Reefmonkey

This is more early 90s, but a place I liked to shop as a high schooler in the Willowbrook Mall was J Riggins. I guess they went out of business.

Yes, it is the current Target shopping center. Since it sounds like it was almost exactly like the Northoaks "mall" (though didn't have the movie theatre), it really wouldn't look any different from any other strip shopping center in an aerial view when it was in its "mall" configuration, and there was no need to change the external structure to convert it from the "mall" to a conventional strip center. Like Cosmic8 says, it's really not what one would think of as a typical mall. For the one in Northoaks, the "mall" part was really more like an enclosed foyer one could walk into, with entrances to the theater, target, and an arcade. Looking at the Walnut Bend shopping center now and remembering the Northoaks "Mall", I have no problem believing TexasVine's description of Westchase Mall as it was is accurate.

Dirty's, used to be located on Durham just south of I-10. Great chicken-fried steak Strawberry Patch on Westheimer where Pappas Bros Steakhouse is now. Also great chicken fried steak, as well as the best hot blueberry muffins ever created, included free in your bread basket. Harry's Kenya, a great upscale restaurant downtown. The San Jacinto Inn - great seafood. Right by the Battleship Texas - NOT to be confused with the Monument Inn. Tuffy's Seafood down on Galveston The original Mariposa lunchroom in Neiman's at the Galleria - it used to be on the 1st floor right by the entrance to the mall, now that area is a cosmetics counter The Sakowitz downtown lunchroom. The Sakowitz Post Oak lunchroom, for that matter. Great orange rolls in the bread basket The original downtown James Coney Island Las Brasas mexican restaurant on Kuykendahl just south of FM 1960 Dong Ting's very upscale chinese restaurant, in the same little area as Brennan's (and I'm looking forward to Brennan's reopening) Cafe Artiste off Mandell and West Main Hills Pier 19 in Galveston, now a (shudder) Joe's Crab Shack. Also Strand Street Brewery, now a Fuddruckers. Zan's down in Galveston. I can't remember when this closed. Fortunately, I got a taste of Zan's cooking again in 2004 when he catered my wedding. Oh, yeah, Phoenix bakery down there did my wedding cakes, and now they are closed. Cafe Miami, a cuban restaurant off Bissonnett at Hilcroft Dolce and Freddo Pino's on Westheimer and Hilcroft Cafe Montrose Guy from empress - was that Richard, or Scott Chen?

I was looking at TexasVines' post about the failure of Town and Country mall, and found this comment interesting: I actually work at the corner of Walnut Bend and Westheimer, and before they revamped the Target there, I thought the shopping center there reminded me of the NorthOaks "Mall" on FM 1960 and Steubner Airline that I used to go to as a little kid through high school. NorthOaks was exactly how TexasVines describes Westchase Mall - anchored by a Target, and you could enter the interior walkway either through target or through a front door. It had an arcade and a 6 screen movie theater, that by the time I graduated in 1994 had long been converted into a dollar theatre. I think now the interior walkways have been closed off. I imagine Westchase and Northoaks were built by the same developer.

You don't have to worry about me, I suck at even putting together Ikea furniture, I certainly wouldn't try doing any major remodeling myself. I was just curious because I used to rent a house like I described in my OP and always thought that the landlord could have made better use of the garage by converting it into a living space than he did using it as a storage for worthless junk he obviously hadn't touched in years.

Thanks, that's about what I was guessing it would cost. BTW, I do know that there is more to a window than a hole in a wall, which is to say I know a window from a hole in a wall

I remember the Gap commercials from the early 80s - animated, following the cartoon gold tread on cartoon blue denim, while a man with a very deep bass voice sang in a descending scale: "FALL IN TO THE-GAP" I thought about that every time I passed the Gap in Greenspoint as a little kid in the early 80s Yeah, I remember when it seemed like every mall had an ATTACHED movie theater that you entered through the mall, a GNC vitamin store, a Hickory Farms, and a pet store. I remember when the Galleria still had an attached movie theater, where the new section meets Galleria II. Also remember an independent full-service pharmacy on the second or third level of Galleria I, a gag gift store on the rink level of Galleria I (at the Neimans end) and the great old Sam Houston Bookstore on the rink level, where FYE is now. I loved that book store -only place in Houston with a decent selection of James Bond novels. I very

How about this - taking an existing ground-level garage and finishing it out as a studio-apartment-style guest house? Say one of the little older 1-car garages in a pre-war bungalow in-town. A little, but not a lot of rewiring - repositioning some outlets, adding one or two more Plumbing - putting in a bathroom - toilet, standup shower, sink, as well as putting in a kitchenette with a sink. Not putting in a dishwasher, so no need to plumb for that. No nat gas - water heater would be a 30 gal electric Cut a couple of holes and hang two sash windows Put in some insulation, hang sheetrock on the outer walls, plus some studs and sheetrock for privacy for the new bathroom area. No central AC - go with a window unit. About how much would that cost?

From birth (1976) through 3rd grade, I lived in Cypresswood, and at that time Greenspoint was our mall. What I remember best is all the waterfalls throughout the mall, some of them very elaborate with passageways to walk through, etc. I also remember the kids' shoe department at Foley's, which had a Star Wars theme, was like the inside of a spaceship, with radar screens, etc to look at and interact with. I also remember going to see the Empire Strikes Back in the theatre there - one of my first movies I remember. There was the pet store, where I got my first fish aquarium, and my brothers and I always loved the smell of pipe tobacco coming out of the Pipe Pub. I remember a Bennigan's style restaurant inside the mall, called "Dalton's" Ah, yes, I remember Best - kind of like Service Merchandise (which used to be called Wilson's). I also remember going to Scooby Doo's Pipe Organ Pizza across the street. The trees inside weren't fake. They were ficuses.

There still is a Gears Rd. in that area. There still is a Jetero Blvd west of IAH. Wasn't that long ago that I remember them changing 149 to 249, and I'm only 32. There is still a business on 249 (is it a bar, and convenience store?) that is called the 149 such and such that I see when I drive up there. Steubner Airline is still called that name, at least north of 1960.

I agree with Vertigo58, as a kid I used to feel like I was in NYC when I was in the Galleria Lord and Taylor. Also felt that way when I was at the dowtown Foley's. Other stores I liked or remembered as a kid: Sam Houston Bookstore - the only bookstore in Houston with a decent selection of James Bond books, which I got into reading after Living Daylights came out. The coin store on the mid level of Galleria I, right around the corner from See's Candies (another favorite). I used to go there all the time when I was in elementary school and into collecting US coins - you could buy buffalo nickels, mercury dimes, wheatback pennies, indian head pennies, all sorts of out-of-circulation US coins, along with guidebooks and those blue folders to put them in. The Florsheim store, where my dad bought most of his dress shoes.

Anyone else remember the Magic Pan crepe restaurant? Not just remember passing by it, but actually eating in it? I remember as a really young kid eating there as a "special occasion" once or twice.

Did someone here on this board say they thought nonsmokers would come out in droves after the smoking ban? I certainly never expected that. I said the opposite, that the smokers wouldn't flee the bars and the bar owners wouldn't see decreased revenue post-ban. It's exactly what I surmised would happen - the smokers keep coming to the bars, they just go out on the patio to smoke, and us nonsmokers who have been going to bars all along and silently enduring are now breathing (now that we finally can breathe) a sigh of relief. I don't see why anyone on either side would expect to see a non-smoking, traditionally non-drinking person suddenly start going to bars because of a no smoking ban. I don't know, in the bars I've been to, I haven't seen them empty inside. Maybe it's the nights you go. I do know that I've been requesting outside tables at restaurants and chosen seats on patios at bars a lot more recently the last couple of months - not to hang out with smokers, but to enjoy the nice fall weather we've been having. Hmmm. Maybe we should take a look in January, and again in August 2008 to see how many people are sitting on patios versus inside?

Some interesting findings that support this being a very real public health issue, not just for an individual's longterm health, but short-term health as well.. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,298418,00.html ALBANY

Same thing happened to the Village in Manhattan, NYC. It was once one of the cheaper places to live - home of the gay community, artists, bohemians. They made it a colorful place to live, and that attracted the affluent yuppies, who priced them out of the market, and soiled their own nest by forcing out the very people who made Village the place that the yuppies had wanted to live. Meyerland is the new gay community in Houston, for those priced out of Montrose by the yuppies and bobos*. *Bobo: bourgeois bohemian: http://www.flakmag.com/books/bobos.html

Right on!

Well, that discussion probably deserves a thread of its own. I'd love to discuss it in depth with you, but I'm not sure where we could fit it on a website about Houston architecture. I'll just say the belief among white-collar workers "I'd buy American goods if they could be produced as cheaply as overseas goods...." has been common at least since the 1970s, and I have to admit I used to say it myself. It's easy for a white-collar worker to think that when it is just blue-collar jobs going overseas. I think some people are waking up to the reality, though, now that white-collar jobs like accounting and IT support are being outsourced to places like India and Malaysia. In the end, what good are low-priced goods if one day so many people are unemployed or underemployed due to overseas outsourcing that they can't even afford the cheap stuff? It is seductive to think that by buying goods from developing countries and encouraging them to focus on production of exports, we are helping those countries' economies and the peoples' quality of life, but too often, that just is not true. Well-meaning NGOs, even the UN, encouraged several African nations to focus their agricultural efforts on exportable cash crops, such as cocoa, coffee, and sisal, and they neglected the development of food crops for these countries' domestic needs, resulting in food shortages and inflation, actually decreasing quality of life. Cote d'Ivoire's serious political instability is attributable to this. Manufacturing of goods for export in developing countries can and does often cause this kind of inflation. Oops, there I go, talking about it, getting off-topic. I'm not going to say anything else about it. As far as second-hand smoke and cancer risk goes, I am not going to be less careful about exposing myself to carcinogens and just assume by the time I have cancer the medical science will have caught up. If it does, that will be great, but I am not going to depend on it. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, the man said. The scientific community may not have conclusively proven how bad second-hand smoke is yet, but common sense tells me it isn't good for me. I don't need indisputable proof, nor is it very wise to wait for indisputable proof, to take action to prevent a potential negative effect. (There, see, I always manage to get back on topic in the end )

And your point is???? No one is forcing you to read this thread or respond to it. If the discussion didn't hold your interest, then you are free to move on.

Sorry, you're right, my place is out on the west side of the Island beyond city limits, where the city doesn't come in and take the seaweed away, I never go to the beach along the seawall, forgot they do that there. Of course, we have more beach between the vegetation line and the water line out west than the seawall beaches do, even though we don't pump sand there.....I wonder if our sargassum being left there has something to do with that?

The project's RI/FS, RAP RD/RA (all reports that tell you what they found on the site and what they plan to do to clean it up) and all subsequent monitoring reports are public domain. You can access any of them with a FOIA request.

Now finally you provided a well-thought-out, coherently written post. Well done. Your position on cabbies is consistent with your position on bars, raises some good points, and is reasonable, that one should be able to actively ask a cabbie not to smoke if he is already in the cab. As far as the smoky smell goes, it is definitely gross and offputting, but not a health issue. I know I hate getting into an elevator at work with a smoker, or getting into an elevator a smoker has been riding in. It just reeks. However, that's a preference, and no reason to bar smokers from riding in elevators, as long as they do not actively smoke in them. I agree with you, a cabbie should be allowed to smoke in his cab as long as he refrains from smoking if requested to by his hire. On children in smoking cars, you are right, it is a very difficult situation. Certainly CPS can't be policing traffic, and police do pull over parents who are endangering their children by not having them buckled in. In cases of child welfare, we want an immediate response. However, if that parent is smoking with the child in the car, you know they are also exposing their child to second-hand smoke. Is issuing a citation for driving the child while smoking going to prevent smoking while the child is in the house? Should we be pulling children out of homes and putting them in foster care until their parents quit smoking? It's dangerous territory. I don't like to see too much intrusion on parental rights. Though I don't spank my children, I don't think judicious use of corporal punishment is necessarily child abuse, but there is certainly a movement to make it so, and that concerns me. On the other hand, I am all for awarding temporary state custody to children whose Christian Scientist parents refuse to give them life-saving medical treatment for religious reasons. So while I want parents to never smoke around their children, I can't think of a good way to enforce it. I don't know what the answer is, but I don't think writing tickets to parents who smoke with kids in the car is. Though it isn't an ordinance I would spend any time fighting against.

I like the motivation behind it, but I don't like the means at all. Using traffic laws to enforce good parenting? There are times when it is necessary for the state to intrude upon the parent-child relationship and abridge parental rights for the welfare of the child, but the bar should be held high, and should be the jurisdiction of CPS, not traffic cops. It does remind me of something, though - cabbies independently own and operate their cabs, they are their "place of business", yet may cities have ordinance that cabbies cannot smoke in their cabs, either at all, or while under hire. For those who think that bars should be able to run their "place of business" as they see fit, do you think taxi smoking bans are unfair?

TheNiche, You present a good argument, and I do agree that excessive regulation can be bad and result in job losses - in fact, my career, as an environmental consultant and now an environmental compliance officer has been all about keeping environmental regulations from becoming an excessive burden to my clients and now my employer. The truth is, most US regs err on the side of not being stringent enough, but often a particular EPA or TCEQ administrator interprets a reg or guidance document in a ridiculous way that doesn't do anything to protect the environment and unfairly constrains my employer. That's why there are people like me. It's not that regulation is bad, it just needs checks and balances. In addition to people like me, industry has powerful special interest groups that don't really care about the environment, and are constantly lobbying to make environmental legislation as lax as possible. Against all that pressure, reasonable legislation to protect the environment, public health, and worker health faces an uphill battle. On a smaller scale, the same thing has been happening with the smoking ban. Restaurant and Bar Owners' Associations, who don't really care about their employees' health or their patrons' health if it is going to impact their bottom line have been trying to kill the bar smoking ban for years. They sucessfully had it tabled for quite a long while. The reason they lost this time is the restaurant owners splintered off from the bar owners and now support the ban. This is what I have been talking about with interests battling interests. You want to label me as thinking "might makes right", but I really wish it didn't work that way. I am just glad in this instance the might that was on the side of protecting human health was greater. I also agree that it is unconscionable that the US has shipped so much of its potentially dangerous and unhealthy industrial activities to unregulated markets like China, where people are being paid a slave wage to work in very unsafe conditions. This did not occur because of too much regulation, however. This occurred, again, because of a clash of interests that arose from an unregulated market. This occurred because of labor unions. With the Industrial Revolution in full swing during the Guilded Age, there was no regulation at all of worker compensation, working hours, workplace safety, even child labor. Unions rose to fill the void of lack of regulation, and fought for reasonable work weeks, fair wages, and safe conditions. This was unhindered market forces at work. Corporations were the powerful monolithic entities that the many, the workers, needed jobs from. One worker didn't want to work in unsafe conditions, or died from unsafe conditions, there were hundreds of malnourished workers clamoring to fill his place - better to die on the job than starve, I guess. An individual worker had no power to demand better money, safer working conditions. Then unions formed, and now there was an equality of power between the workers and the corporations. They demanded fair wage, resonable hours, safe shops, and got them. Again, Interests battling Interests. But unions got greedy, got corrupt, and started demanding ridiculous things, because they were less concerned about the overall health of the economy than they were about taking care of their own. They went from demanding safe conditions and fare wages to an entitlement system that killed the US steel industry and crippled the US auto industry. And it didn't have to be. Everything fair they gained is now mandated by the government, who came in late in the game. The government mandates a minimum wage. The government mandates time and a half for anything over 40 hours. The government mandates safe working conditions. If the government had done this in the beginning, enacted reasonable regulation, unions would never have gotten the traction they have, would never have become so powerful as to cripple American industry. Correct me if I am wrong, but I am going to guess you have never worked in a job where your life has relied on proper lockout/tagout procedure, where it has relied on air monitoring making sure that the atmosphere in the vessel you are entering is below the lower explosive limit, and oxygen levels above 19.5%? I'm guessing you have never worked in a job where OSHA regulations keep you safe on a daily basis? I have, and yet, even as someone with a masters' degree, an educated specialist, I have felt both clients and my previous employer pressuring me to cut corners on safety, both my own, and the subcontractor crews I was in charge of, just to get the job done right then. As you can probably guess, I am not one to back down from an argument, but I still was put in uncomfortable situations of refusing to work until the right equipment arrived, or conditions improved, and I knew the only thing that was keeping me from being fired was that they knew I could report them to OSHA and OSHA regulations protected me from being fired for reporting them. A lot of this occurred without the crews really understanding what was going on. These people certainly had an "imperfect understanding" of the risk they were facing (to borrow a phrase from you), whether from lack of education or whatnot, and the companies were not invested in explaining it to them. The only reason they made information such as MSDSs available is they were required to. Most of them were just nervous that they might get fired. None of them wanted to get sick or die, they were just blue-collar guys who were scared to lose their jobs, and if it hadn't been because I knew the regs, would have had no one advocating for them, and they probably would have just done the work. You can talk all you want about a person's right to choose a risky job or else move on, but until you have had a job with real risk, worked with blue-collar workers who are afraid to get sick, but just as afraid to get fired, you have no idea what it really is like. No one should have to choose between their health and their job. People are still confused about the health effects of second-hand smoke, and tobacco industries have spent millions of dollars to make them stay confused. So many bar employees are young people who think they are invincible anyway, aren't thinking 40 years down the road, think if they themselves don't smoke, they will be okay. Lung cancer in nonsmoking women is on the rise, it is a fact. Do you think all the cute girls at all the Little Woodrows's locations take that into consideration when they take the job? The people whose health we don't protect now, even if they choose not to protect it, we will be paying for in the future when they get sick, though higher medical insurance premiums, higher Medicare costs. That's another way other people's second-hand smoke effects me, even if I never step foot in a smoky bar - I am going to have to help pay for the care of those the second-hand smoke made sick. On a side note, I would have been equally happy to see the city pass an ordinance that required bars to install air handling systems that reduced smoke pollutants to negligible, or at least NAAQS or OSHA PEL levels. You can be sure there would have been a lot of bars that would have fought that, saying it would cost them too much money. I feel sorry for the bars that voluntarily installed such equipment and now can't use it. Hopefully they can sell it to bars in other places that still allow smoking and recoop some money. Another side note on the issue of international competition, I have a solution to that as well. I think the US should require that any products imported into the US be produced in countries that have environmental laws and workplace safety and product safety laws at least as stringent as US laws. Demanding that the companies also pay a reasonable living wage and reasonable hours would be nice as well. The only way a company from a less developed country could get around that is if it acheived and maintained ISO 9000 series and ISO 14000 series compliance. This would rebalance our trade imbalance, protect US jobs, and be a globally responsible thing to do. It would also be pretty hard for the WTO to accuse us of protectionism if we did it for those reasons. Look at all the safety problems with Chinese imports right now. It is about time we start regulating our imports in this manner.

Your feeble attempts to discredit me are what is pathetic. The very worst you could accuse me of was indiscriminately lumping you in with RedScare's viewpoint when I said "But wait, I thought you guys are all saying bars can't possibly stay in business if they don't allow smoking?", but since you talked about drinking with RedScare in post 217, it is certainly a pardonable offense. What I accused you of not understanding was that you, by claiming that there are plenty of bars that cater to nondrinkers, were contradicting RedScare's and others' claims that bars would not be in business without smokers. You proved you didn't understand it when you said "I NEVER said anything about "bars not being able to sustain" without the asmatic crowd bringing in their hard earn dollars....." and you obviously still don't understand your mistake, my semiliterate friend. You chose to come after me in this thread, yet you have not contributed a single piece of significant content to the thread, and have conveniently ignored many of my arguments, such as the University of Wisconsin bar air quality data, because you know you can't say anything to counter it. Now you, like RedScare, without owning your defeat, make some lame parting shot in an attempt to save face, but you two are really just taking your ball and going home.

No, the premise of my argument has always been that OSHA has saved lives and prevented suffering for workers by requiring employers to reduce hazards, such as inhalation hazards, in the workplace; bar employees deserve to be afforded that same protection. The premise of my argument has also always been that the city health department has reduced illness by requiring restaurant owners to abide by sanitation standards; bar patrons have as much right to have their pulmonary health protected as they and restaurant patrons do to have their gastrointestinal health protected. Those arguments you have never been able to undermine. Your argument about "the right to take an informed risk" is naive - it ignores reality. It assumes an economy where all workers, even unskilled workers, are always so in demand that they can afford to refuse a high-risk job and will still be able to make enough to keep a decent standard of living, and can uproot their families and move elsewhere if the dominant industry in their area is high-risk, so therefore risks don't need to be mitigated. Also, these jobs need to be done, and many of the most dangerous - eg power generation, waste management, cannot be farmed overseas if Americans aren't willing to accept the risks or demand too much money. And I don't think anyone here sees moving jobs overseas as a good thing, or having to pay more for energy, waste management a good thing, so if we can keep the jobs here and make them safe enough that we don't have to throw money at people to get them to work there, I think that is the best thing for America. Bringing this back to the issue of bar employees, it is a great job for say, a college student, with flexible hours outside of normal class hours, and makes way more money than folding jeans at the Gap in a smoke-free mall. For a student struggling to get though college without a staggering student loan debt, the difference in money between the two jobs may make the difference. "Choice" is not such a simple thing. And we have already granted protection from inhalation hazards to industrial workers, so not granting them to bar workers violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment I also noticed that musicman had the same read of TJones' "premise" of a bar that I did, so it wasn't just me. Though since the rest of TJones' posts teeter on the edge of incoherency, I am willing to accept that TJones just worded the statement so badly that it could be misconstrued to be saying that a "real" bar must always be smoky and filled with inebriants, but he didn't really mean that.