IronTiger

It was next to a railroad, which is going to limit walkability in some regards. But really, I suppose one way to back up what the building was is tracing back the land history of the apartments north of the freeway. If the entire property was condemned and then split off and sold, then probably not, but if part of the land was condemned and the original owners sold out then it might be traceable. From what I found, the address of the apartments, legally, isn't on Castle Court but rather 4508 Graustark, but I can't find anything on that property prior to 2016.

Wow, they're still on that? I remember reading about that circa 2006. There have been signs in Hempstead protesting a landfill for over a decade, and there are probably still Ashby High Rise signs around the Museum District (haven't checked in a few years). Guess the more things change the more things stay the same.

The H-E-B is/was right on the edge where the nice part of Bellaire ended and the crappy part began.

Any urban highway is going to cut through neighborhoods in the city no matter what. The big question was the urban highways cutting in the central business district. As for your other comment, I commute under 610 on a daily basis on one of the major roads that go under 610 North. On either side, there are old buildings and the occasional business. Yes, looking at Google Earth, there are more of the dense townhomes on the southern (more affluent) neighborhoods than the north side but even that's starting to change.

Of course there would be demolitions. If you wanted minimal demolitions, you would have to re-route 59 up to Kirby and Richmond (east of Greenbriar was where the heaviest demolition starts for 59, and even then a lot of that is reduced due to a tight right of way and using the railroad). The real question is if you want "core" to mean "CBD with few to no single family houses" (which I-45 DID avoid) or "core" to include "established neighborhoods". If you want to change the definitions, then anything in the Beltway is "core" as well. I find it interesting how the same people who accuse the Pierce as "cutting" through Midtown and shouldn't be there are the same ones who hold 610 as a dividing line between "muh inner loop core" and everyone outside of it.

In a historical sense, the highways DID bypass the core. The reason why I-45 is always bad because of the sharp curves in the road, and those were there to AVOID THE CBD. Interstate 10 went clear on the other side of the railroad while US-59 also avoided the core. With the exception of Boston's defunct Central Artery (which pre-dated the Interstate system), the Interstates were largely designed to go AROUND the downtown area. Anyone telling you otherwise either has no idea about history or is trying to push an agenda (usually both). Don't believe me? Fire up Google Earth (I think there's still a desktop version if you don't already have it), go back to 1944 when the freeways didn't exist (but leave the roads layer on) and tell me what you see.

The Navasota location is big and prominent, it's at a gas station constructed about five years ago that had space for a fast food and actually located 5 miles south of where the bypass ends and even longer to the city proper.

Wait, so the Sears had a ground lease that it only would've had for 100 years? Who owned it? I thought Sears had all that land, and leased some space to Fiesta. Huh. A while back we had discussions if Rice owned the land or not. I guess they really DID all along.

That's what I thought about the Tower Point H-E-B back in high school...back in high school, I remember getting really excited that the Google Earth maps view was from February 2010 and not from 2006, then looked at the empty patch where a new H-E-B was supposed to be and wondered how they would get it open, but no, by October it was open. When I drove home, I was surprised to see a new building for H-E-B that had just been a foundation a month or two before (it too is supposed to open by fall). I'm looking forward to it...the 43rd Street Kroger is fine for all intents and purposes, but there's a number of items that I prefer to get at H-E-B...

Unless there's a really strong compelling case and they were already considering it, petitions to have businesses locate in cities/areas are a lost cause (or petitions in general). The property is still leased by H-E-B if I recall and even if it is now closed, H-E-B keeps that lease, and they are often reluctant to lease it out to food and drug retailers. It also assumes that the demographics of the area will still hold and the flood didn't create/is creating a situation where potentially lower land value would allow less affluent residents to move in. Any "elevation issues" would require Trader Joe's to demolish the entire shopping center, too. Is the traffic count even that high where that H-E-B was?

I've been wondering what this building was (I don't remember it having a roof), so construction/demolition must be VERY slow. Assuming that the August 2017 Street View is all demolition and no construction, the building styles are completely different (different columns, roof, etc.) behind similar stucco (also, a third of the building was torn down). And indeed, on Google Earth, it looks like the "corner" of the building (where the main Dorsey's facade was) is the oldest portion, everything else (ironically now torn down or mostly torn down) was newer.

Seems like in the late 1970s and early 1980s (pre bust) it was a trend for the newer larger apartment complexes built out in Gulfton and Westheimer (the ones catering toward single young adults) featured nightclubs and restaurants on the premises. The trend even spread to College Station for a while (two were built) but I want to know more about the ones in Houston. I think Colonial House had more than one nightclub, but it seems strange that apartments would even do so...I wouldn't want to live near a nightclub with pulsing music until 2 am... Does anyone remember specific examples?

The only reference I could find of Shoney's becoming Jim's is this link and another long-dead forum post (assuming that SicEm365 puts back up the old BaylorFans archive) about the Shoney's there becoming Jim's. I know I had another source but it was lost (along with Shoney's in Waco opening in 1993). The sale didn't seem to affect Houston, probably because of Champs being there, as Shoney's existed in Houston in the mid-1990s.

I thought Jim's was the one that bought up a number of Shoney's in central Texas before closing them all down again, and if that's the case was Champs like Shoney's?

Empty lots don't really have to densification, it has to do with land value (and those two are not interchangeable). A row of strip centers, churches, restaurants, and hotels is not very dense, but downtown and Uptown are, and empty lots (or parking lots) usually indicate two things: 1) The land value is so low that it doesn't really make sense to build there (any place out in the country, neighborhoods in serious decline, City of Detroit, etc.) 2) The land value is so high that it doesn't really make sense to build anything other than a high-profit building (basically any urban area including San Francisco's former Central Expressway up until 2008-ish) If you look at Uptown, even back to 2004, you'll see that there are more empty lots than today but the lots that are developed (with a few exceptions) are all skyscrapers, dense malls, or hotels. Downtown has empty lots, and those lots won't develop until they find developers for big multi-story building. Putting in a Panda Express with its own parking lot and drive-through would definitely be attractive but the land value is too high to see a low-rise like that built anymore. At one time the land value in downtown was low enough that a McDonald's with a parking lot was there at Main and Capitol, but that obviously is not the case anymore.

The "Westpark line" (which is often used to describe a former railroad ROW as it existed from downtown to Eagle Lake) is unusable east of Shepherd (the last customer on the line after much of the line was cut for US-59) short of a cap project for I-69 and putting the rail over it, which would be one of the most expensive options. However, the line crosses US-59 at Cummins, about a 1 and 2/3 miles of where the line COULD go in theory. However, the rail going down Cummins means it will have to go over the 300-feet wide US-59 entirely, and demolish the strip center at the other end, so including elevation points we're talking maybe a 1,700 feet bridge, which is absolutely the most expensive part of the line and probably why METRO has been dragging their feet on it. If the rail turned off at Shepherd/Greenbriar and split so it could use that right of way and go underneath ready-built bridges it would save a ton of money in building and demolition, and then traditional railroad crossings are added down to Westpark Drive, just as the railroad did prior to 2001, including an awkward crossing at Westpark and Edloe. The big problem with that is that Greenway Plaza is now cut out of the plan, it really hurts the potential ridership of having that on the line (even if the convenience of having Kroger right on the line is added). It should also be noted that the 2003 referendum which I presume put the plans for the University Line to begin with was not on Richmond, specifically named the "Westpark Line" and paralleling US-59. You could argue that the Westpark right of way was a tentative plan (it was) but to claim that the plan sold to voters in 2003 was Richmond is false. https://www.ridemetro.org/METROPDFs/AboutMETRO/Referendum/2003-Referendum.pdf

Yeah, look at the picture with the truck doors. The stucco probably can't be saved even if it was pressure washed and painted, plus being overtaken by vines is highly damaging to brick (given age of masonry and excessive humidity)

Update: the 1984 directory lists this as Heights Bakery. Wonder when it closed up permanently and abandoned.

http://www.loopnet.com/Listing/1344-Yale-St-Houston-TX/9071926/ Anyone know what's up with this building? It's clearly been abandoned for years, and the build date is unknown (HCAD says 1930, Loopnet says 1950). It seems like it might have been a small grocery store at one time, and it's been in the hands of Jerry Court (d/b/a "City Wide Gourmet Foods" apparently) for the last 30 years.

But it isn't. The median is only 36 feet wide, enough for two left lanes and a comfortable median to put trees, etc. but not wide enough for light rail. If you look at any other Houston road with light rail, every single one either had significantly widened ROW or reduced lanes (if not both). Width for tracks is going to be about 25 feet accounting for their width, the power poles, and enough space for the trains and cars not to brush into each other. Factor in even a station that's going to be on one side of the road and that's 36 feet right there, which would preclude space for a left turn hand lane on that size (a station between tracks is even wider). At that point, you would need to reduce traffic lanes or increase right of way, but that means that "large enough for light rail" doesn't apply anymore. There are a few Houston roads that have a median actually wide enough (Bellfort between Jutland and Mykawa, JFK south of Beltway 8) but Broadway isn't one of them.

Dallas still uses them and Caltrans used them up until last year.

The apartments are trash, visited them in fall 2015 looking for a place to live. The thermostats were still of the "dial" variety and they couldn't even make the demo unit not smell like smoke. Imagine what the "real" units were like.

When did Houston stop using Botts dots for marking lanes? I know Dallas has a bunch of 'em but they seem to have largely disappeared in Houston over the years. Gessner Road had them on the south side of Interstate 10. Somewhere on YouTube there's an old video of someone heading to Memorial City Mall that way. Crosstimbers Road (east of Shepherd but west of Yale) and Blalock Road (north of Long Point) have similar situations where they originally had two sections of concrete divided neatly by a row of Botts' dots but at some point they were stripped out for traditional striping with a new bicycle lane making both lanes slightly narrower. A small handful of smaller streets actually have WHITE dots in the middle even though they are two lane roads but they may have been just removed later (Emnora Lane near Gessner, Maxwell Lane near I-45). For a wider example, Sawyer near Memorial Parkway had them too. I'm guessing originally the outer lane of Sawyer wasn't actually supposed to be a driveable lane, today it's four lanes until both lanes suddenly merge into one for the ramp to Memorial Parkway. Most of the highways had them for normal lane marking, today they're only used for construction. When did this shift away from the dots start?

From what I heard stopping at the Subway it's being converted to a Pilot, and the clerk mentioned a Starbucks inside. When I visited it was more apparent that the Subway was never connected to the gas station at all. From what I can make out of the old layout, the convenience store part was on the north side of the building with an entrance facing east, and Denny's was on the south side with an entrance facing south. The Subway was carved out of excess Denny's seating.

I *think* there might be one left, but another one of the unique Houston items...gone.