Houston Streets 10--Farnham Park & Charnwood

On the advice of some posters at the Houston Architecture Info Forum, I decided to try to get into Farnham Park today. This is the street south off of San Felipe just before you hit Buffalo Bayou. It is a gated street, but the scuttlebutt is that it is actually a public street. So I asked the guards if I could ride around. They waved me through.


This is a house I've always been curious about. A modern house with metallic skin, the back of it (shown here) is visible from San Felipe.


Here's what it looks like from the drive-way. You really can't see all that much--I think you'd really need to go up the driveway and see it up close. But at least I've seen it from more than one angle now.


This house on the corner of Farnham Park and Farnham Circle manages to be airy and boxy at the same time. It looked quite lovely in the late afternoon sun.


This is a view of the middle of the house. It's hard to see, but the stairs are individual boards that project from the wall. No railings. Looks cool but kind of dangerous.


Another modern house at the end of Farnham Circle.


This curious house is a combination of modern and classical (those are doric columns). When I see that particular aesthetic combination, I inevitably think of Mussolini. Or Albert Speer. I mean, maybe it's not the best combination.


Another modern house on Farnham Circle.


Farnham Park has something very rare for Houston--a scenic overlook. It's amazing that the developer didn't requisition every square foot of Bayou frontage for development, but here is the proof. A beautiful bend of the Bayou behind a lovely metal fence. (This image is made of three photos.)


This brown house with a metal roof is almost all the way to the end of Farnham Park. It looks like something you'd see in Colorado, surrounded by birch trees and rock. Quite lovely, actually.

Now apparently some residents were alarmed to see me riding in their neighborhood taking photos. So the guards gave me a lot of shit when I left, and they strongly implied that this was private property and that I was not allowed to take photos. It was a humiliating dress-down, which I would have gladly avoided. I was afraid they'd try to hold me or call the cops, but they took my personal information (which if I had any guts, I would have denied them*) and let me go.

(*Don't ever entrust me to carry out part of any secret spy mission. I crumble under authority instantly.)

I then rode around the corner to Voss, and entered the neighborhood of Charnwood. When I saw that, I thought of Charn, the ruined world in The Magician's Nephew. But apparently there is a place in England called Charnwood, which I'm sure is the origin of the name.


This house at the corner of Inwood and Woodway had an intriguing curved ivy-covered fence.


In an earlier post, I suggested that there was no public access to Bufalo Bayou between Memorial Park and Terry Hershey Park. Well, I am happy to report that I was not completely correct. Briar Bend Park is a little park on Woodway that faces the Bayou. According to the Bayou Preservation Association, it is the only park between "the upper and lower sections" of the bayou. They give instructions on using it as a canoe embarkation point (scroll down). (The bike leaning on the gazebo in the park is mine, by the way.)

Frankly, getting a canoe down to the Bayou would be tough. It has a very steep bank with only rough trails leading down, but it is worth it to go down and take a look.


For one thing, you'll discover this chair built onto a fallen pine that straddles the bayou.


Here's another view of the Bayou chair. Now, you may be asking--Robert, did you climb out on this log and have a little sit-down? Well, no. I chickened out. Maybe with a few beers in me, I would try it. If I were 12 again, I surely would.


This structure is across the Bayou from Briar Bend Park. I wondered what it was--it looks a little like apartments with a mansard roof.


But no--it's a sewage treatment plant. If you're canoing here, don't accidentally swallow the water! This plant is right at the end of Farnham Park. So these wealthy folks in their big houses with their uniformed guards who hassle innocent tourists--well, when the wind is right, their neighborhood must be quite fragrant.

This leads me to a theory. I was amazed to find a park anywhere on the Bayou besides the big ones. How did Briar Bend Park happen? Maybe the developer of Charnwood was thinking, "Even though I can charge a premium for Bayou-backed property, no one wants to live across from a shit factory. But if I put a park there, that's an amenity that adds value to the rest of the neighborhood!" Who knows?

Update: Well, someone knows. I got an email from a former resident of the neighborhood, and she wrote:

Prior to about 1985, the “park” was an under-utilized, scrubby odd-shaped piece of land owned by HISD with a shabby playground that was actually rather dangerous. My recollection is not exact but HISD decided to sell the property. The neighborhood formed a committee to work with the Houston Parks and Recreation (I think that’s the name) to create a neighborhood park. I’m fuzzy on details as I was not in any kind of a lead position on this. Anyway, we raised money and got the city to contribute money and the land was purchased for use as a park. It was a big endeavor and I think I remember that it was initially difficult to convince the city that a) we deserved a park and b) that the land was large enough.

Folks in our neighborhood had terrific input as to what would go in the park and worked very closely with the parks people – the gazebo was a big deal as I remember and so was the jog trail. The playground was (in the 80s anyway) state-of-the-art and we were very proud of it. There was a splashy opening ceremony and the park was an instant hit – everyone in Briarbend and Charnwood at that time had little kids and we just lived down there.

So there you go. My cynical speculation was completely untrue! If anyone knows interesting history of anything I write about, please let me know. At best, I get intriguing glances of interesting places, and I really enjoy gaining a deeper knowledge of a place, when it's possible.

One final note. Key Maps really messed this neighborhood up. I want to support Key Maps, since they are local and all, but they make a lot of mistakes. First of all, Del Monte connects with Woodway and is not a dead end, as they depict. Furthermore, Burgoyne does not make a right angle turn and connect with Woodway as shown. There is a greenway that connects the two streets--perhaps at one time, the city intended to make a connecting street. But Burgoyne dead-ends where I have shown in the map at the beginning of this post. Finally, Briar Bend Park does not extend all the way to the end of Woodway as shown. There are some houses and apartments after the park, which is smaller than depicted on the map, alas.

(Thanks to Swamplot for the great mention!)

Houston Streets 5

Today’s ride was into the next Village, Piney Point. It lies just east of Bunker Hill. I rode mainly south of Memorial and partway north on Piney Point. The streets heading south from Memorial are especially interesting because they have properties that abut Buffalo Bayou. Needless to say, these properties are highly prized and very valuable. They are not without their drawbacks, though. Buffalo Bayou does flood occasionally, and the houses right along the bayou will get flooded first when that happens. Perhaps more dangerous for these property owners is that the Bayou’s banks are made of mud—they can gradually and sometimes abruptly shift, collapsing some of your property. I saw at least one driveway that had apparently dropped a few feet because of this. Most of the other bayous in Houston are channelized—lined with concrete. They don’t look very pretty, and apparently channelization causes some serious flooding dangers, but along them at least there is no chance that your bayou-adjacent property will become under-the-bayou property after the next big rainstorm.

One benefit (or drawback, if you are a gardener) of these big Bayou-adjacent properties is the presence of rabbits. I saw two on this ride. You don’t see them in most neighborhoods, but along the Bayou in Memorial, they are occasionally observed. My theory is that, unlike squirrels, they can’t survive the predations of housecats in most of Houston. After all, rabbits can’t scamper up trees and escape into the forest canopy. But along the bayou, there are few homes relative to the amount of possible rabbit habitat, and few homes mean few housecats.

Obviously houses on the bayou are valuable—inherently so because they are on large lots and are themselves large and fancy. But does being on the bayou itself add to the value of the house? Hard to say, but the houses along the bayou that I saw today ranged in value (according to Zillow, which is highly suspect when dealing with large, expensive, unique properties like these) from $804 thousand to $3.54 million.

Of special interest are the houses on the bayou on Windermere. Their properties are actually bisected by the bayou. This is one of those instances where I wish I could float down the bayou—to see if any of these home-owners have constructed bridges to connect the two sides of their properties. If they have not, the portions of their properties on the north side of the bayou must be pretty useless to them. (A quick look at Google Maps showed no bridges, but the forest cover is thick enough that I could have missed a bridge even if it was there.)

Here is the Bayou taken from the bridge over it at Piney Point. The normally torpid creek is high and rapid here, following several days of heavy rain.

Over on Arrowwood Circle, this is the entrance to an enormous estate. They really don’t want you bothering them. All the homes on Arrowwood are quite large (indeed, in Piney Point, houses range from large to mammoth). The Key Map of Arrowwood has an error. The north-south branch off the circle goes north towards the bayou, not south as shown on the map.

This house on Windermere seems to express one very important thing about its owner, which can be summed up with the phrase “I’M RICH!!” Well, it’s easy to point fingers, but I’m sure if I were rich enough, I’d show off in some way also—my tastes would be different (better, I hope—but what man doesn’t think his own tastes are better than his neighbors’), but I’d conspicuously consume with gusto, no doubt. I do like all the balconies, though. But I'd like them better if they had chairs on them.

Mott is one of those charming little cul-de-sacs that backs into the bayou. People here are wealthy and some are comfortable enough to display their wealth in their own unique ways. Like this faux bunkhouse for some very rich cowboy, complete with a metal trompe-l’oeil saguaro cactus in front.

Right across the street from lonesome cowboy Bob is a house with a large pond (too big to fit in one shot and a gazebo.

Kinkaid is a private school nestled between San Felipe and the bayou (on land that is worth millions). I was amazed to discover that the school, which educates some of the brightest offspring of Houston’s elites, is over 100 years old. For an institution to be that old in Houston is rare. They haven’t always been at this location, though—indeed, for much of the 20^th century, that location would have been absurdly remote and undeveloped. Until 1957, they were at the corner of Richmond and Graustark—now the location of an adult bookstore!

When I was in high school, I was acutely aware of Kinkaid because they were always in competition with us for most National Merit Semifinalists (along with St. Johns, an elite Episcopalian school).

The sculptural installation here was erected in 2006 in honor of Kinkaid’s 100^th year.

This little monument is both touching and kind of weird—who works as a crossing guard for 44 years?!

I was amazed to stumble across this apparently abandoned property on Ames Circle. The house is partially boarded up and crumbling, the pool is filled with silt, and the fountain, which must have been quite elegant at one time, is falling apart. Zillow estimates the value of this property at $1.48 million.

Skipping north of Memorial, this house is on Quail Hollow (which is the street that connects by footpath only to Blalock). Behind this undulating wall is a home so immense that I could not fit it into one photograph. Indeed, everyone on Quail Hollow shares at least one attribute—wealth. Zillow rates every house on Quall as being worth at least a million dollars and up to $3.19 million (the one pictured here, I believe).

These wooden signs are common in the neighborhood. Most frequently, you see Memorial High School signs (it being the nearby public high school), and less frequently St. Thomas and Strake Jesuit (both Catholic). I haven’t seen any yet for Kinkaid or St. Johns.

This unusual castle on Shady Glenn looks strong enough to repel bandits, marauders, Moors, and neighboring noblemen with ease.