Houston In The 1980s

[Subdude]

Wasn't Chelsea's the name of the bar that used to be in the basement of the old Plaza Hotel?

That was Che's, I think.

[Dagnabbit]

On Chelsea off Montrose South of US59. A cool club that featured local singer/songerwriters, featured great acts like Townes Van Zandt and a lot of fun.

The Name of the club came from the street address where it was located 804 Chelsea (between Milam & Travis).

[Margo Mitchell]

...........

Edited October 22, 2012 by Margo Mitchell

[forever123]

Does anyone on here remember the club in the 80's called Struts? Remember its exact location?

[Tumbleweed_Tx]

Struts was at I-45 and Aldine Bender in the northwest corner of the intersection.

 

I did many, many shows there with lots of local bands  

[Specwriter]

That was Che's, I think.

 

Che (there should be an acute accent over the 'e') was a very nice restaurant on the ground floor of the hotel at the corner of Montrose and Berthea. The main entrance was on the Montrose side of the building. I took a date there in the late 70's and she was completely impressed (we were very young). IIRC we had rack of lamb for two. Reservations were required. When we arrived there was a matchbook at the table with the restaurant's logo on on one side and my last name on the other.

[forever123]

We will be travelling back to Houston this week for some reminiscing.  Does anyone remember the location where Confetti's was?  Also, does anyone remember an upscale disco near Greens Road?  

[RedScare]

We will be travelling back to Houston this week for some reminiscing.  Does anyone remember the location where Confetti's was?  Also, does anyone remember an upscale disco near Greens Road?  

 

Confetti was in the Galleria area south of the mall on Alabama. It was where the Roxy is located now.

[queenwest]

oh the 80s in houston. such great memories. cool things were the champs on 290 and bingle(i worked there). eating at sals pizza, . going to the dome for oilers games, astroworld, klol, 97 rock( mr moby) remember when kilt was rock? kikk radio. all the great newspeople who kept us informed every night. so many things from that time period. too bad houston isnt the same any more.

[torimask]

I've only gotten through the 1980s in the stacks from the South Belt Leader offices, but pulled together most of the history of the uncovering of the Brio DOP dumping that had come out by the end of the decade. 

 

Will take me another trip back home to get into the 1990s, but I think it's a pretty good overview of how things unfolded in the early days. 

 

http://southbelthouston.blogspot.com/2014/06/brio-1980s-leader-coverage.html

 

 

[sevfiv]

This is excellent...thanks!

[kylejack]

12 bars in Houston

 

Marfreless, 2006 Peden.

Kay’s, 2324 Bissonnet.

Nick’s Fish Market , First City Tower, 1001 Fannin.

The Last Concert , 1403 Nance

Park Lane , 2010 W. Alabama

The Jockey Club , 4714 Richmond

The Remington Bar & Grill , 4608 Westheimer

The Backroom , Hyatt Regency, 1200 Louisiana

White Horse Cellar , 1211 Fannin

La Carafe , 813 Congress

Grif’s, 3416 Roseland

Richmond Ice House , 4700 block of Richmond

 

5 still exist with the same name, 3 still exist with a different name, 1 changed business type (to Hebert's Meat Store) and 3 are gone.

 

http://www.texasmonthly.com/story/89-greatest-texas-bars

Edited August 8, 2014 by kylejack

[IronTiger]

I can't believe I read through most of that article before realizing it was over 3 decades old. 

[kylejack]

I put the year in the title of the topic!

[IronTiger]

I put the year in the title of the topic!

Yeah, I did catch a glimpse of that. I saw "83" in the topic title, so I assumed it was the 1980s, and then was somehow basically allured into thinking that it was far newer than it actually was since they formatted it like every other article they've posted...and......

 

Anyway, it makes sense now that they would bring up fern bars at all.

[kylejack]

On Google Books I found an old copy of the actual article scanned in. On there they include some pics. Pretty cool.

[Subdude]

White Horse Cellar - Wow.  That old building was torn down 3-4 years later.

 

Remington Bar on Westheimer was sort of the opposite of the White Horse.  It had a rep as a sort of yuppie pick-up bar.

 

 

 

[mollusk]

It's not like I was trying to do a grand tour or anything, but I visited (if not frequented) over half of them.  And yet I still have a liver.    

[kylejack]

Remington Bar on Westheimer was sort of the opposite of the White Horse.  It had a rep as a sort of yuppie pick-up bar.

 

Yeah, this article introduced me to the term fern bar. I'm going to bring it back into fashion.

[trymahjong]

that list of bars. . . . . . back  then we were still in Midland. Once I went to the 007-the darkest bar I ever encountered!

 

-a really scruffy guy in dirty red coveralls like mechanics wear was there-- everyone i was with told me he was a regular and the guy acted like a regular-- all seemed fairly friendly with him etcetc

 

 

later i found out the scruffy guy was Clayton Williams.

[ChannelTwoNews]

http://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/houston-and-oil/

 

The Chronicle has uploaded a special report that originally appeared in the Sunday June 2nd, 1985 edition of the paper, with a series of articles looking at life roughly three years after the plunge in oil prices began. Like most other articles from the paper, just googling the headline will give you the free access view.

 

 

[swtsig]

Fascinating piece.... Glad the chronicle put this back out there.

[devonhart]

A clip from a 1983 training film made in Houston. Dig the office equipment at the beginning. Full film at http://texasarchive.org/library/index.php?title=2011_02146

 

[torimask]

New post covers 1990 - 1993 when things really got going: http://southbelthouston.blogspot.com/2015/01/brio-superfund-south-belt-ellington.html

 

Fair warning, this feels like it reaches epic novel length!

[ej35401]

Bump - seems appropriate to bring this topic back up.

 

[msteele6]

I was working in the construction business in the mid '80's and when the S & L's went busted (after de-regulation allowed them to turn from places where people saved money to make big purchases like homes, into casinos) that busiuness tanked incredibly quickly.

 

I well remember speculative building projects setting empty for years afterward. The one that always comes to my mind was the Tang CIty Mall on South Main, an attractive Chinese themed mall that I can never remember having a tenant. The mall itself was finally demolished a few years ago.

 

Of course, that wasn't the only speculative building project that tanked. In the mid '80's you could drive all over town and see building after building advertizing for tenants, usually to no avail.

 

At about that time (1984?) I was looking to buy a house and attended several auctions for foreclosed properties, the most fertile area was out past what is now Beltway 8 in an area called Mission Bend. You could drive through that neighborhood and see multiple houses on every block that had been foreclosed on.

 

Maybe de-regulation isn't the answer to every problem.

 

 

[UtterlyUrban]

I bought my first house in Houston in 1982. Things were still going pretty well - so well in fact that I had to buy a negative amortization loan with increasing interest rates. (Who said that all these creative mortgages are new?)

It was in Concord Bridge - the SW corner of Eldridge and Little York. I think we paid about $69k for a Gemcraft home, and the interest rates went from 11% to maybe 13% (I cannot recall exactly) and the equity amount increased for the first four years. In other words, we weren't even paying all the interest we owed!

By the fourth year the house was worth much less than we paid for it, and the interest rate was 13%! About 1/3 of the houses in the neighborhood were abandoned. All the surviving neighbors got together to mow the lawns of the empty houses. It was a stinking mess.

I bought a house in The Heights (420 West 23rd - you can look it up) for $112,000 in 1988. (the house is now appraised for $402k. Not really such a big deal - that is only about 6.5% annual increases). We rented out the Concord Bridge house (on Lyndonville) for what we were paying on the mortgage. We finally sold it in 1990 for what we owed. I felt extremely lucky to get that much.

I keep telling people that we have seen this movie before. I just hope it has the same ending.

I personally know people who simply walked away from their homes in some of these "far away" (at the time) sub-divisions. They couldn't rent them and the value of the homes had gone from ..... Oh, something like $70k to $10k.

Office buildings, some brand new and never opened, were called "see throughs". There was nobody in them and you could see right through them.

The economy went from red-hot to dead-flat in about three years and stayed that way for a while. There were a lot of reasons for this other than oil: The banking system having mostly all local banks with lots of local exposure, the S&L crisis generally, etc.

Houston's economy is a bit different now. It is somewhat less dependent on oil. But, this is still an oil town. As with the last bust, it will take a while for the impacts to unfold. If oil stays at these levels or goes down over the next 1-2 years, there will be much more pain, but likely not as bad as the 80's. I do expect a decline in housing prices over the next two years however. How much is anyone's guess. Bad local economy, low oil prices, and likely some rising interest rates and possibly a bad national economy. That doesn't bode well for housing.

Edited November 3, 2015 by UtterlyUrban

[MirrersTrucking]

Is this why they built and never opened the Kingwood Mall? ( Now Kingwood hospital)

[IronTiger]

Is this why they built and never opened the Kingwood Mall? ( Now Kingwood hospital)

There were several malls in the area proposed but not opening. One intriguing one I read about on the HAIF (might be in papers, but they're not online) was a second mall across from Greenspoint but even more upscale (this from a time when Greenspoint was considered to be a nice mall, on par with Memorial City today).

[9075]

I was still a kid when all of this went down, but I do remember a few things about this period in Houston's history:

 

There were a lot of auctions. You saw them advertised everywhere.

 

My aunt and uncle bought a house in Clear Lake in 1987.  It was a foreclosure and they paid $18k in cash for it.

 

There was a large apartment complex under construction on Dixie Farm Road in Friendswood that sat unfinished for years.  All of the windows were broken out, and the exposed framing eventually started to rot.  It was finally torn down, and I think a nursing home was later built on the property.

 

The twin towers on the 610 West Loop near Memorial Park got into some sort of financial trouble and sat vacant until the late 1990s when they were renovated and received new curtain walls. 

 

There was another office building at 59 and Weslayen that sat vacant from the mid '80s until it was demolished about 5 year ago.

 

I had some other relatives that lived in Fondren Southwest.  Their neighborhood went from very desirable to a complete dump in a very short period.

 

Lots of gas stations closed, as this was also the period that new environmental laws regulating underground storage tanks went into effect.  Along with less revenue from lower fuel prices, many operators could not afford to replace their leaking tanks.