crunchtastic

Next time you talk to your English co-workers, when you're done just say "ta". (as in ta-tas). The snooty Londoners will wonder who you've been talking to behind their backs.

If I have to hear 'chef-driven restaurant' again in this context I'm going to have a seizure. Christ on a cracker! How much gastropubbin' and slow food cocktails do the Good People of The Heights need in a 5 mile area? Clearly not that many, because it's easier to use the prescribed anti-walmart talking points rather than keep the 'chef-driven restaurants' like Bedford and Textile viable in one's own neighborhood. Curious how no one wants crappy chains, but yet the Heights manages to keep the Creeks (aka the home of the dry, overpriced burger) hopping. Style over substance, apparently. I second 20th st Dad's Chacho's motion.

I'm almost positive there was one on Nasa Road 1, by the old putt putt near Galveston Rd. If it wasn't Arthur Treachers, it was another fish and chips place (before there were long john silvers here). late 60s to mid 70s. haha, i just looked more closely at the photo, what's with vinnie barbarino out there cleaning the windows? or is it chachi?

Costco snack bar! They have a great all beefer. A drink and a big weiner for a mere $1.50.

They have awesome stoner drive-thru food no one else does: 6-packs of mini-corndogs. Yum, I love corndogs.

srsly, it's a new word for me! But yes, I am. Or would that be 'homette'?

what's a Houton HOMER? Is it an acronym? I've never heard of one before. I'm a little inclinded to think that a person who feels compelled to drive out if his way to keep his out-of-town friends from seeing a hotel building next to the park has issues. Seeing as how you had to drive through 200 hundred potholes and past a few dozen homeless people to get there, I'm gonna go out on a limb here, and suggest that your friends have already started devleoping their opinion of downtown Houston before they are assaulted by the appalling architectural mediocrity of a mid-priced hotel chain.

Star Trek, nyet. More the bright white lights of Kubrick. But I'm with you, I don't much care about lights downtown. Just don't be ugly and slutty about it, is all I'm saying.

Perhaps there is too much science fiction talking here, but it seems to me that the less human a place the more brightly lit it is. Creeps me out.

This building looks awesome right now, before the interiors are finished out. You can see straight through it. I'm glad we were spared the lights around the turbines. Downtown doesn't need every new building calling attention to itself like a fat suburban housewife wearing a shrunken Lucky tee and metallic platform sandals. There is beauty in restraint.

Zoos sort of creep me out. The premise behind Planet of the Apes really messed with me as a child, and to this day, the idea of primates in captivity gives me the heeby jeebies.

Crunchtastic, who is herself rigorously Sicilian-American, remains most geniunely unimpressed. .........Although, the names does lend itself to being mangled and pronounced as Pie-Hole-Uh, which is pretty funny.

Roger that, Attica. My dark dirty neo-con secret has been revealed to all. I think some people get blinded by the civic club groupthink. I see it all the time in my own neighborhood: the yuppies and guppies move in, all jazzed about living in the hood. It starts off appropriately enough: neighborhood clean-ups, crime awareness and reduction, and generally making the area more safe and therefore, more attractive. Then the gated-community mentality starts to come through. The enemy becomes renters, low-income neighbors, attempts to block places of commerce that would attract such people, frowning upon 'chain' retail, etc. But it's not black and white. There is room for all, and I believe that. Just because I saute my veggies in a $300 all-clad from Sur La Table and grind my own meat doesn't mean I don't also shop at big box retailers. With frequency. And I refuse to let groupthink make my shopping decisions for me. The Target Good / WalMart Bad meme grows tired. It's partly true and mostly naive at best, and intentionally deceptive at worst. There are a number of HAIFers who have weighed in on their feeling agaisn Wal-Mart and I respect them, and believe them: Barracuda, Kinkaid, Kylejack, etc. I think they, too believe in a middle ground. But they're not the ones who are cramming their agenda down everyone's throats. What offends me in this discussion are the numbers of the anti-walmart people are hanging their argument on the 'evil business practices. If that's really the case, and the mission is to save the greater good from WalMart, then that mission is accomplished by convincing 80-odd percent of Americans not to shop there. Predictably, I don't see any of them spreading the good word down in the Almeda WalMart parking lot. I suspect there may be a number of new and newish people to town, who don't understand that inner-loopers of means here don't necessarily follow the old east-coast patrician, paternalistic flavor of liberalism. Or the left-coast crunchy flavor, for that matter. The other part of the argument, property values and running down the mom and pops, has no useful data to support it. Not in a major metro area where WalMart is already established, particularly infill in a former industrial area during a recession in which growth has nearly ground to a standstill. So, we see the grasping at straws, the use of non-pertinent and invalid arguments to trying to slap on a veneer of authority and good intentions on the oldest NIMBY play in the book. Not for all, but for many of loudest and most strident, the unspoken message is always the same, and I suspect deep down is fear-based: "I'm a top 20 percenter, and I worked hard for the education, lifestyle, rich spouse, informed tastes, hard body, fill-in-the blank, that makes me and my environment feel good, unique and authentic. Please don't destroy my consumption-based illusion.' I say there's room for all. Let Wal-Mart build, and whenever the Regent Square people can find some cash, the area will have a whole new slew of appropriately unique shops and cocktail bars where $10 skillet crowd won't spoil the vibe. Room for all!

Kidding? I think not. You make it from where? My office with 2,000 other warm shopping bodies at Heights and Allen Parkway? The round trip drive time from my office to Sawyer Heights is 15 minutes with no train, and in 30 minutes I hit BOTH Target and Petsmart. I know this because I do it about once a month, as do countless others from my building. In fact, Target is commonly referred to as the 'The Caf' because the joke is more people go there at lunch than eat in the crappy cafeteria on campus. And many of those people will go to WalMart instead (or at least put it in the rotation) because it will be that much closer. lol, you clearly have a lot to learn about the lunch-hour powershopper. Judging by your member data, I presume you joined HAIF expressly to spread the good NIMBY word. Why not humor us, and try to come to the table with some pertinent data, or at the very least, believable anecdotal stories. You still never cleared up exactly what Wal-mart's southern demnographic boundary is after your lecture on the 20th street Maginot Line. And I'm still waiting for you take another stab at your bizarre assertion that Wal-Mart will force out Canino's, despite the fact the 20 years of grocery store growth in the area hasn't already done so. Tick Tock.

Excellent point about people who work nearby. I'm hearing chatter in my office compound already from all the hardcore lunch hour shoppers. I'm sure more than a few commuters would like the option to do lunch hour/after work shopping in order to get it out of the way before slogging home down 10 or 45 north. I'd even go so far as to pull a number out of my ass, and say that there are easily 800 to a thousand suburban WalMart shoppers here once you factor in non-AIG tenants. All within a quarter mile of the propsed Yale St store, 5 days a week.

lol, Ed Wulfe begs to disagree. Your post is unfortunately filled with wrong statements about businesses you fundamentally don't understand. By your logic, Canino's should have already been run out of business years ago by the 3 Fiestas in proximity. In fact, they're doing better than ever thanks to gentrification of the Heights and Lindale and the growing latino population generally. Canino's is not just a market stand but a distributor. If WalMart/Sams were going to drive them out of business, it would have already happened at the wholesale, not retail, level. I live in a majority-hispanic inner loop neighborhood. The meat markets and panaderias are micro-local places that cater to foot traffic and the newest immigrants still needing a familiar experience. Wal-Mart is destination shopping. They are not natural competitors.

There aren't any better options out there. Not realistic ones. When will see with open eyes what the true state of the economy (and commercial real estate and finance, specifically). It is time to adjust your dated utopian visions of mixed-use, town-square, quasi-urban wholesomeness for all. Quit being willfully ignorant of reality. This is the reality: Houston Pavillions: mainly empty. West End: almost entirely empty. City Centre: mostly empty. Regent Square: dirt. For three years, dirt. And consider that Houston is in better shape than nearly all of the country. The Costco development got it right on Richmond and would like to see Wal-Mart do the same thing. I think it's unlikely though. Like Niche said, the growth is coming from well capitalized grocery and big box retail. Dream all you want, there's not going to be mixed use boutique hotel, gymboree/slash whatever built on that large a site. It is not economically viable now and it won't be for years. Right now this country is saturated by retail that people aren't buying. Wal-Mart will bring things people will buy, and a net gain of jobs to the area, period. None of the other big boxes ringing the Heights forced businesses and jobs out. Not Lowes and HD on the north loop, not Target, not the new giant Kroger. You are using a 20 year old argument pertinent to small town America and it simply doesn't apply in Houston, Texas. Protest Wal Mart labor practices all you want, but understand that keeping people under 40 hours a week is the rule, not the exception, in large retailers. Shop at Target and pretend that the cute sundress you just bought was not made in Ecuador by near-slave labor. Delude yourself into thinking that HEB is a Chinese-plastic free zone. Do whatever makes you feel right and good. But for the love of god, don't keep pushing this non-argument that a Yale St Wal Mart will take jobs and destroy businesses. At this location, in this city, it will not.

I'd love nothing more than to see the concerned heights neighbors do a real protest of the proposed Yale Wal Mart. Think of it as a meaningful vacation from strenuous days of blogging, girls lunches at Stella Sola, play dates, bikini boot camp,and taking your overly-accesorized children to Berryhill while the moms relax with some 'ritas. Raise awareness for the cause by mobilizing for hours a day in the 100 degree heat, marching in the dirt with signs and bullhorns. Or how about going door- to- door with clipboards? Forming a human chain in front of the bulldozers? If you did, you might get a tiny bit of insight into the tiring, hot and less-than-comfortable lives of the people for whom WalMart is a good thing. Yea, I know I'm being hyperbolic and rude. I originally expressed these sentiments in a PM, but I feel compelled to go public with them. I've had dear friends in the Heights on and off for more than 20 years, and there's a lot about it I love. But I am really, really glad that I did not buy a house there. Because lately I find the misdirected, contradictory righteousness just downright suffocating. We're talking about empty dirt by the railroad tracks, on the other side of the freeway, generating no jobs and nothing to the tax base. I understand taking a philosophical stance, but not at the expense of our community during a recession. I will say this to the Stop Wal-Mart crowd: whatever big box retailer builds on that site, watch the news when they start hiring. When 5,000 people show up to apply for 250 jobs, ask yourself: are my priorities perhaps misplaced?

You could always move on up to the east side. No restrictions here! OK, maybe some lightweight deed restriction on certain streets about multi-family and commercial, but hey. Unlike the Heights, I'll have light rail 3 blocks away from mi casa in the next two years. It may only go to Minute Maid Park and down Harrisburg, but hey, it's a start. And if you ever get lonesome for the Heights, I think the #40 Pecore bus comes through here.

I'm late to the game and still trying to figure what Heights-invasion is happening. This is proposed for south of the I-10? It's practically at the railroad tracks! The cries for more fancy cheese, more checkout lanes and more parking just resulted in the planet's largest Kroger on Shepherd, but a Wal-Mart on the other side of the highway is a problem? There is apparently no pleasing the Heights. I hate shopping at Wal-mart (and virtually all large stores) because it attracts so many people with their armies of horrible little children. But, I love their RV parking policy. I'm stoked, because when I cash out and get rid of all my stuff to live in a used motor home, thanks to the Wal-Mart parking lot, I can stay inside the loop.

Plus 2 for Emo building. I used to work nights in a tiny, dim office near his eye. It made me cry, too.

If you've ever wondered what English football hooligans are like, this would be a good time to start drinking at the Richmond Arms. Unlike the relatively mannered ManU fans, lots of Tottenham and Chelsea people there.

Where is CityKid? Surely he has some thoughts on why Houston -- despite our notable lack of film/tv studios, Tyler Perry, and general urbanity-- beat both Atlanta and Dallas.

This is all very exciting. Be sure to tell me when Houston soccer hysteria reaches the point that I can rent out my well-appointed study to 2 or 3 hot Croatian dudes for a $1,000 a week. I missed the Super Bowl in Houston, so I fully expect to be able to cash in on proximity to the new Dynamo stadium.