Reefmonkey

17 hours ago, mkultra25 said:

The answer lies in this post:

 

 

That explanation still leaves me with a lot of questions. If it's true, who did the gerrymandering? The district, or the state? It seems like the district wouldn't be able to just grab another ISD's land like that, and I have to assume that by the 70s, the timeframe the people in that thread are saying the land was gerrymandered, it should have already been long applied to another district. And having grown up in the Klein district in the 80s, and knowing the mindset of the residents there at that time (let alone 10 years before that), that then mostly lily-white group of voters would never have willingly agreed to annex Acres Homes and other nearby very black, very poor areas. So did the state force the annexation on them? If so, how, and why, and there must have been some record in the local papers of the inevitable public uproar and even legal fight over that.

But there is another problem with this explanation, and it's related to the 1970s timeframe for the explanation. Klein ISD lists Recreation Acres Elementary School as a former campus, it was opened in 1949 "to serve elementary students in the southern part of the district." Recreation Acres is just south of the intersection of 249 and Antoine, down in that southern panhandle that our fellow Haifers say wasn't annexed until the 1970s to get federal funding for being more diverse, but Klein ISD is saying that area was already part of the district back in 1949, when the feds weren't giving out such diversity funding. Its the same story for Garden City Elementary School, which opened in 1956 and closed in the 1970s. It was in the extreme southeast corner of the panhandle, if still open today it would be the southernmost campus in the district.

So unless Klein is distorting history and making it sound like these schools were opened and run by KISD when they were actually run by a predecessor district before Klein Annexed the area, it seems Klein owned this panhandle since at least 1949. That would be before anyone cared about "diversity", before the feds were offering dollars to schools for being more diverse.

So the question still remains, how and why did Klein end up with that long skinny panhandle extending so far south, when the rest of the district stops at the natural and logical boundary of Cypress Creek?

I've always wondered, why does Klein Independent School District have that long, skinny "panhandle" of territory that extends south of Cypress Creek (otherwise the southern border of the rest of the district) between Champion Forest Drive and Stuebner-Airline? Seems like logically that panhandle ought to be either part of Cy-Fair, or divided up between Cy-Fair and Aldine and/or Spring (although Spring is also weirdly shaped with two "lobes"). It seems like most of the 56 school districts in the Greater Houston area (with the exception of Houston ISD's western finger) are fairly reasonably compact in shape, Klein (and Spring) seem to be outliers.

Who decided on the boundaries of the school districts, anyway, and what was their criteria? Especially why was Klein given this strange appendage that would quickly become the worst part of the district?

http://texasbest.com/schools/map.html

https://kleinisd.net/UserFiles/Servers/Server_568041/File/District/District Quick Info/Kmap-Superintendent 2-26-18.pdf

This is a field guide TXDOT put together to help identify historically significant gas stations.

http://ftp.dot.state.tx.us/pub/txdot-info/env/toolkit/420-05-gui.pdf

Anyone have any favorite older gas stations in Houston that are still standing?

Today's Houston Matters episode on KUHF, in honor of the 50th anniversary of Stonewall, discussed the Diana Foundation, and organization I hadn't heard of, that started with an Oscars viewing party in someone's apartment the night of the very first televised Academy Awards in 1953. It is the oldest continuously active gay foundation in the country. They've published a book on the history of the foundation, and you can flip through the book for free online. It's an interesting snapshot of what life was like for gay and lesbian Houstonians through the years, especially for me, to see what things were like before the 80s, when I first became aware of the gay community through my mother's theatre friends, right around the time when they first started being able to be out in public.

https://www.dianahistorybook.com/

1 minute ago, cspwal said:

I wonder what happened to the car-a-stick piece of art work 

 

Also the ad for TheHaif.com 👀

Yeah, I wonder about that too, there is a car inside the downtown one, but I don't think its the same one.

Yeah, the old HAIF ad, wasn't that a kick to see?

My 12 year old daughter has been obsessed with 80s culture for the last 2 years now, so towards the beginning of her obsession I took her to the Hard Rock Cafe for lunch, explained that when I was her age in the mid-late 80s, Hard Rock Cafe t-shirts were a huge fad (along with Spuds McKenzie shirts until the school district banned the latter), and I bought her one of the classic shirts. Last night she told me she was outgrowing that shirt and needed another one, so we need to go back to Hard Rock. She then said something about how cool it was that she could go to the same restaurant I went to when I was her age. So I had to break it to her that Hard Rock wasn't downtown back then, it was on Kirby, and that got me curious about what years the Kirby location was open, and why they moved downtown.

I found this article, didn't realize Houston's Hard Rock Cafe opened as early as 1986 (edit: opening date November 6, 1986), so early into the Hard Rock fad (I don't think I actually ate there until about 1992). Some mildly interesting discussion of the architecture of the building, and (edit) as cspwal points out, check out the old www.theHaif.com ad!

http://offcite.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2010/03/RIP_Moore_Cite67.pdf

Looks like they moved downtown in 2000 (edit: Kirby location's last day of service was May 20, 2000, Downtown location opened the next day). I remember to going to the "Fire and Ice" restaurant that briefly took over the space in 2001. On the "why" Hard Rock left Kirby, this HBJ article from 2001 sheds some light:

https://www.bizjournals.com/houston/stories/2001/11/19/newscolumn3.html

Quote

 

Larry Plotsky, a retail broker with The Plotsky Group, says shops and restaurants on Kirby are geared toward a specific demographic. Fire + Ice, he says, did not fit the area's specialized niche.

"Both Hard Rock Cafe and Fire + Ice were both entertainment, tourist concepts," Plotsky says. "Kirby Drive is the ultimate for Houstonian traffic, but not for tourist traffic."

The property is owned by the prominent Dickey family, who controls several acres of pricey retail land near the intersection of Kirby and West Alabama.

Hard Rock had a long-term ground lease on the site. But in early 2000, the rock-n-roll restaurant relocated to downtown's Bayou Place. Fire + Ice was subleasing the space from Hard Rock, which still has about four years left on its lease, says Tommy Dickey. While the future of the high-profile property is still uncertain, Plotsky says a fresh use on the site could prove to be a better fit.

 

I guess it did make sense in 1986 to open a Hard Rock on Kirby (Galleria area would have worked too, hence Planet Hollywood) when downtown was nothing, but once the late 90s early 00s downtown renaissance started, Hard Rock wanted that access.

On 6/8/2019 at 7:40 AM, trymahjong said:

I am beginning to get the picture.

 

remembering what I said about being a novice..... the wines tasted nice. Only I didn’t get that slight headache nor the indigestion feeling I usually get. I wondered as I tasted them if they would be similar to wines bottles 500 years ago?

Kinda depends on the style of wine. A vintner who goes after the big bold California styles that are all about varietal, you probably would not have found wines that tasted like those centuries ago. But a lot of European wines are probably very similar to what they were centuries ago, especially certain Italian styles. And retsina is a style that probably tastes nearly identical to the way it did at least 2,000 years ago.

Don't assume though that older winemaking techniques were better. Before the advent of cultured yeasts and dosing grape must with sulfites or sulfur dioxide to kill wild yeasts before starting fermentation, winemaking was much less predictable than it is now. Winemakers would of course use the lees from an old batch of wine of proven quality to inoculate the next batch with yeast that worked (although they didn't really understand why this worked), a batch could still become contaminated with a wild yeast species (both from the grapes or from the poor sanitation back then( that would give it a funky flavor, or worse, make it spoil, and wine makers would try to recoup their losses by blending this off. There was a reason the ancient Romans rarely drank wine that hadn't been cut with water and sweetened. And speaking of the Romans and sweetening wine, from Roman times through the 1800s, lead acetate was regularly added to wine to sweeten it and balance the flavor.

4 hours ago, dbigtex56 said:

I guess making wine is like making sausage: you really don't want to know.
Here's an interesting article about wine additives.
(Fish bladders?! Who knew!)

Yeah, isinglass, it's a fining, or clarifying agent. (I do a little home winemaking) Generally the isinglass is going to agglomerate suspended solids in the wine and cause them to fall to the bottom as lees, and theoretically the isinglass all ends up in the lees, which are discarded when the wine is racked, so winemakers don't consider the isinglass to be "in" the wine anymore, but because the wine process involved an animal product at one point, the wine can't be considered vegetarian. Wines that want to be considered completely vegetarian will use a non-animal derived fining agent, like bentonite, a type of clay. You have to use a lot more bentonite than isinglass though.

6 hours ago, H-Town Man said:

 

Luminare, I was wondering when you were going to arrive with a 300 word post in which you pretentiously decide every question. We are obviously not talking about what is "legally" considered Pei's building, but whether merely having his name on it makes it worth preserving when it is not the highest and best use of some pretty valuable land and does not contribute to an urban historic district that is probably Houston's only walkable neighborhood. These, by the way, would be my reasons for razing it, not "just because I don't like it," and I think these are more than just the "values of today." I like how, as usual, you give a bunch of opinions but never commit yourself to either side of the question at hand, viz., "Should it be preserved or not?"

I tend to agree with H-Town Man here. Even if IM Pei designed it himself with some grand vision in mind, it's a completely unremarkable looking early 80s one-story commercial building with no significant Houston history to it, and it's not an efficient use of a parcel in downtown Houston in the 21st Century.

22 hours ago, j_cuevas713 said:

It's not so much the method of transportation as much as how people were carelessly weaving through traffic as if every driver would notice and not hit them. It also seemed like a huge fad but it was interesting to see people use them because you could literally drop it off along the sidewalk and it looked to be an efficient mode of transit for getting across the city quickly. 

That was my observation this March when I was up in Austin as well.

33 minutes ago, Sunny123 said:

What kind of home his father made a king home or what home. If his father made very good home than his father or home name came in guiness book of world record but because his father made third class home so his name only came in you tube or some peoples know because many peoples made much better than his father. His father is not 1 person who made this kind of home 100 peoples made better than this kind of home because his father didn't made better home so he can't let peoples came inside the home.

You must have the wrong table, I don't think anyone here ordered a word salad.

30 minutes ago, CrockpotandGravel said:

I'm copying this here from a post a saw on Facebook on Wienerschitznel restaurants that were open in Houston. When the chain was in Houston in the 1960's through the 1990's, their name was Der Wienerschitznel before the name changed to Wienerschitznel.

For some reason or another (I'm going to point to news reporters and journalists who aren't doing their job well, are lazy, or aren't from Houston so they only went by a press release sent to them from the franchisee bringing Wienerschitznel back to Houston), news stations and articles in Houston Chronicle, Community Impact, Houston Business Journal, and Houstonia magazine are reporting Wienerschitznel is new to Houston. That's not the case as many of us old-timers from Houston know.

Wienerschitznel has returned to Houston, opening one of many locations that will serve hot dogs in Houston. The first of these is in New Caney and that location opened Saturday.

This is a partial list of Wienerschitznel restaurants that were open in Houston.
 

Der Wienerschnitzel (Baytown) 1201 N Alexander
Der Wienerschnitzel (Galveston) 712 Seawall Blvd)
Der Wienerschnitzel (Houston) 1818 N Shepherd Dr 
Der Wienerschnitzel (Houston) 2014 Gessner Rd 
Der Wienerschnitzel (Houston) 9019 Jensen Dr 
Der Wienerschnitzel (Houston) 1303 Westheimer Rd
Der Wienerschnitzel (Houston) 7535 Bellfort Ave 
Der Wienerschnitzel (Houston) 2230 Wirt Rd
Der Wienerschnitzel (Houston) 5850 Hwy 6 N 
Der Wienerschnitzel (Pasadena) 901 E Southmore Ave
Der Wienerschnitzel (Pinehurst) 2420 Mac Arthur

 

Also there's this from an University of Houston yearbook in the 60's showing these locations
 

4510 Almeda (Houston)
3716 Farnham (Houston)
4914 Griggs Rd (Houston)
7801 Hillcroft (Houston) 
8117 Long Point Rd (Houston) 
7018 South Park Blvd (before it was renamed to Martin Luther King Jr Blvd) (Houston)

 

https://digital.lib.uh.edu/collection/yearb/item/18466/show/18435

 

 

Never eaten at one, how do they measure up to James Coney Island?

Here are a couple of Bobby McGee menus, probably from one of their Arizona California locations, which lasted a lot longer than in Texas.

Here's one that the source I got it from says is from 1987:

https://scholarsarchive.jwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1249&context=menu_collection

Can't quite tell what year this one is from, but judging from the design of the menu and the prices, which are slightly higher than the 1987 menu, (along with the lack of email address or website under the corporate address), I'm guessing very early 90s?:

https://scholarsarchive.jwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1946&context=mbf_collection

FilioScotia is right, food doesn't look to be anything special at all. Interestingly, Bobby McGee's was founded in 1971, and very similar Magic Time Machine was founded in 1973, and Magic Time Machine (which still exists in San Antonio and Dallas), still serves a menu very similar to these two from 30 years ago. A lot of the prices have gone up in that time, but interestingly, shrimp scampi cost $15.99 then and now.

https://www.magictimemachine.com/assets/file/magic-time-machine-menu.pdf

2 hours ago, CaptainJilliams said:

 

I don't want to speak for @UtterlyUrban, but I think I may know what he means.

 

In the past 2-3 years since I've lived in Houston, and again, this is just my personal experience (no real way to quantify anything), I've noticed an increased aggression in panhandlers in my most recent ventures downtown. Now I'm not sure if it's just desperation, mental health issues, withdrawal from drugs or all of the above, but I've been called out by people on the streets asking if I can give them money. No conversation starters, no small talk, just straight to the point. It's uncomfortable and it's difficult when you have to navigate strategically around them as you walk through town. You could look at this situation, again, as a norm in most major cities, in fact we probably have it easy down here. But with a growing downtown population, many of whom have families, I'm sure many of them do not look favorably on the situation when those who are homeless congregate in areas of high activity (Market Square, Minute Maid Park, Main Street, etc.)

 

Also, the tent cities keep shifting locations after each city clean-up, and recently they've moved to more visible locations.

I get it, it sucks to have to deal with it on a daily basis, I remember it well. Just trying to walk to stores from my apartments down there in the early 00s I was constantly being pursued by aggressive panhandlers, and I do mean pursued, I had them shout at me from a block away, and start following me, it was spooky. I remember shopping in that Randall's in midtown when it was all shiny and new and being accosted by a panhandler in the frozen food section. When I lived in the Camden Midtown circa 2003, across from the Cadillac dealership, my view from my 2nd story balcony was of the homeless woman who wore plastic grocery bags for socks and always sat on the bench right below me. Couldn't even be free of their badgering when I was in my own apartment - one sunny Saturday afternoon I was grilling on my little hibachi out on my balcony and a homeless person (can't remember if it was her or another one) calling up to me for money. I haven't lived there in 15 years, but I do go down there a lot on weekends, park and walk around, eat at restaurants, shop, etc, and it's a lot better than it was 15 years ago. There is so much more development and activity now than there was back then, homeless people can't exist there in the concentrations they did back then, and when you get hit up by a homeless person on a busy street with a lot of other normal people, and a lot of brightly lit businesses, it's a lot less threatening than when it is just you and a homeless person on the lonely street between your apartment and the nearest store. And the corridor between midtown and downtown under the Pierce Elevated back then, having to pass through a Hooverville, it was a real psychological barrier between the Fourth Ward and the First Ward. Making that area gated parking was great. Again, it sucks when you're dealng with it on a daily basis, and I understand how that is going to affect someone's perspective, and I am sure there are certain times and certain areas where things get to be more like they used to be for a while, but from a longer perspective of 20 years, it looks much better overall.

On 5/22/2019 at 4:26 PM, samagon said:

 

just so I understand clearly, you're holding Lime responsible for how Chris Matthews of Houston Business Journal used one of their scooters when he rented it?

As wilcal said, the Lime rep rode the scooter from the Galleria area to downtown. Matthews's tweet:

" I rode the lone operating Lime scooter in Houston yesterday. Lime scooter rep rode it from the Galleria down the Buffalo Bayou trail to his downtown hotel during rush hour. Would you use these scooters instead of driving your car around Houston? "

On 5/22/2019 at 8:33 PM, UtterlyUrban said:

I am glad that you feel that midtown is better.  

 

I have lived in downtown for 5 years and I can say that it is significantly worse today than 5 years ago.

On what do your base your opinion that it is worse? I'm looking at the statistics, which show that homeless numbers have significantly decreased over the last several years. This comes from the Coalition for the Homeless's 2018 report on the Point-in-Time Homeless Count & Survey for the Houston area, which is required by HUD. It shows a 51% decrease in overall homelessness since 2011, and a 63% decrease in unsheltered homelessness in that time. There has been a slight uptick since Harvey, but it's still significantly lower than it was 5 years ago.

3 minutes ago, H-Town Man said:

 

Well hell, we walked the same footsteps. I went to Brill and then to old Kleb, moving into new Kleb in 8th grade. Never went to Haude though. I thought all those schools were nicer than Strack, maybe because Strack was two stories and thus more bruising to the eye, and didn't have a pretty campus around it like old Kleb did. I actually liked the character of old Kleb and Klein, which seemed kind of like a little village in contrast to the new fortresses that have been built there. It was nice to walk outside between classes.

 

I appreciate your mom's hard work.

 

Yeah, Spring-Cypress used to be a nice drive. So was Louetta for that matter. It's crazy how it has all changed. I'd give a pretty penny to be able to drive back there one day and see Gerland's staring across Stuebner at Safeway and its little shopping center with wood-shingle roofs, Gulf gas on the other corner and everything west of the Klein Career Center nothing but trees...

 

Strack definitely looked brutalist on the outside, but I remember going to speech tournaments there in 6th-8th and thinking the inside seemed nicer, I guess because it was only 10 years old as opposed to 20. And up to that time I had never gone to a two-story school, which seemed cool.

Klein was definitely a much nicer school my last two years than my first two years. The Commons, Pavillion, and courtyard between the two, the Hi Rise, pretty much everything south of the original building, was pretty nice. I was kind of surprised that they tore down all that stuff that wasn't that old, when they could have just torn down and rebuilt the main building. But I guess that open campus with walking outside wasn't secure enough in this day and age.

Once I got my license, I used to joyride all around "up in the country" as I called anything north of Louetta, and I had my favorite "country roads." I'd take Old Louetta up to Spring-Cypress and then over to Huffsmith-Kohrville Rd, and then maybe turn on Boudreaux Road, and all that felt like the rural South at that time. I'd also take Louetta to North Eldridge Parkway, and head south on Eldridge, and it was nothing but dense pine forest as far south as Cypress-North Houston Rd. My girlfriend and I would pull off the road at the bridge over Cypress Creek and make out under the bridge. Shocking how built up that is now 25 years later.

It definitely seems better to me. I moved into Midtown in January 2000, lived there until April 2004. Any time day or night I wanted to walk from my apartment into Downtown, I had to pass under the Pierce Elevated and all the homeless camps. Turning all that into fenced parking lots some time after I moved was an obvious solution, one that was about 30 years overdue.

On 1/31/2019 at 11:18 AM, H-Town Man said:

I was there over the holidays, eating at Wing Stop. Yeah, the area seems to have gone down, reminds me of what shopping centers along Veterans Memorial south of FM 1960 used to look like. Are you thinking of the Kroger on the southeast corner of the road? Two of the other anchors have left this intersection, I think it was Randalls most recently on the northeast and I have no idea who was on the southwest where 24 Hour Fitness is. Meanwhile Strack Intermediate is looking as ghastly as ever, it's mind-boggling that such a building was ever constructed for children on this side of the Iron Curtain.

 

My "town center" was Louetta and Stuebner-Airline, which is treading water. The new Klein High School didn't come out as nice as I had hoped and I miss the old one. Maybe when the trees grow up it won't be so brutal. Food Town leaving isn't good.

 

Basically the whole stretch of Louetta from 249 to I-45 has gone downhill mainly due to relentless clear-cutting of trees.

 

That 24 Hour Fitness on the Southwest corner used to be the greenhouse Kroger I was talking about. Across the street on the Southeast Corner used to be another chain grocery store, definitely a Minimax: https://houstonhistoricretail.com/grocery/minimax/

Shoot, I would have given anything to go to Strack, I went to the original Kleb building, which was just as much of a windowless block, but older (from 1967) and run down. They moved Kleb into its current building three years after I finished 8th grade. I started out at Haude, which was Klein's first "modern" elementary school (a windowless block with open concept classrooms), then went to Brill for 4th and 5th (another windowless block), then after Kleb I went to Klein, which was pretty rundown by the early 90s. My sophomore year we had to endure all the mud and chaos and detours getting between classes while they enclosed the Commons and built the Pavillion (one of my friends of the debate team came up with the name). I haven't been in the new Klein building yet. I was in Klein Cain this February (I am the volunteer coach for my daughter's middle school speech team and Cain hosted a tournament) and was overwhelmed by the interior of that school. It felt like a major airport terminal or a shopping mall. We'll probably be going to the new Klein  this fall for a tournament, I'm curious to see what it's like, but will be strange to be in my "alma mater" yet will be unrecognizable to me.

Agreed on Louetta, my mom has been fighting that in the area for 20+ years, her biggest victory was convincing Kickerillo to give up the land for Kickerillo-Mischer Preserve. And Spring-Cypress and 2920, when I left for college in 1994, they were both still country roads with farms and even a few 100 year old farmhouses, now they're 21st Century Levitttown.

1 hour ago, Response said:

Don't confuse the Grand Texas Development with the Grand Texas Theme Park. The theme park is just one aspect of the development. The Grand Texas website does corroborate that there are multiple facets to this development. Not sure how you miss that. There's even a map showing you where all the various parks and side developments will be located.

 

No matter what the Chronicle says, what they are opening now is not a theme park (9), it is a water park (5) and an adventure park (3). There is a difference. The theme park may well never open. But they have opened the water park, the adventure park, the speed sport racing park, the RV park, some retail and some of the hotels/motels are currently under construction. So they're almost halfway there.

 

Right before they started construction of the water park and adventure park, (around December of 2017) I was very skeptical that they were ever going to get any more of this project built. But to my amazement, they actually did get 2 of these parks open. So who knows, we may actually see a theme park there one day. But it's years away if it's coming at all.

 

A theme park is a monumental feat of construction. Water park development is small potatoes compared to theme park development and I can't blame anyone for being skeptical about a theme park ever being built. The developers have missed so many timelines and come up with so many ridiculous excuses for delays that I for one would take anything they say with a grain of salt.

 

With that being said, I think it is a miracle they have even come this far.  So I'll cut them some slack for now because although it seems to be taking forever, so far they have been delivering what they have been promising. I certainly credit the developers with persistence.

 

If the theme park is built on the scale of Hanna-Barbara Land or Busch Gardens Houston (those places were built for little kids and had no major rides at all) , it probably won't be around long. But if the theme park is built anywhere close to this plan, I think it will have a very good chance for success. As for the success of Big Rivers, the one thing that will set them apart from the other water parks in town is that the Gator Bayou Adventure Park is included. No rides, but those zip lines look like fun to me. 

 

 

I did see that map, after 10 years with multiple missed deadlines, a big red block that says "coming soon" doesn't mean anything as far as I'm concerned. The theme park is what Galland led with in his promotion of the project both when he started it and for several years after - even as late at 2017, he said "We bought this land for one purpose, and that was to build a theme park.” Now when I click on the "Theme Park" link on the Grand Texas website, nothing happens, the Investor Information page mentions Big Rivers Waterpark, Gator Bayou Adventure Park, Speedsportz Racing Park, the Grand Texas RV Resort, and then says "shopping, dining, and hotels currently under construction or in planning," but doesn't mention anything about a theme park in planning. So what is it that I'm missing?

I'm not just skeptical about the theme park ever being built, I'm skeptical about the wisdom of using a water park as a stepping stone to a theme park, especially out there. The Houston area already has Schlitterbahn down in Galveston, Typhoon Texas in Katy, and Splashtown just 25 minutes away from Grand Texas - and Splashtown is closer to both the Woodlands and Houston's population center. Water parks have such a short operating season with high expenses, I question whether even Houston can sustain four. I don't know enough about adventure parks to know if that'll be enough of a tie-in to keep luring Houstonians away from other water parks, and given Galland's obvious lack of knack for capitalizing projects like this or managing marketing and promotion, I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't look into whether it would be enough of a lure either.

Sorry to sound so pessimistic, because I like theme parks and would like to see Houston have a good one, and I initially followed this project with some excitement, but its course has been disappointing, and I worry it may make it less likely for investors to want to participate in other, better theme park projects in the area.

I don’t see anything in the Chronicle article or the Grande Texas website to corroborate that, unless you want to count a broken link to a theme park page. After a decade of delays just to get this much open, I’ll believe it when I see it IRT a theme park ever opening. Let’s see if what they’ve got now survives as long as Hanna Barbara Land or Busch Gardens Houston. 

So ten years later,  "Grand Texas" is finally opening next week.

https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/east-montgomery/news/article/Grand-Texas-theme-park-Houston-opening-2019-13840991.php?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=facebook&fbclid=IwAR33ol83ZFyHf9kjXbe350nWLJ-Q0DMxWHgEEcakp39sAU_lfOLMRnLlA9c

Here's what it offers:
 

Quote

 

The first of its kind in Houston, the combined water and adventure theme park boasts some impressive attractions that are considered some of the best and biggest in Texas, including Houston's biggest lazy river (the Rio GRAND River) and the largest inflatable obstacle course in Texas (Wild Isle.)

The parks offer plenty of kid-friendly attractions, including a 300-component interactive play structure - another attraction that is considered the largest in Texas - called Gator Splash. A petting zoo, pony rides, massive maze, catch and release fishing, gem mining and more are also offered at the parks.

 

Anyone looking for an exceptional thrill ride can challenge themselves on the adventure park's multitude of aerial and ropes courses. Entry-level to expert-level zip line courses and rock climbing walls (including one of the tallest climbing walls in Texas according to Grand Texas) are offered year round. The park even offers a gator attraction that lets visitors get up close and personal with real life alligators, according to the release.

 

One-day general admission starts at $44.99 at the gate for adults, $34.99 at the gate for juniors. Some of the adventure courses are not included with admission and run extra.

 

Doesn't really sound like a theme park to me. Seems to have scaled back a bit from what they were saying it would offer 10 years ago. And they ashcanned the "no admission fee" idea.

Quote

Grand Texas is supposed to consist of several areas, including Boomtown, an indoor entertainment center with rock climbing, a mechanical bull, a giant arcade and other activities; Flint Ranch, an agriculture based play area with pony rides, petting zoos, pig races, hay pavilions, peewee rodeo and exhibits on farming and ranching; and Gunslingers, a state of the art, family friendly paintball facility with four themed fields made out of movie sets and one competition, airball field as well as target ranges. Galland is hopeful these areas, which will incorporate rail and oil history as well, will open in April 2010.

 

According to the website, Grand Texas also is to boast Wild Texas Frontier, an island filled with activities for all ages, including high ropes courses that traverse a river, canoeing, catch & release fishing, and a giant maze; and The Mansion, a reception hall reminiscent of the Texas State Governors Mansion, which can be used for a wedding reception of up to 400 guests or more intimate business functions. Galland hopes these parts of the park will open within a year of the park’s projected opening in Spring 2010.

 

There is to be no admission fee into the park, though some activities will have ticket charges.

 

1 hour ago, wilcal said:

 

Is "mixed-use" tenants not residential+commercial?

Not necessarily:

https://www.completecommunitiesde.org/planning/landuse/what-is-mixed-use-development/

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While mixed use has become a popular buzz word, the term can be confusing. It is not just limited to a multi-story development that incorporates commercial use on the first floor with residential uses on upper floors. The Urban Land Institute’s Mixed-Use Development Handbook characterizes mixed-use development as one that 1) provides three or more significant revenue-producing uses (such as retail/entertainment, office, residential, hotel, and/or civic/cultural/recreation), 2) fosters integration, density, and compatibility of land uses, and 3) creates a walkable community with uninterrupted pedestrian connections.

Also, the Houston Chronicle article uses the term "mixed-use" in regard to Memorial City in the following way:

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The Fort Worth-based company is tasked with reimagining the former Sears store on the south side of the mall, as well as developing plans for additional public spaces and mixed-use tenants to complement the 265-acre Memorial City campus in west Houston.

That comma, followed by "as well as", means that plans for mixed-use tenants (whether residential is part of that or not) is separate from what they are going to do with the former Sears store. And the 265 acre Memorial City campus is more than just the mall and its parking lot, it is also Memorial Herman Hospital and medical/professional buildings, as well as several office buildings and even apartment buildings which are already there:

http://www.memorialcity.com/about-us/metronational/

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Today, the ‘city within a city’ is 265 acres of Class A office space; retail centers, including Memorial City Mall, a 1.7-million-square-foot super regional center; the Memorial Hermann Memorial City Medical Center (the region’s second largest medical campus); the 33-story Memorial Hermann Tower; The Westin Memorial City and Hotel ZaZa Memorial City; and highrise and garden residential living.

1 hour ago, wilcal said:

 

A second CityCentre right next door? Who tf would want to live at the mall? "Hun, pick me up a cinnabon on your way up from the parking lot"

I'm not seeing in the article any mention of any plans for anything like that, so don't know where you're getting that.

Huh. I took my daughter here two-three (maybe four?) years ago, for old times' sake for me, and because I thought she'd like the ghost stories. Interior was just as cool as I remembered it, food was a lot worse than I remember, I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did, especially since the late 90s revitalization of downtown and all the much better dining options. My nostalgia aside, it's probably for the best that building is going to be put to a better use.