 kt. wind gust will rip the roof off a lot of houses built in the last 20 years. The bottom line to all of this is as you say-- for Houston proper, it's all about flooding. A slow moving storm, big or small, can devastate Houston with 20' inches of rain in an already saturated condition. For the metropolitan area down 45 south, a big Hurricane is a wind and storm surge problem. The way the bay comes up all the way to East Houston, that could be a big deal for a lot of people -- roughly the population equivilent of Fort Worth. Alicia hit on Galveston Island. Farther South, around Freeport and a bigger storm could mean destruction like we've never imagined. I plan to be ready to act responsibly, regardless of what "The Niche" says. EDIT: I just found this: http://chps.sam.usace.army.mil/USHESdata/A...meteorology.htm Interesting.

...which is exactly what I meant when I said, "We should imagine the worst-case scenario so we can plan accordingly and change those plans as the outcome deviates from that worse-case scenario."

"Deutschbags" is a quote from the movie, Beerfest, now playing on HBO.