IronTiger

It's the drainage below that makes the difference. I'm proposing something like this--right now I'm at work so I can't show you "before", but this used to be a Burger King surrounded entirely by parking lot with no real drainage. Today, it's a retention pond with no development, while still providing parking for the area. That's what there should be more of (a lot more of). It still "fits" in with development, isn't super-expensive, and adds far more benefits than drawbacks for reasons listed earlier in this thread. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Almeda+Rd,+Houston,+TX/@29.7303881,-95.377226,89m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x8640eab710ba6797:0x665638146e08a4e5!8m2!3d29.6585817!4d-95.4016789

The floodplains need to be redrawn, that's for sure. Can't have a 500 year flood and a 1000 year flood in a city less than 200 years old. So obviously, more of the city is in a floodplain than thought. Mass demolition is not going to be the answer to the city's woes. It would be different if the city was shrinking, so demolishing existing homes is going to just push out sprawl even further at best. Houston is not SimCity, and you can't just give yourself carpal tunnel with the bulldozer tool, and your 17 years is an awfully arbitrary number just to get the most disasters in and account for Allison, even if there were no major floods or other significant natural disasters in the 1980s and 1990s (I don't know enough about Houston history to say that for sure). One thing I agree on is the sprawl problem, though not in the way you're thinking. Most developments have not included proper retention ponds, but it's also the infrastructure itself, a lot of the city was built fairly fast fairly cheaply in the 1970s and 1980s and that's been a problem. I know for a fact that roads like Long Point Road will easily flood just during a brief but hard rain.

I had read that the Brays Bayou project in progress actually did prevent/reduce flooding...where it was completed. The big problem with the flooding was that recent infrastructure improvements HAVE curbed the floods, it's the older stuff that didn't. I certainly don't think mass demolition is the answer, at least not on the scale Kinkaid is suggesting. I would propose requirements on detention ponds in new development, as well as converting existing long-vacant spots (like the Main Street McDonald's site mentioned) into drainage areas with permeable asphalt lots. By the way, Google Maps updated to show Houston as of 8/30 with lots of flooding, including the Sam Houston Tollway near CityCentre turned into a rather lovely looking canal, until you know it's not supposed to be there.

Pretty sure that the Fiesta in question opened around 1989, not '99

In further thinking, sealing off the tunnels from floodwaters with the big "submarine" doors may have prevented damage underground but I also think that affected waters above. One site that would be GREAT for a retention pond area is right at the corner of Richmond and Main Street. Close down the little section of Rosewood and tear out the old McDonald's slab used for parking, as well as other slabs from old development. In return, a new detention pond can be dug as well as modern porous asphalt. + Gets rid of blight + An environmentally friendly replacement to the leftovers of yesterday that weren't even doing much + Can mitigate flooding + Keeps parking use + Adds green space + Does not harm traffic patterns + Relatively cheap + No structure demolition + No additional land used + No need to worry about maintaining Rosewood again There's not a lot of downsides here. Then try to do that all over the city.

I think that part of Houston's problem is just largely unchecked development for years. Probably the parking requirement may have stemmed further ultra dense development that in retrospect, would've been worse for flooding. In the meantime, new development needs to have detention ponds and possibly defunct retail could be demolished for it. Almeda and Wheeler used to have a Burger King that was razed for parking, but more importantly a place for water to drain. We need more spots like that, and they can also be little "green spots" in a city filled with development.

I would say that more areas need to be bought out and converted into greenspace, a la what happened after Allison, especially struggling retail (what if the bulk of West Oaks Mall became a huge reservoir lake?!). Perhaps also some sort of parallel "emergency spillways" for bayous. There also needs to be rules on retention ponds, I know College Station instituted detention ponds a while back for commercial and large residential developments, and I think that has prevented flooding. Nothing like a parking lot that gets sopping wet with just the slightest of downpours...

I assume for the floods that the tunnels were sealed with the giant doors they put in place after Allison, therefore the damage here is limited to the surface and some underground garages. It also appeared from my last check of Google Maps yesterday that US-59 was fully open.

I hope the Julia Ideson Building and the archives are okay. Luckily, the flooding doesn't seem to be too bad, you can still see that the planters aren't overflowing and you can still see the road striping. It's been really difficult to tell how much damage there is. I saw flooded streets but I don't know where...plus some roads have notoriously poor drainage (a brief but heavy rain can easily flood out some roads...Long Point Road comes to mind). I also saw a picture of water near Sam Houston Parkway with a stoplight almost overfilled, but I don't know where that was (I think it was near NE Houston). I haven't seen any big "highways into canals" pictures, though I suspect that maybe that's not a bad thing if the water doesn't flow into neighborhoods and instead serves as emergency water conduits. Yesterday, there was actually a part of Highway 6 NB in Grimes County that was closed due to flooding, and there are no shelters prepared in Bryan-College Station. I suspect that as Houston dries out, there will be some blowback to local political officials who said that "local officials know best" and that people should just ride out the storm.

So, I assume that the MGP near the Northwest Mall opened at approximately the same time?

Keep in mind that this was CSISD, not Houston--but the timeframe seems right.

Wow! This post dislodged an old memory...when I was in kindergarten back in my hometown in the mid-1990s (where classes were only half-days), I remember one of my teachers saying that the classroom (which seemed rather large, at least for a 5 year old...I'd say that it was about the size of a typical elementary school classroom) used to be twice the size before they built a wall between the two classes (the building was built in the 1970s and still showed it...brown everywhere). I wonder if they did "cluster classrooms" for kindergarten back then.

It looks like "Kirin Japanese Seafood & Sushi Buffet" is still there.

From perspective it looks like El Pupusodromo looks like it would be LJS. Meanwhile, Smiley Plaza looks like it replaced something else (between McAvoy and the apartment complex) sometime after 1989 but before 1995 per aerials but HCAD says it was built in 1974 (and Smiley Plaza does not say "1990s build" to me). The picture must have been when Stop N Go was brand-new as HCAD says 1985. Knowing this chain, I'd say that in the mid-1990s it converted to a Diamond Shamrock but kept the name, renovated & rebranded the Stop N Go into a Corner Store (DS had that shape of Corner Store) in the early 2000s, then rebranded as a Valero around 2006 or 2007.

According to Google Earth, all four(?) were wiped clean by 1989 but the strip mall wasn't built until 2000 (according to HCAD).

I thought that it was if you remember the 1960s you weren't really there. In all seriousness, though, what did happen to that row? Was there a big fire?

Well, it was 1995 when Diamond Shamrock bought it, so it probably lasted through the 1980s. It does look like that entire row was bulldozed sometime in the 1980s for....reasons?

The source is Houston Chronicle from this page but does anyone know where this is today? I'd say it still exists as a Valero with a Corner Store, and you can see a Long John Silver's in the background to the left and apartments(?) to the right. The road seems to be a typical four-lane thoroughfare but lacks a large median, my first guess was Long Point Road but that lacks Corner Store gas stations oriented like that.

Looks like the perspective is throwing me off. I see the curve and I know it's facing east, but Midnite Sun is 524 Westheimer, which would place it in the middle of the block, whereas the Stop N Go is farther out in a building that still exists (though is vacant) at Westheimer and Whitney. According to TSHA, Stop N Go adopted that name in 1983, though that wasn't the logo they were using by the late 1980s. I'd reckon that they closed then when Diamond Shamrock bought the company and purged it of non-fuel locations?

The first picture in this thread is from Arch-ive.org, run by @sevfiv. I've never been inside the building, or even seen it (I just remember the fence around the property with indications that it was used by HISD at some point, somewhere deep in HAIFistory there is a thread I made on it). It reminds me a LOT of how the defunct Zachry Engineering Center on A&M used to look like.

It looks like Stop N Go (and the other businesses there) were converted houses (which is what many businesses in Montrose were like). Neat! The building looks like it was gone by 1989, though (probably closed after converting a nearby 7-Eleven?)

Too bad! A few years ago you always seemed to know EVERYTHING about I might have had questions in, including hotels (fantastic stuff with the Hilton near the airport, I still remember that). As an aside, I did find out a bit later that the Preference Inn didn't even open as Preference Inn, it was opened as "Icom", a French-styled hotel (built at the same time as Sofitel/Hyatt Regency but more budget-oriented). Yeah, I was a bit thrown off at first, but my second post found that the Royal Coach Inn and the "Radisson Inn" were one and the same. (Also, Venture didn't even build out anything, that was all the dealership's doing)

Well, there's no Randalls stores nearby and they can rebuild their market share, it can be an attractive space rather than holding out hope for a Nordstrom or putting something like a second Macy's or Dillard's there (or outright demolishing the space), it can be an attractive and interesting addition to a regional mall, and all that. They have only closed one Houston-area store since the Albertsons takeover, and the independent division status was too small to justify (seeing as how the Tom Thumb stores were re-aligned with the Dallas offices, and the few Louisiana stores were not enough to compensate) along with the DC.

I use script-blockers and other tools on my desktop, but browsing HAIF mobile is a painful experience because regularly, I try to click on some topic link, and before the topic fully loads it redirects me to some third party spam site. Then when I try to click back, it takes me back to the index and not the topic I was reading. It's terribly frustrating and I don't know what's the cause of it (host, third party attacking host, webmaster) but it wasn't always like this and I'm wondering if anyone else has had the same issues.

I'm guessing that the center remodeled in the late 1980s when AppleTree expanded. SOMEwhere in my archives I have a picture when AppleTree was still at the center. There was a blurb in Texas Monthly regarding Kids' Kounty.