Jesse Hager recounts how he was detained after photographing the new Houston FBI office. The Houston Parks and Recreation department is dedicating its new offices in a renovated MacKie & Kamrath building that once housed NASA.
Sunday December 6
A little-known piece of the city's NASA past is being renovated, modernized and opened to the public historic: Design inspired by Wright [Houston Chronicle]
The low-slung building, made from a distinctive green stone known as green-cast quartzite, was commissioned in 1956 as the headquarters for a Houston-based construction firm, Farnsworth & Company. Employees of that company would later develop such well-known contemporary firms as Spaw Glass and Williams Brothers.
Farnsworth hired MacKie & Kamrath, a local architectural firm, to design the building. The designers were influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright and incorporated certain elements that Wright took from Mesoamerican civilizations such as the Aztecs and Maya, said Anna Mod, a preservation consultant who prepared applications for the building's historic designations.
"When I saw the building in Houston, that's the first thing I thought of," Mod recalled. "Frank Lloyd Wright had borrowed the same vocabulary."
Stephen Fox, a Rice University architectural historian, said MacKie & Kamrath incorporated some of the same elements into other corporate headquarters built in the 1950s, including the Schlumberger building on the Gulf Freeway (1953) and what is now the Exxon-Mobil research center on Buffalo Speedway (1954). These buildings represented part of Houston's first wave of suburbanization after World War II, Fox said.
City may be solvent, but it isn't a pretty solvency [Houston Chronicle] "At the corner of Plaag and Pointer in the Houston/Trinity Gardens neighborhood lurk early signs of Houston's looming budget crisis. Across the city, monthly bulk trash pickups are now done every other month. In some places, they may not come at all."
CITY COUNCIL RUNOFF Costello, Derr slug it out for at-large seat [Houston Chronicle] "Costello said he has the expertise to tackle flooding, but acknowledges it will not be easy finding the money in budget-strapped times. The city has no dedicated revenue source for street reconstruction and drainage work, he said. Instead, money is taken from water and sewage fees. 'We're robbing one utility to pay for another,' Costello said. 'We really believe streets and drainage should have its own enterprise fund.' Costello proposed some sort of user fee to pay for drainage projects, but also said it would have to be approved by voters in a referendum. He said that as an engineer he could help inform Houston residents about the urgent need to rebuild crumbling infrastructure."
Wolff looks back over his six years as head of Metro [Houston Chronicle]
Transit should really serve all the people in this area. It's not just for people who have no alternative, and it has to be attractive to do that and I think rail takes it there. One of the differences that I think we had with Tom DeLay was that he felt that a transit system is sort of a form of welfare. I think this was unfortunate and narrow-minded, because it is not a form of welfare. I recall walking out of Da Marco's on Westheimer one night with friends of ours, around 10 at night, and I think it was the 82 was inbound. And it was full. And they said, "Look at that bus! Who's on that bus?" I said, "I'll tell you who's on that bus. Those are the people who stand behind the counters in the stores in the Galleria, those are the people who clean the offices, those are the people who wait on you in restaurants. Those are hard-working people." They're not on that bus because it's sort of fun to be riding the bus on Westheimer at 10 at night. They're getting from their jobs back to where they live. And if they didn't have that form of transit, then they'd be on welfare. Metro is a productive part of our city, helping people get from where they live to where they work, to get to their doctor, to shop. So I have very short patience for people who think it's a form of welfare, and therefore it's sort of a cross to bear. No, it's an important part of the city and people who don't realize that don't know cities.
Sale of Clear Lake condos OK'd : Partnership bids $9.5 million for 44 Endeavour high-rise units [Houston Chronicle]
Saturday December 5
On The Strand, it's the best of times after the worst of times [Houston Chronicle] "The 36-year-old festival, with visitors and entertainers roaming the streets in Victorian-era costumes, is returning to its full 10-square-block area with more than 150 vendors for the first time since Hurricane Ike wrecked Galveston in September 2008, drowning The Strand Historic District in 10 feet of water. Last year's celebration was restricted to The Strand because most of the shops in the Historic District were still repairing damage. Advance ticket sales this year are about 80 percent of sales at the same time in 2007, when 33,000 attended Dickens on The Strand, said Molly Dannenmaier, spokeswoman for the event sponsor, the Galveston Historical Foundation. Foundation officials were pleasantly surprised that 22,000 visitors showed for last year's truncated celebration."
Friday December 4
Lakewood may buy former Compaq Center from city [Houston Chronicle]
Thursday December 3
‘University Line' rail project closes in on federal funding: If the proposal survives a 10-day period, Metro can start preparing [Houston Chronicle] "The Federal Transit Authority notified Metro this week that the project has entered a 10-day congressional notification period. If no member of Congress files an objection by Dec. 10, then the FTA will give Metro the green light to begin preliminary engineering of the route."
League City's hike-and-bike plan to be unveiled [Houston Chronicle] "Clark Condon Associates, which is developing the plan, will present it."
Tuesday December 1
It's a crime more people can't see the new FBI building [Culture Map]
I was standing on the sidewalk taking pictures of the new FBI Field Office Building designed by Larry Speck of PageSoutherlandPage in a joint venture with Leo A Daly. Two cars paused as they exited the compound—both drivers reached for their phones—and before long three security guards and an agent, all armed, brought me inside the security booth and questioned me.
That was as close as I got to an actual tour of the building.
More trees, less to mow seems like a win-win: Flood control district banks on shade for savings [Houston Chronicle] "A decade ago, the district could shop at local nurseries for the seedlings it needed. Eventually, its rising demand outstripped supply. The district needs trees that nurseries do not always stock because they do not sell well, such as water tupelo and black locust, Watson said."
Sunday November 29
OBITUARY Scoular, architect who had pivotal role in city's medical community [Houston Chronicle]
Major project near Bush possible: Development for airport could include restaurants, offices [Houston Chronicle] "At a minimum, it would include restaurants, a gas station, a convenience store and a cell phone lot with an electronic system to display flight information. And it might have office space, shops and a 125-room hotel."
Houston once was 'a big cow town' [Houston Chronicle] "Urbanization has taken over a lot of the pasture land in Harris County. Harris County at one time was the largest cattle-populated county in the state - 20, 30 years ago. Houston used to be a big cow town. You had the stockyard right there where the University of Houston is: It was the third-largest calf market in the United States. It opened in 1931, and it closed in 1968. Really, Houston was never like Fort Worth, because Houston always had the petrochemical industry in the forefront, but there were lots of cattle around Houston. At one time there were eight major abattoirs in Houston. Now there's none."
Saturday November 28
He aims to turn off The Beacon: Attorney claims homeless program is now a nuisance [Houston Chronicle]
In Houston, we have a lot to be grateful for. We'll start the list, but feel free to add [Houston Chronicle] "We're grateful for the much-needed new public spaces that our city is developing. For Hermann Park's new, shamelessly romantic Tiffany Bridge. For the new building at the Children's Museum of Houston, which doubled the museum's size. And for the Houston Public Library's revamp of the downtown Julia Ideson Building, which promises to make one of the city's best old buildings far more accessible to the public. We're grateful that we're learning to make our big infrastructure projects do double and triple duty. Consider Willow Waterhole, a new-wave stormwater retention project still under construction but already serving several aching needs. During big storms, it stops neighborhoods from flooding. During dry periods, it gives people a place to jog, bike and play. And its wetlands and meadows attract more than 100 species of birds."
Thursday November 26
Preservation of prairie brings recognition to conservationists: Katy area group among those singled out [Houston Chronicle] "Jaime Gonzalez of the Katy Prairie Conservancy and Flo Hannah of the Houston Audubon Society earned recognition for their work with others to transplant pieces of a prairie field before it was lost to development."
It's deconstruction, not demolition: Architect razes house, donates the materials to charity [Houston Chronicle] "More than 7 tons of material, from wood floors to plumbing, windows to brick, have been donated to the City of Houston's Reuse Warehouse. The facility, opened last May, serves as a broker for building supplies, housing donations and funneling them to nonprofits."
CITY COUNCIL DISTRICT A Rivals agree on key points: Lewis, Stardig both push flood control and street work as priorities [Houston Chronicle] "Lewis, 42, a community college instructor and Democrat who lives in Oak Forest, was the runner-up in the seven-candidate Nov. 4 election. Lewis proposes that the city buy the closed 227-acre Inwood Forest Country Club and turn it into a flood control basin and park. Then, he wants to give businesses tax incentives to locate on the park's periphery."
Wednesday November 25
SCHOOL DISTRICTS FEEL THE SQUEEZE Decline in sales, property taxes forces some to shelve construction plans, others to let new campuses sit vacant [Houston Chronicle] "To gauge the impact of the economic slump hitting Texas, look no further than the dilemma facing the Houston-area school districts of Conroe and Cypress-Fairbanks. Together, the two districts have taken the extraordinary step of temporarily halting construction of 15 schools. The districts have bond money to build them and students to fill them, but no money to operate them."
