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Nate99

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Everything posted by Nate99

  1. Nate99
    They have added something of an "eyebrow" to the top of the unfinished section. Not sure how much of it you can make out in the picture here. There will be a ledge right below the 4th floor windows.
  2. Nate99
    I was on top of the garage behind it and took this shot.
  3. Nate99
  4. Nate99
    and a new vantage point...
  5. Nate99
    This should be kind of fun when full...
  6. Nate99
    Not that I recall, but I might have missed an earlier round of things. The planning and logistics of a project of this scope would be interesting to see the particulars of, but I'm sure they don't want to set that train in motion until they have as much of it locked down as they absolutely can. We'll see. The proposal next to the garage across Milam from the park seems like more of a long shot. With Hines on this one, I'm not so worried.
  7. Nate99
    Thanks for the info DScott.
  8. Nate99
    Federal funds for any local project are a winner if your state/locality is a net taker. We are net payers in to the federal treasury. To the extent we participate in the fun, we're not taking "our slice of the pie", we're making everyone's slice bigger that we or someone in the future will have to pay for. If you have a project that benefits Houston, sell it to Houstonians and we can fund it, don't hide it in something coming out of DC. I'm mildly opposed to the idea, but warming to its necessity if we want to be able to move around at all, by car or otherwise in 20 years. Raise the funds locally and increase the accountability. Loop 610 connects the second largest port in the United States to a highway that spans from one ocean to another. That's not exactly in the same realm of national economic interest as shuttling Galleria shoppers to a bar before heading back home, but clearing the highways of their cars may be at some point.
  9. Nate99
    I know that the federal trough flows aplenty for local transit projects, but the more that gets doled out to anyone, the more we (as Texans) pay. Fed spending is so opaque, I wouldn't presume that the trough is of finite size anyway, in the end, this would just another burden (with whatever pork trades had to be agreed to for the votes) piled on the heap that we will end up footing more than our share of in any case. So for our billion(s) dollar rail project, we would fund a few bio-domes in Iowa along with the concurrent administrative bloat. If you want out congressmen to play the pork game better than the other guy to fund such things, I can't really get behind that, to the extent that is a winnable game at all. I think Houston could manage it if any city could, if we truly wanted to, without playing Mother May I through Congress and the DOT, the waste would just be more difficult to hide. The Houston area's GDP is larger than Austria's. Put some teeth in to the development contract and maybe it would be more manageable in a situation like Luminaire outlined that avoids the DC sausage factory.
  10. Nate99
    If we want rail, we should pay for it. Why does the federal government need to be involved?
  11. Nate99
    The time between soil samples and ground breaking seems to run in to many months. Q4 does not seem unreasonable given that we saw those guys on the site only a month or so ago. Why they cleared off the parking lot is anyone's guess. The Marriott Marquis had the soil sample trucks doing their thing well more than a year prior to ground breaking. Ditto Hess and the tower apartments across from Finger's ballpark place.
  12. Nate99
    I agree, the whole thing seemed to have a complete absence of satisfactory outcomes for anyone involved.
  13. Nate99
    The whole thing became something of a self parody quite a while ago. I was rooting for both sides to lose.
  14. Nate99
    It's difficult to guess with any precision, but they are probably 5-8 feet below the basement floor level. It must be a part of the tower's foundation that they have to muck out completely to start the footprint of foundation pilings for the new tower. I was in Calgary recently and they are building a tower there on a whole city block downtown with a hole that is at least four stories deep. It seriously looks like a mine.
  15. Nate99
    Agreed, great place to watch a game. Really not a bad seat in the house. Last time I was in there, they still had (very aged) wooden benches.
  16. Nate99
    As per right back at you. Might as well make myself useful in my wandering around. Today was jackhammer pride day, evidently. It was deafening from 609 Main, light rail work, Houston Club and elsewhere.
  17. Nate99
    Just speculating, but I'd imagine there are all manner of adhesives at their disposal, if they are not bolted on somehow. It would look awful if they started falling off.
  18. Nate99
    They are chipping out more concrete below the "floor" level of Texas Tower basement.
  19. Nate99
  20. Nate99
    I was referring to the bands of slightly offset from the facade/vertically placed "bricks" (as in the pic below). Maybe they were there all along, but I thought I remembered seeing more seams before.
  21. Nate99
    I believe that it was an event hall, but only recently. It may have been a small operation type office, and there was a foreign car garage in that general area (with BMW and Acura symbols painted on the windows) but that may have been another building, but it has not been anything successful in my memory.
  22. Nate99
    Interesting how they somewhat disguised the seams in the prefab brick panels. It looks good.
  23. Nate99
    They look to be chipping away at the last of the basement floor currently. All of the structure is gone apart from the basement wall in the Fannin/Texas corner. The orange excavator with the jackhammer attachment was going after a block of concrete that looked to be several feet thick in every dimension. I think it was probably outside of the tower's foundation perimeter though. That may have been the crane base now that I think about it. There is another sub-ground level foundation just to the south of the old tower that they are in the process of taking out too.
  24. Nate99
    You shall not pass.
  25. Nate99
    I like it, but I'm not picky.
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