msteele6

In the mid eighties I was working in the commercial steel fabricating business here in Houston. By the time I got out in 1986 steel was selling so cheaply we couldn't give it away. The main culprit was the Savings and Loan collapse. They had been deregulated and had decided that gambling was a more lucrative occupation than investing. As a consequence, anyone with an idea that included real estate investing could finance it at a savings and loan (similar to the late unlamented housing bubble). I distinctly remember whole strip centers being built, apparently on speculation, that never had a tenant, the most memorable to me being the Tang City Mall on South Main (Hwy 90) near where Beltway 8 now crosses 90. This mall was demolished a few years ago. At the time you could drive around the city and see "For Lease" signs on almost every mid rise building. As far as residential neighborhoods, I went looking for a house amongst all of the foreclosures of the time (it seemed like there was a foreclosure auction every week), the neighborhood that seemed the hardest hit was Mission Bend. I drove around that neighborhood many times and it seemed like there was a foreclosure on every block. As far as pollution is concerned, I don't believe that Houston has ever been really bad mainly because, wirth our flat landscape and constant sea breeze, the pollution is quickly blown to other parts.

All of these monetary considerations are moot as long as the alternative is to move 150 lb people around the city in 3,500 lbs. of scrap metal while emiting gases that are moving us closer to destruction day by day. The only people who adamantly oppose mass transit are the ones with vested interests in the automobile culture, car salesmen, insurance salesmen, gas station owners, etc. Of course, they are going to oppose it due to its "excessive costs" etc. not mentioning that the automobile itself has to be (and has been) subsidized by gargantuan outlays for its own infrastructure, roads, gas stations, traffic control systems, automobile repair facilities and the list goes on and on. Finally, I would say again that the issue is moot in the long run, the automobile culture that we have created simply isn't sustainable at the level that now exists in my humble opinion. JMO Cars delenda est. - Cato (revised)

I believe that there was another Chuck Wagon (Chuck Shack?) at 75th and Lawndale. It was next to the theater or possibly just across the street, at one time there were two hamburger joints almost straight across the street from each other at that corner (or rather just up 75th Street towards Mason Park from that corner) one of which is still there, having morphed into a Mexican food restaraunt if I'm not mistaken. I can attest to the fact that Martini's Hardware has been on the same site since the '50's. As far as traffic being bad on Lawndale, that would be before my time, however, I do believe that Lawndale was once an important route to Galveston (via Old Galveston Road) and that might have caused some heavy traffic.

So many things wrong with this post on so many levels. It appears that the poster is an aspiring (frustrated?) radio talk show host. That can be deduced from his method of argument . You must PROVE every assertion you make while they must be "taken in context", they are "only joking" and so forth. With people of this kind, argument is fruitless because they don't accept facts nor recognize logic. Therefore, the only possible response would be to quote Bible verses to them. I have doubt that there are numerous candidates for the task in the book of Revelation that would be adequate to PROVE my assertion, however, I will leave that exercise to the readers. I am also quite certain that I will not have the last word on this issue given Mr. Scare's nearly 14,000 posts and therefore won't make the attempt, but I will say this, in ten years the climate change deniers will be as extinct as the Dodo bird, and for the same reason. Finally, I note that Mr. Scare says that he doesn't mow his yard in November, that statement can mean only one of two things either he uses undocumented labor for the task or he lives in a trailer park and therefore has no need. In view of his previous comments (and their prodigious quantity, if not quality) I favor the latter possibility.

You want me to prove something that will happen in the future? That's quite a task.

Change is always seen as impossible until it happens, then it's seen as inevitable. I'm old enough to remember when we didn't mow our lawns here in Houston in November.

Quite a few fallacies here. I'll try to address them one by one. First, "isn't on any...potential transit line"? How would we know that something isn't on ANY potential transit line? Second, ending our automobile culture wouldn't mean doing without automobiles completely (and certainly there would be uses that would REQUIRE automobiles) it would simply mean using them only when necessary, after all, do we really need a 4,000 lb car to transport a 150 lb woman around town while going 0-60 in 5 seconds? Thirdly, if the money used to support the automobile infrastructure were diverted to fund a transit system, 80 percent of the things that you now do would probably shrink to something like 25 percent (or some other small number). Finally, it doesn't really matter how we argue about this. if we continue on the path we are now on, none of us will be doing ANYTHING and so the whole argument will be moot.

Just noticed this post. The actual name of the church was the Freeway Baptist Church. I attended this church from the early 1960's until the 1970's. The church is still in existence and is now located just south of the Beltway next to the little league fields. The pastor was originally Jack Bridges, then Scotty Alexander and finally (for me) Granville LaForge.

We have to kill the automobile culture before it kills us.

We build more roads to accomodate the cars - and then we build more cars because the roads are there. Meanwhile we eliminate public transport because, after all, everyone has a car don't they? The U.S. has created a public transportation system that is wasteful in the extreme and not only in the fuel that it takes to run it but in the raw materials that are required to create it. I have nothing against the automobile, I have one just like everyone else, it's just that the system that has been created cannot be sustained over the long run, and if we are to survive as a civilization it will have to be modified. I say HAVE to be modified because the alternative is the destruction of the civilization that we have created. The Earth itself is telling us this. If you don't believe it maybe you will be reminded the next time you're mowing your grass in November. By the way, the most important thing we could do to increase the efficiency of the current transportation system would be to address the inefficiency of our traffic control system, sometime it seems to me that the traffic signal system that we now have in place is actually designed to IMPEDE traffic rather that facilitate it. If you don't believe it, think about the inefficiency of sitting at a red light in the middle of the night with no traffic in sight. The controls (those stainless steel boxes at the corner that are approximately the size of refrigerators) house a mechanism that is about as sophisticated as an common kitchen timer and still break down every time the dew gets a little deeper than normal. We can send a man to the moon using a computer smaller than the average traffic signal control box.

Money spent on rail projects isn't wasted, it's invested. The rail projects have so many potential benefits they're difficult to enumerate, however, for starters they have the potential to drastically reduce emissions, one of the most important challenges of this generation. The status quo automobile society is soon going to be as dead as the dodo bird - and good riddance, after all the idea of a 4,000 lb car hauling around a 120 lb woman is as ridiculous as it is inefficient. I would respectfully suggest that anyone not wishing to share its fate start working on its replacement. JMO P.S. I forgot to mention that the 4,000 lb car wouldn't be quite so absurd if our vanity didn't require it to accelerate to 60 mph in about 5 seconds.

Actually, looking at your description again, I'm more convinced that the room you remember was the club that was accessed from the area right next to the grassy hill between the bowling alley and the Joske's. The conference room was on the opposite side of the mall next to the mall offices (near the old Newberry's and Bond's). This grassy hill was bordered by huge blocks of granite that we used to climb down as they formed a sort of giant stair case leading from the "bridge" that ran along one side of the Joskes's down to the parking lot that lay adjacent to the bottom floor (basement) of the Joske's. I have a picture of Gulfgate taken from the air that shows the area perfectly but I can't figure out how to attach it to my post. However, if you look at the Mall Hall of Fame site referenced in NenaE's post above it's next to the area marked "Plaza" on the layout. This plaza was a grassy area that was also a hill.

With regard to the proximity of Mr. Goss' and Mr. Powers' projects I've heard that ornithological specimens displaying identical plumage congregate homogeneously.

If I am not much mistaken the dark haired man that Candace Mossler is smiling at in post #15 above is Mel Powers. It's also interesting that the building that Mr. Foreman was allegedly trying to homestead (post #10) is in the Arena Towers, a developement that was owned by Mr. Powers. I heard that Mr. Powers got into a rather heated dispute with a local steel erector about one of his projects and as he banged on the table the erector grabbed his tie thus restraining him. It's also interesting that Mr. Powers project was located right next to the Dean Goss dinner theater. Mr. Goss had some interesting incidents in his life that revolved around mysterious murders (two of his wives if memory serves).

I watched Gulfgate being built in the 1950's as a young child. The thing that most impressed me was that the entire mall was built on a giant hill. I believe that this hill was actually built up above the surrounding landscape. The result was that many of the stores in Gulfgate wound up having basements - that is the basements were built at ground level, the dirt was piled up around them, and the mall was built on top. There were many stores that had basements - Grants, Newberrys, Bonds, Walgreens, etc. Deliveries at Gulfgate were made underneath the mall with truck entrances at two locations, one near Joskes at that end of the mall, and the other at the end that was adjacent to what became the 610 Loop right at the pedestrian bridge. In addition to the store basements there were several other areas under the mall, most notably the bowling alley, but also a club near the Joskes. In addition to these businesses, the mall offices were located under the mall on the other side near the Newberry's. There was a glassed in entrance stairway that led down to those offices. In that office area there was a large auditorium where I used to go to see free movies on Saturday (the only ones I remember were "Frances the Talking Mule" movies with Donald O'Connor). If my memory serves there was an elevator that went down to that auditorium and that is, in my opinion, the most likely source of your memory. It is also possible however, that there was an elevator that went down to the club, since that club was located quite near the Joskes (and therefore also the Sakowitz), it is also quite possible that that club was what you remember and it does seem to fit your location more closely - I'm not really sure how big the club was. Hope this helps.

I lived in Southeast Houston and went to Milby High School, graduated in 1968. At that time there were maybe 2 or 3 black people in the school. Of course, there were many Hispanics at Milby at the time and I had quite a few Hispanic friends, but as far as blacks, very few acquaintances. I am old enough to remember going to grocery stores where there were drinking fountains specifically for "Negroes". Me and my brother would sneak a drink to see if the water was any different, it wasn't, but the fountain itself was shoddier.

I also remember a bowling alley on Harrisburg, don't know what the original name was. It's long gone now but turned into a night club called "Soul World" I believe. With the changing demographics of the area it eventually became known as "Latin Soul World" if that makes any sense. I was only in it a couple of times since I lived much closer to the Tropicana on Lawndale but thought I'd mention it in the thread.

I lived near Gulfgate in the '50's and '60's and the civil defense sirens were always tested at noon on Friday every week. Our particular siren was located at Southmayd elementary school.

Funny that Dentler's potato chips would be mentioned in two consecutive posts, albeit not so strange as one might think, they were a pretty big part of my life in the fifties too. I can still remember that green bag I looked for each day in my lunch sack. It would have amazed me to see the new potato chips that are made today, the consistency not only in quality but in quantity, I can remember opening bags of Dentler's and finding one huge chip and a few fragments. Talk about ruining one's lunch. I also rememer finding some pretty burnt chips on occasion. Even with all that, those Dentler chips were probably my favorite food of the fifties. There was a Dentler's restaraunt south of the Medical Center on Fannin or Main until maybe fifteen or twenty (?) years ago, I've always wondered if they were related to the chip makers.

Reading FilioScotia's post about the bowling alley on N. Shepherd reminds me of the people who, I believe, owned that alley. They were Don Ellis and Pete Treybig if I'm not mistaken. They also owned the Tropicana on Lawndale. Both men are members of the Texas Bowling Hall of Fame. I can still remember watching Mr. Ellis practicing during slow times at the bowling alley on Lawdale, rolling strike after strike. When he didn't throw a strike, he just reset the pins.

The El Portal on Lawndale (near 75th) was originally (since the '50's) called the Tropicana. The building is still there. There was also a bowling alley at the corner of OST and Scott that was built off of the ground and which had parking under the building. I don't remember the name of it, but it was probably built in the 1960's. The building is no longer there.

Using Goldman Sachs as a moral compass may not be the most appropriate, unless, of course, you're some kind of a criminal. Having read through many of the arguments and counter arguments concerning light rail in particular and mass transit in general, I would like to make one observation: "The perfect is the enemy of the good."

The first Oshman's I remember was the one at Palm Center. It was at the opposite end of the mall from the Penney's store, right next to the Lewis and Coker grocery store. I remember going to this store often, usually after having eaten at the old Thornhill's cafeteria.

I believe that there was also a Sambo's at the intersection of 610 and Wayside. Near where the later Auchans was located, and on the same corner, that would be only a few blocks from Gulfgate.

As sevfiv says, it was the old Montgomery Wards store, one of my best friends mother, Mrs. Guererro, worked at the store in the sewing (cloth?) department. What I remember even more distinctly than the Montgomery Wards was the Jack in the Box that was built just in front of it on South Park (Martin Luther King). This was the first Jack in the Box that I remember in the Houston area. I still remember being driven up to the old Jack in the Box with the hidden speaker and placing my order, generally a burger with "secret sauce" and those great old fries. Had to have been mid '60's?