Houston Streets 8, part 2

Readers know I like modern houses (although I am critical of them as well). In Memorial, it's rare to find a really top-notch modern house. But here are a few that I liked.

This one is up on Voss Park. I liked the variously-angled roofs and the horizontal-vertical contrast in the windows.

Thus one, way down south on Kirwick, looks more like what you expect from a modern house, with odd, seemingly arbitrary angles and features. It's a little hard to see in this photo, but there is a cool little balcony that is shaped like an acute isosceles triangle.

UPDATE: Houston Architecture Info Forum poster BenH identifies this house as "a 70's design by Phillips & Peterson."

It wouldn't be a blog post about Memorial if I weren't talking about McMansions. This house on Willowbend is what I call a McMansion larva. You can't have a McMansion without tearing down the house that used to sit on that lot. Now it may be that I am being unfair. Maybe the new house being built here will be of a size appropriate for the lot and the neighborhood . . . Nah.

Now, if you are going to build a McMansion, like this one Marsha (just North of Beinhorn), it's probably a good idea to have an entrance way that doesn't look like the outline of an enormous erect penis. Unless that's the effect you were going for, of course.

One thing that has interested me a lot, but that I never get to see, is what people's backyards look like. Especially those houses that back right into Buffalo Bayou. The most valuable houses in Houston back onto the bayou, so one can reasonably expect some large, fancy lawns. But there are also the engineering challenges of making sure your yard (or house) doesn't slide down the mud bank into the bayou. I was able to observe a couple of bayou-adjacent yards from the bridge over the bayou at Voss.

This house, on Magnolia Bend, deals with the issue of the sharply sloping bank of the bayou by terracing. You can see that the pool is lower than the house, for example.

This Hunter's Ridge house also has terracing, but here it appears to be more decorative than functional, and the lawn is sharply sloped as it heads down to the bayou.

One thing I've loved about the Villages is the multitude of pedestrian cut-throughs. The area is very park-poor, but at least they have ways for jogger and walkers (and mischievious teens) to get around without walking along major arterials.

This walkway connects Timberglenn with Trail's End, and thus provides a way for walkers to get from Hedwig Lane to Voss without going on Memorial or Beinhorn.

This shady path connects Wilding (a street full of mansions) to Marchmont. The map indicates that it crosses Soldier's Creek, but there is no indication that it does. It may be that Soldier's Creek is buried in a pipe at this location. Or maybe the map is just wrong--it wouldn't be the first time.

This seems like a cute little cut-through on the face of it. It connects the south end of River Bend with the little shopping center on Voss just north of San Felipe. But I guess something bad must have happened because they did this to the cut-through:

There's nothing especially interesting about this house on Creekwood (north of Beinhorn), but I thought the color scheme--white bricks, red wood, and slate-blue shingles--was quite nice.

I like houses with ponds. Let's face it--people don't use their front yards for much. If they entertain outdoors, it's a barbeque or pool party in the back. So since the front yard isn't all that important, why not put something purely decorative in it? I like modern sculpture best, but few in Memorial are quite that daring. But ponds are also very nice.

Of course, you could always put non-modern sculptures in your front yard, as these folks on Fleetway did. The pair show two girls sitting quietly and reading, and two boys climbing a tree. Not only is the sculpture traditional in style, it reinforces traditional stereotypes.

Also on Fleetway is this bizarre alternative to the teardown-and-build-a-McMansion ethos. These folks evidently felt that their already existing ranch house was too small (it is actually huge--I couldn't fit the whole thing into the frame). So they added on a two-storey addition. Now the addition is actually quite attractive in its way, but it doesn't match with the original house at all! I shudder to say it, but it might have been better to have torn down the whole house and just rebuilt from scratch.

The only commercial location photographed on this ride was the rebus at The Mason Jar, a restaurant that has been operating on the Katy Freeway (at Clifford) for decades. They used to change their rebuses frequently, but this one looks old and faded. So maybe they don't change it anymore. Can anyone tell what this rebus says?

This is my favorite street name from this trip. It seems like the most personal. Unfortunately, Historic Houston Streets provides no clue as to its origin.

Finally, I wish you all happy Halloween and leave you with this superb hand-made Halloween graveyard located on Lanecrest. The epitaphs are rather witty--it's worth a trip to check them out.

Houston Streets 8--Piney Point, Hunter's Creek & Hedwig Village

I started this particular ride back in August, fully intending to finish it up quickly. School intervened, and I found it hard to make the time. This week is midterm break, so that has given me the opportunity to finish up Piney Point Village and Hedwig Village, and do most of Hunters Creek. Piney Point and Hunter’s Creek are interesting places—the 3^rd and 5^th richest towns in Houston, according to Wikipedia. Of course, they are not really towns. Towns are places where people live, work, shop, recreate—these two villages are basically political units that are mainly distinguished by the fact that they are not Houston. I suspect that if River Oaks was its own politically independent “village,” it too would be one of the five wealthiest towns in Texas.

One thing I took a lot of pictures of was a creek which winds through Piney Point and Hunter’s Creek. It’s not Hunter’s Creek (which is larger and seems to run mainly in Hedwig Village, weirdly enough). It’s called Soldier’s Creek, and it winds through the yards of the wealthy residences of these two villages, eventually emptying into Buffalo Bayou.

Up on Oak Lane, behind Memorial Elementary (where my cousin is a teacher, coincidentally), there is a private street with two houses separated from the street by the creek. Therefore they have little bridges for their driveways and walkways. It’s a charming effect, and one that plays out all along this creek.

Also on this street, directly behind the school, is this park-like lawn. I was so tired and thirsty when I got here that I decided to sit in it and drink some water. It was most relaxing, but as I left, I was called by an old coot, who wanted to know what I was doing on his lawn. He spoke ominously of “suspicious characters” in the neighborhood. That’s a description of me if I ever heard one.

Soldier’s Creek truly defines Bridgewood Street. The name is appropriate—one must cross a small wooden bridge to reach this street, and then cross another to continue down it.

How many wooden automobile bridges does one ever see? The quaintness factor is off the scale!

Furthermore, all the houses on Bridgewood street (except for two at the beginning of the street) are only accessible from the street by bridges.

It’s a cool, almost medieval effect, but I wonder if the creek ever floods? Have these people ever found themselves trapped in their mansions?

This house at the end of the street was the most intriguing. It was a partially torn down ruin, but weirdly enough, even the task of tearing it down seemed incomplete.

As you can see, it is an empty shell, and the foundation is half bare. I have to say, I like it the way it is. But what’s odd is that there is no sign of demolition in progress—no backhoes, no taped off areas, not even any churned up dirt. There was a “for sale” sign, but it was laying face down and appeared to have been doing so for some time.

Another thing about this property that is strange is that the garage (which is intact but boarded up) and the house are separate buildings, on opposite sides of the creek. Indeed, the creek runs in a loop through the middle of the property. This may be a clue to why this otherwise beautiful property is an abandoned ruin. As far as I can tell, the two parts of the property that are separated by the creek are each too small to have a substantial house and garage. Oh, you could put a perfectly adequate house and garage on either side, but adequate is not enough for this neighborhood. And no one wants to have to park their car and walk 50 yards and over a bridge to get inside their house. It’s simply a very inconvenient lot for the average home-owner. If it was a normal house, it could go for $970 thousand, according to Zillow. But this is a lot that requires an eccentric owner. And rich folks in Houston might be eccentric in some ways, but are deeply conventional when it comes to their houses. It’s a shame, because this is one beautiful location.

It has an additional benefit of a nice little footpath connecting Bridgewood with Hunter’s Park Lane.

Saddlewood has a tiny spur that is actually named Soldier’s Creek, and here are two bridges—a footbridge for a house, and another wooden bridge for cars. All these wooden bridges seem a bit, I dunno, rickety. Are they really safe for cars? Admittedly, they don’t get a lot of traffic.

Weird Coincidence

Yesterday, when I was in Kaboom (as I mentioned in my previous post), I purchased several books, including Shikasta Re: Colonized Planet 5 by Doris Lessing. This morning I wake up to learn she has won the Nobel Prize.

Coincidences of this sort mean nothing, but still, it was odd.

Lessing is an author I have liked since college. I once heard her read when she was in town for the premiere of the opera version (by Phillip Glass) of The Making of a Representative for Planet 8. Reading The Golden Notebook while in Nigeria was an overwhelming experience. She's a writer with hits and misses, but whose work has moved me a lot over the years.

Kaboom

This is a relatively new used bookstore on Studewood in the Heights. I discovered it by accident recently, and spoke with one of the owners. It's a Katrina refugee--the original Kaboom was in the French Quarter. After Katrina, they set up shop here, always intending to continue selling in New Orleans, once that city was back on its feet. But they have recently come to the conclusion that New Orleans will never really be back on its feet. The owner (whose name I did not get) said that Katrina finally brought home the reality that the city is not a viable city for a store like theirs. There are no Fortune 500 companies headquartered there, and the port, once one of the top three in the U.S., never recovered from the oil bust in the 80s. (Houston got most of that tonnage.) Consequently, the only real business in New Orleans is tourism, and she wasn't sure that that could support a bookstore. Especially as business did not pick up after they reopened after Katrina.

So they are selling their building in the French Quarter, and looking for a location in Houston (presumably in addition to the one they have now). They need a second location because, for some reason, they can't stay open late at their current location. This bookstore is a very welcome addition to Houston. For used bookstores, Houstonians have mostly had to choose between Half Price Books (mostly remainders) and various paperback "book nook" types of stores (not very selective about what they carry). But even in this small location on Studewood, it was clear that Kaboom had a deep deep fiction selection of highest quality (I found many Alison Lurie books at Kaboom, as opposed to one at Half Price), as well as cool older books on many subjects.

They're at 833 Studewood. Check them out.

(Photo by johnjron1 from http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnron1/394735721/)

The Evolution of Zoning in Houston

There was a discussion of zoning over at Matthew Yglesias's blog, and the discussion turned to Houston and the proposed Ashby at Bissonnet high rise. I was amazed that such a local issue would pop up in a national blog comment area, and responded at length. Here's what I wrote:

paperpusher is correct. In fact, this high rise, which will produce significant negative externalities on some of the wealthiest, most influential people in Houston, may end up being the tipping point into the adaptation of some kind of zoning in Houston.

But the deed restrictions have only become seriously important in Houston in recent years. For most of the last century, developers didn't have to think about deed restrictions because almost all development was greenfields development. Houston sprawled, and developers, aided by the city and state, could make up the rules (including deed restrictions, which used to be hair-raisingly racist) as they went along. Even if Houston had zoning, it wouldn't have affected a lot of development which was done outside the city limits in "municipal utility districts" with the tacit agreement that if the city ran out sewer lines, etc. and developers built subdivisions, Houston would annex them in time. Only interpretations of the voting rights act in the 80s stopped this willy-nilly annexation. (But developers keep building outside Houston in small satellite towns or unincoporated MUDs.)

This sprawl development was made possible by the continued and aggressive freeway building by TxDOT. The wheel and spoke freeways of Houston have been a massive government financed sprawl engine. To add to this institutionalized sprawl, in-town development was made difficult by de facto zoning rules having to do with the number of sewer hookups a property could have. It was next to impossible to build higher density housing in town because of these limitations until the 90s.

But now these rules have been liberalized, and the sheer size of Houston makes it much more attractive for people to live in the inner city, close to work centers. A good thing in general, but without zoning, we see more and more examples of the high-rise that paperpusher mentions above.

While I think every city's urban issues are heavily influenced by a nationwide policy in favor of freeways, each city's own issues are a result of its historical and present development, and the inertia of the past is usually hard to change, even when it is necessary to do so.

The Accidental President of Brazil

This breezy political autobiography is a nice introduction to recent Brazilian history, if you can stomach FHC’s false humility. It forms a nice addition to A Death in Brazil by Peter Robb, which examines closely the corruption of the Collor presidency.

I rather wish Cardoso had given more details of his career and recent Brazilian history, and he was too nice by far. But he gives a useful view of modern Brazil. The Prestes Column and the revolt of São Paulo in 1932 are given as examples of how tenuous the rule of the federal government of Brazil was. And the inability of Brazil to effect normal changes of government in the 50s and early 60s was given as a profoundly Brazilian weakness. This has been something I believed ever since the first Angolan elections after the end of the civil war there. It’s not the first democratically elected president of a country that matters, but the second or third. It’s when transition doesn’t cause a crisis that democracy can be said to be sustainable. He also talks about how decisions made by Portugal in the 16^th century (offering enormous land grants to settlers) have fed into the endemic inequality of today. This kind of commonsense observation helps one make sense of Brazilian history.

After the military finally gave up power in Brazil, they essentially handed power over to Tancredo Neves. Neves, however, died before he could take office. Neves was a fairly independent politician who was acceptable to the pro-democracy forces. The military had forced them to accept José Sarney as his running mate. Sarney was seen as the military’s man. So in 1985, Sarney became the first non-military president of Brazil since the early 60s. The military had left Brazil in sorry shape, suffering from hyper-inflation and many other ills. Sarney failed to improve the situation—indeed, the inflation just got worse. Even then, Lula was a major figure, appearing on the covers of major newsmagazines, and scaring folks with the possibility that his leftish Partido Trabalhadores would gain power. This is why they elected Collor in 1989, who painted himself as an outsider there to remove the “maharajahs” of government. Like almost all Brazilian candidates, he actually came from an elite, politically connected family. His pathetic story is told in gruesome detail in Robb’s book. Not only did Collor not solve Brazil’s inflation problem, he stole millions if not billions.

Meanwhile, Cardoso was slowly progressing politically. He is at pains to claim he had no political ambition, and maybe he doesn’t see it. But he was clearly destined for politics from an early age—his father and grandfather were politically active—and when he was forced into exile by the military regime, he was instantly politicized. So even though he was a practicing sociologist and professor (writing a key text on underdevelopment), he was always involved in the struggles to reassert democracy—and that meant being in politics.

He was a senator when Collor’s successor (and vice president) Itamar Franco hired him to be foreign minister, Franco seemed ill-suited for the presidency—like Sarney, he had been inadvertently thrust into the job and had to deal with crisis from day one. After three failed finance ministers, he brought in Cardoso. At this point, Cardoso accomplished one of the great economic/political feats in modern history—he introduced a new currency (a common occurrence in Brazil) and tamed inflation.

Now the most unbelievable part of the book is when he says he ran for president because he was afraid Lula would win. If he had said to preserve the Plan Real, I would have believed it. But Lula was too radical to win. Even though Cardoso and Lula had been close during the last years of the military when the fight for democracy was happening, Cardoso was a “third way” free-marketer and Lula was a nationalize-everything socialist. Cardoso rightly thought Lula’s plan was backwards, especially as command economies were collapsing all around the world.

So Cardoso ran and won, twice, both times against Lula. He had already done his heroic thing. He says, “My presidency was, at its most basic level, about trying to turn Brazil into a stable country.” That’s what he accomplished during his presidency. His biggest crises were the worldwide debt crisis in the late 90s and AIDS, and he acquitted himself pretty well. And after he was term-limited out, an older, mellower Lula finally won (his fourth try). And while Lula’s government has appeared to tolerate an unacceptable level of corruption, he has been a steady leader, fiscally reasonable, and a counterweight to the semi-radicals elected in Venezuela and elsewhere.

Cardoso is charming, and this book worth reading. Perhaps it’s too much to ask for more detail, more economics, more nitty gritty politics, more detail. But still I wish it had them.