Results tagged “property”

Good morning, Houston. If you've ever dreamed of designing a neighborhood marker, now's your chance: The Sixth Ward Property Owners group is looking for someone to come up with a sign to mark the historic area. "Right now we have markers in the neighborhood and they're in bad shape," Maria Isabel of the SWPO said. "It would be great to redo those." The design specs seem pretty open — the location and materials are...

Good morning, Houston. So a record high 40,182 Texas high school seniors won't be graduating this spring because they failed all or some of the TAKS test, the standardized exam required to get a high school diploma. Overall, 84 percent of students passed all four parts of the test — math, science, social studies and English — but black and Hispanic students seemed to have the hardest time, with 28 percent of black students...

Looks like Misty Ann Weaver's defense attorneys won't be the only people picking through the rubble of the burned-out office building on the North Loop: The family of Jeanette Hargrove, one of three people killed in the March 28 fire, has filed suit against the building's owners and Weaver, the nurse who has confessed to setting the blaze, and they want their own investigation of the structure's fire safety systems. The suit, filed on behalf...

Citing repeated safety violations at a north Houston apartment complex, the city took an unusual step Tuesday: It revoked the complex's certificate of occupancy, meaning residents will have to find other places to live within the net few days. The complex in question is Carter's Grove, the same place where two kids were nearly electrocuted in February while playing around an unlocked electrical transformer. But the transformer incident was far from the only problem at...

Let's think back a few years to the late 1990s, when Houston's downtown revitalization was beginning in earnest and a variety of bars, restaurants, clubs and entertainment venues were opening in the area that once was a virtual no-man's-land after business hours. Everything seemed like it was going well for a while — Bayou Place was developed, the baseball stadium opened, old buildings were being restored, some great businesses popped up — and then, over...

Good morning, Houston. If you really love being in your car, you may be in luck: According to former Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, traffic in Houston is only going to get worse. His answer? Start planning now for new road construction and encourage people to take public transportation. Our advice: learn to multi-task. >> That ain't pretty: Looks like it could be the end of the line for a notorious Houston beauty school: On...

Yesterday, Mayor Bill White announced a new plan for Old Sixth Ward - the Chronicle stated that "[Mayor White] proposed creation of a special district within the neighborhood west of downtown with design guidelines for construction and renovation, along with financial incentives to discourage demolition of historical houses." Historic, indeed: according to the Old Sixth Ward Historic District site, the neighborhood has the largest amount of Victorian homes in this region (except for Galveston,...

After about one-third of the original homes in River Oaks have been demolished, the Chronicle has now picked up a story about the will to preserve. The homes in the area, which were largely built by well-known architects for well-known families, have been meeting the same fate as many others in Houston (think Bellaire, West University, and creeping in to older neighborhoods - sixth ward, Heights and beyond). The average house size in the U.S....

Residents of Houston's sixth ward, which was founded around 1877 and is the largest collection of victorian homes in the region (apart from Galveston), are taking their words of pro-preservation to ever-popular YouTube.com. Their messages relate the importance of the neighborhood in Houston and how the architectural significance is diminishing significantly. According to the Chronicle:

Posting the videos was an act of "creative desperation" after activists waited almost a year for city officials to help them create land-use regulations through the neighborhood's Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone, or TIRZ, said Larissa Lindsay, president of the Old Sixth Ward Neighborhood Association.

Continue reading "Sixth ward residents upload to YouTube"

Planning to get an early start on holiday shopping? Then you'll be glad to know that the Galleria is opening early Friday — 5 a.m., to be exact. It's not that the mall hasn't opened early on "Black Friday" before — it used to open at 7, so this isn't all that big a change — but still, you have to be pretty dedicated to get out of bed in the middle of the night just so you can be the first person to set foot in Jimmy Choo.

Here's some good news for those of us interested in keeping some of Houston's past around: In a couple of weeks, the Magnolia Ballroom building downtown will become the first commercial building in Houston to be a protected city landmark. City Council created the protected landmark designation last year; under it, protected properties may never be relocated, unsympathetically altered or demolished. Property owners have to apply and meet certain criteria to have their structures named...

The Ben Milam Hotel (Joseph Finger: 1925), located across from Minute Maid Park (and some may know that old place - Union Station), has been vacant for more than two decades and may soon be history. What's with all this speculation, you ask? Well, we recently witnessed the sneaky razing of its neighbor, the William Penn Hotel (which was, indeed, in much better condition), and now its windows are being removed and the interior is...

It’s still not completely clear if we’re the fattest city or the skinniest, but either way, Houston will soon have a few more restaurants in the Galleria. The space that used to be occupied by Lord & Taylor has been divided so that it can hold 12 businesses. The eateries will include The Kona Grill, which will be the first to open in August. It will be followed by The Oceanaire Seafood Room in November...

What a crazy place this Internet is. A few weeks ago, we talked about how the Houston Airport System's website sent people to a porn site for a while, and now a local car dealership is suing a company they claim co-opted its online presence for porn.