Houston News Blog

​Todd Mason is the vice president of real estate services for Metro. At the time of his hiring, there was some concern that by hiring Mason and dabbling in big-time real estate development at and around Metro properties, the transit organization was extending itself far beyond its mission statement, which reads:

METRO is an innovative regional transportation organization of dedicated employees committed to partnering with the public and private sectors to provide the safest, highest quality services and mobility solutions that exceed our customers' expectations while creating economic growth.

Consider those fears well-founded. Apparently, Mason is now attempting to decide who gets to ride the light rail and who doesn't.

​Heartbroken fans of Clifford Pugh, Shelby Hodge and Heather "Shopgirl" Staible take solace -- the trio of ex-Chron lifestyle scribes have a new home online at Culture Map Houston, which debuted a few hours ago.

"CultureMap, a new online magazine and "mapazine" -- the first of its kind -- headquartered in Houston, TX -- brings hyper-localized intelligence and insight to each city that it covers," trumpets the intro the little blurb on the "About Us" page. (Update: Staible continues to write for the Chron. Our apologies.)

So expect lots of gritty reporting on the seamy underbelly of this sprawling, brawling port city...the lives of sex slaves in near North Side cantinas, the shattered remnants of injured oil-refinery workers' dreams, heartwarming tales of human triumph out of the miserable Southwest Houston apartment-strewn dystopia, and explorations on the death of blue-collar America down around the Port of Houston. As Balzac was to Paris, Dickens to London, so Culture Map will be to Houston...

Or not. Here is how CultureMapHouston continues to explain its own raison d'etre:

Photo via Deadspin

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Photo by Blake Whitaker

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Photo courtesy "Mary's, Naturally" Closed

​Mary's, the bar that many people think of as the gay bar in Houston history, is no more, a victim of unpaid rent.

But there's a scramble going on to try to keep as much of the place as possible, as a way to preserve a cornerstone of Houston's gay past.

A Facebook page has been set up to encourage ways to get artifacts from the 40-year-old place.

"The old sign with Ronald Reagan smoking that hung in the bathroom?" writes one commenter. "The old 'Mary's' sign that hung outside the building on the patio? What about any of the artifacts stored in the back building? Or some of the items from the back patio, like the motorcycle and statue?"

Tim Brookover, an activist in the gay community, is urging the GLBT Community Center board to get active in saving whatever can be saved.

The third annual Montrose Crawl took over Westheimer on Saturday night as crowds of Halloween revelers lurched from bar to restaurant to bar. With the attendees encouraged to come in costume, it was as if Arne's and Party City had simultaneously exploded onto the streets of Montrose. Needless to say, it was difficult to pick our favorite costumes of the night, but here are our top six.

Photos by Trish Badger

​Number Six goes to this lovely lady, er...handsome man, er...extraordinary person who dressed as our favorite SNL character from the 90s: It's Pat!

Halloween weekend was cause for much merriment and mischief making. Whether at Rich's or the Roxy, the House of Blues or the streets of Montrose, a cosplay convention or an erotic ball, fun was found all over the city this weekend. Check out our favorite photos below.

Photo by Son Lam

​The huge Houston Press Halloween Bash at the House of Blues brought out guys and ghouls from all over the city. See more photos from the event here.

Photo by lcrf

​Hair Balls is always worrying about reducing our carbon footprint -- in fact, we're constantly using aerosol-spray cleansers and dusters to reduce it like a mofo -- which is why we were stunned to learn in the Houston Business Journal that beloved burrito builders Chipotle Mexican Grill will be installing solar panels in about 75 stores throughout Texas....but not in Houston! (And they're even teaming up with Houston-based Standard Renewable Energy to do so.)

Unlike Encore in Dallas and CPS in San Antonio, CenterPoint Energy wouldn't provide rebates for the installations, SRE spokeswoman Kelley Wright told Hair Balls. Which can only mean one thing: Centerpoint wants the polar bears to die, right?

Halloween used to be a holiday for innocent kids to dress up in truly cute costumes. Then it became a holiday for women to dress up in sexy costumes, and men to dress up in whatever costumes would most likely result in them hooking up with a tipsy Sexy Nurse.

And now, of course, it is also a holiday where people feel the need to dress up defenseless dogs.

They did it last night at the Hotel Derek, in an event called Howl-a-ween, to benefit Citizens for Animal Protection. Yet these citizens, supposedly concerned with protecting animals, subjected their pets to the following outrages.

What did the dogs have to say about it? We gathered some quotes.

Photos by Liana Lopez

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Photo courtesy GHCVB

​Houston may be fat, polluted, sprawling and ugly, but it's got one thing going for it, according to Forbes magazine -- it's one of the safest cities in the country.

Say what? Don't they read our Bayou Body Count? What, you go ten days without a murder and all of a sudden you're Eden?

Apparently, the designation doesn't have anything to do with odd recent spurt of non-murderousness.

Forbes looked at violent crime (see above), workplace deaths (refineries are so safe), traffic death rates (well, hard to die when you're not moving in a jam) and "natural disaster risk" (Bingo!!!).

The magazine added all these factors up and determined -- somehow -- that Houston is the 38th-safest city in America. Which, ummm, may not be as great as it sounds.

Photo courtesy White House Flickr group

​Let them bitch all they want in Chicago about getting shut out of federal stimulus funds for "smart-grid" power projects. Here in Houston, we're kicking ass.

The federal gummint, that socialistic, fascist Big Brother, announced today how it is spending $3.4 billion of your grandkid's money, and Houston's two largest power companies were big winners.

CenterPoint is getting $200 million to help with a nearly $640-million project to install 2.2 million smart meters and "more than 550 sensors and automated switches that will help protect against system disturbances like natural disasters."

Reliant gets $20 million towards a $65.5-million project to install smart meters.

The CenterPoint check is tied for being the biggest announced today, with Baltimore also getting $200 million.

​We here in Houston are going to be besieged by rats -- not just the four-legged kind, but the ten-legged, ten-armed, sucking-talentless kind, too.

How else to interpret two announcements? One: "New Report Ranks Cities At Risk For Rodents This Year -- Houston Is Number Three." Two, from the official website of the black-hole of metal known as Ratt: " PREPARE FOR AN INFESTATION! LEGENDARY HARD ROCK ICONS ANNOUNCE INFESTATION AS TITLE OF NEW ALBUM DUE MARCH 2010 THROUGH LOUD & PROUD/ROADRUNNER."

Since the second item is in all-caps, it is obviously more important. And since the first one comes -- as could be fully expected -- from a company that pitches merchandise to fight rats, both discussions of rat(t) infestation are probably equally substantive.

Sure enough, the "new report" ranking cities comes from d-Con, "America's number one selling brand of rodent control products." Their helpful solution to the fact that Houston's warm weather, "associated lush vegetation, deterioration of structures and heavy sewer flows" will increase the rat population?

"When preparing your home for winter, the first step is to stock up on baits and traps, like d-CON(r) Ready Mixed Baitbits and Quick Kill(tm) Glue Traps," one of the report's authors said.

Okay. But which would be worse, having an infestation of rats or Ratt in your house?

From the tame to the terrifying, this weekend was full of thrills. Check out the weekend in photos below.

Photo by Craig Hlavaty

​Star Wars In Concert came to the Toyota Center on Sunday night, bringing an entire symphony orchestra, chorus, laser show, cases of memorabilia and even Anthony Daniels with them. Our review of the concert is over at Rocks Off. And for more pictures, check out our slideshow.

Photos by Brittanie Shey

Entrance to the Donnellan vault below the Franklin Street Bridge

​Texas Traveler has spent the better part of the month checking out some of the creepiest, oldest, most interesting parts of Houston and it's neighboring cities, and to wrap up the month we have a few more tales to tell you about. Below, five Houston haunts you may not have known about.

Donnellan vault
Fancy a drink at the Brewery Tap? Be sure to walk a few feet west to the Franklin Street bridge and look over the railing at the northeast corner. You'll see some old red brickwork, the entrance to the Donnellan Family vault built in 1849. Texas Traveler has mentioned this before but here's the full story.

Family patriarch and early Houston settler Tim Donnellan, who died in 1849, was the first to be buried in the vault. Seventeen years later, after the end of the Civil War, Tim Donnellan's son and a friend found some unexploded ordnances in the bayou. One story claims the artillery was dumped into the water after the Confederacy surrendered, but another story claims a Confederate ship carrying the weapons sunk in Buffalo Bayou near MIlan Street. Either way, the weapons were still live, and one shell exploded, killing both Henry Donnellan and Charles Richer (sometimes listed as Ritchey).

Both bodies were added to the crypt, eventually joined by Emily Donnellan, the family matriarch. In 1900, all the bodies were moved to Glenwood Cemetery, but the vault still remains and is easily accessible when the bayou waters are low.

The Face
The Face is one of those stories that sufficiently freaks Texas Traveler out, thanks to our extremely overactive imagination. (And we're not talking about this guy.) Yes, yes, we know all about the Elvis waffles and the Virgin Mary sweat stains -- you can read anything into a Rorschach test that you want. But have a look at this picture and tell us if you don't see what we see.

There are two backstories here. Some people believe The Face, on the harbor-side wall of Ewing Hall at UTMB in Galveston, is that of Jean Lafitte, the remnants of who's home, Maison Rouge, is just a few blocks away at 14th and Avenue A. Other people believe the face belongs to an old man who was a stalwart holdout against the sale of his property to the University of Texas Medical Branch. As soon as he kicked the bucket, his children cashed in, and he's said to haunt the resulting building.

The story doesn't end there. If you look closely above the face, you can see that the topmost panel of the building is darker than the rest. According to fable, the face used to be on this panel. UTMB tried to paint over it, but soon the face appeared on the panel below. That middle panel was sandblasted -- you can see it's a different texture than the rest of the building. But that only caused the face to move down again. Read the comments on this blog post from Galveston locals who've encountered The Face.

Dave Rossman for the Chronicle

​In case you were worried that the departure of Shelby Hodge would hamper the Houston Chronicle's tireless devotion to covering the inanities of rich, pampered self-obsessives in our town, fear not.

Molly Glentzer is on the beat, and among her first offerings is this masterpiece: "SWAT Team Storms Mansion As Part Of Gala Fun." It featured the photo to the right, featuring two jolly folks wackily posing "with one of the SWAT team's sniper rifles."

In the trademark Hodge-ian style, the report continues:

Forget ball gown drama. The second annual Houston Police Foundation Gala shook up all of River Oaks Oct. 17. Fireworks exploded above Tilman and Paige Fertitta's spread as helicopters buzzed the gardens, SWAT teams scaled the mansion, and "shootouts" and "bomb scares" erupted.

Sounds like Saturday night in the Fifth Ward.

We're just so glad these folks had so much fun. It's what makes Houston Houston.

​For those folks out there wondering if superlawyer Mark Lanier had suddenly -- after all these years -- finally developed good musical taste, you can rest assured: He hasn't.

Tort King Lanier is famous for his Christmas parties, elaborate (if liquor-free) bacchanals that feature kiddie rides, top-notch food and high-priced entertainment.

In the past, the acts have included Miley Cyrus, Dolly Parton, Brooks & Dunn and Reba McEntire. (Dolly and Reba have their moments, but tend to play their safest, most-generic hits at these events.)

This year's act will be....wait for it....Bon Jovi. Otherwise known as the New Jersey JV team, whose only career highlight was being roasted by Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. (Highlight: Heather Locklear refusing to answer whether Richie Sambora feathers his pubes.)

​Yesterday, we shared the vision of urbanist and blogger Andrew Burleson, who dreams of a Houston in which we dress for the weather at all times, even at work. It's his view that this would lower energy costs and immensely improve civic life overall.

He thinks we could begin with a Dress For The Weather Week, and after ten years or so of these weeks, Houston could become a city that always, in his words, "lived like it's hot 'cause it is" and "lived in the place that we're at and learned to embrace it."

Burleson says the invention of air conditioning has stopped us from coming to terms with who we really are.

"If a/c had not been invented for 100 years, if you could have taken 1885 or 1905 and paused the world's technology right there, and gave it 100 years of a gap, culture would have changed."

He cites the fashions of the 18th Century versus those of the 19th. "Things were really trimming down," he says. "And then you get to the early 1900s and you start to see Theodore Roosevelt wearing khakis instead of wool pants and the big hats. So you see they were already starting to deal with this [hot] reality, but then air conditioning is like this Band-Aid that came along and people said 'Okay, we don't have to deal with this anymore because we have this artificial cooling device that will make it fine as long as we never go outside.' But never going outside is kind of a big problem."

Nowhere more so than Houston.

Today, we'll explore the benefits of Burleson's dream -- a reborn downtown and Uptown and Houston's emergence as a world fashion capital -- in a little more depth.

First -- downtown revitalization.

​Andrew Burleson hates wearing dress clothes. He also believes this cultural hangover from our distant European ancestry costs too much money, is completely illogical and ruins much of Houston's social life for about half of the year.

"In the summer if you're dressed for work and you go outside it's just murder," says Burleson, an urban designer and real estate consultant and blogger. "Then you go home and change into something that's more appropriate, it's still hot but it's not nearly as bad. So on a weekend I can enjoy going to Discovery Green or on a walk somewhere outside, but not during the week."

As we all know, Houston is famously a city where you can see lots of people not enjoying themselves downtown on a daily basis. Especially during the work week in the summer months, those few that venture on the street for any length of time end up a sweaty mess, so most don't bother. Instead, workers stick to the tunnels and skywalks and stay fast in the embrace of air-conditioned comfort. But since the tunnels close around seven, Houston's downtown empties each day at closing time, and on weekends, the whole district save for a few bars and nightclubs is a virtual ghost town.

Unthinkingly, we've sacrificed our civic center on the altar of conformity to fashions developed long ago in much cooler countries. Another of the more obvious results is very high energy bills. Houston has long been known as "the most air-conditioned city on Earth" for a reason.

Burleson points out, and research bears him out, that women feel cooler than men. Thus we have the absurdity of women needing to take sweaters to work or play with them on days when the heat index tops 100. "We'll go to the movies, church or a restaurant and she will feel like she has to take a change of clothes with her, because she'll be really hot on the way, and then we'll get to the theater or whatever and go inside and she's freezing to death," says Burleson. "She can't sit there and enjoy the movies because she's freezing so hard."

To Burleson, our attachment to dress clothes is not just costly and a pain in the ass, but utterly unreasonable: Here on the cusp of the Tropics, why must we dress as if we are beset daily by cool London fogs?

"We get our fashion sense from Northern Europe, and it comes down to the rest of the U.S.," he says. "Our seasons are linked to that. In September, they start selling sweaters here. Are you kiddin' me?"

"Let's live like it's hot 'cause it is," he says. "Let's live in the place that we're at and learn to embrace it."

Ergo "Dress For The Weather Week."

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If you're like us, when you see Tea Partiers displaying imagery associating Obama with Hitler, your benefit-of-the-doubt well goes bone dry.

But when we received an e-mail about a local clothing company that's gotten into the Obamanazi business, it seemed like a good opportunity to explore this sort of rhetoric in the halfway sane context of a phone interview. Brad Hamm of Houston, who runs Truthwearshop.com with his wife as an offshoot of their custom-clothing business, was happy to talk.

Hamm, who says he didn't care much about politics until Obama took office, has had the site up for about 40 days and has done a few thousand in business. His stated goal is to sell 250,000 of each design. Hamm plans to introduce about half a dozen new designs, but right now there are only two currently available, the one above and this charmer:

Photo by John Nova Lomax

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We spotted this beautifully painted sign outside a Flower Alley fortune teller's house. There should probably be an asterisk after that bottom claim. With four of 15 words misspelled, this seer is clearly in no position to offer "advise" on every "aspec" of life.

​We've written before of the Houston Chronicle's cozy way of doing pro-bidness journalism in years gone by.

Today's Chron offers another charming piece of evidence.

The Bayou City History blog, which is always interesting, posts some photos of the development of the North Loop.

One of the pictures includes the caption from the original February 27, 1954 publication date. The photo showed four smiling, suited white guys ceremonially cutting a chain instead of a ribbon to celebrate the opening of the road:

Cutting the chain: Four who had a hand in bringing the North Loop to reality also helped open the major by-pass route from Jensen to State Highway 73, the first six miles of the loop. Left to right are M.E. Walter, editor of the Chronicle and vice-chairman of the city planning commission; County Judge Bob Casey; John T. Jones Jr., president of the Chronicle and chairman of the Chamber of Commerce highway committee, and E.H. Thornton, Texas highway commission chairman.

Let's see.

​For years, whenever you've felt the need to read about self-important River Oaks types heading to Vail or Taos or France, you turned to the Houston Chronicle's Shelby Hodge. We can only hope for your sake that the need didn't arise too often, but when it did she was always there.

If there was some outrageously "elegant" ball to help the beleaguered opera, she was there. If rich people threw a party to honor rich people, she got the details. If there was wacky fun to be had from a ball with a motorcycle theme, she relayed the laffs.

If there was any dirt that occurred at any of these events, and gossip that might pass as even halfway-interesting, it was safe with Hodge. There was never a bit of information that wasn't safely scrubbed and approved by the people she chronicled.

Alas, she will be chronicling them no more. At least, not at the Chronicle.

​Our thread on all the favorite things gone from (The) Montrose garnered a lot of great replies, as people remembered a mystical time 10 or 15 years ago when townhomes were not on every block.

One caught our eye, not only for its snappy prose style but for its byline: one Mel Sharkskin.

It may not ring any bells with you whippersnappers on the nets, but oldtimers will instantly remember the Public News, the alt-weekly that ruled Houston before we got to town.

PN offered Sharkskin's taut takes on life here, as well as what the Houston Chronicle once called the "saucy" writing of sports columnist Red Connelly, a description we're still trying to live down.

The incomparable Bert Woodall admitted he probably would have never kept the enterprise going if he had been sober enough to grasp the financial folly of it, but for 15 years it was a weekly must-read for a certain segment of Houston (whether it was to agree with it or hate it.)

​It's been a little over two years since Houston legend Marvin Zindler took his shock wig, blue-tinted eyeglasses and excessively nipped-and-tucked face to that great Ice Machine in the Sky.

For a while after his demise, KTRK kept alive his Angels in Action program, where doctors and other professionals would volunteer services to help down-on-their-luck kids or adults who needed eye surgery, wheelchairs, clothes, etc.

Now it's gone. Laurie Kendrick Lori Reingold, the longtime assistant who helped him run the program, no longer works at the station.

"Why they didn't carry on the tradition, I don't know," Dr. Irving Wishnow, an eye doctor and close Zindler friend, tells Hair Balls. "His angels, all the people he recruited, still wanted to help out any way they could."

​Last year, Buffalo Bayou Partnership's bubblegum-pink skimmer boat, the Mighty Tidy, capsized during Hurricane Ike. The Partnership recently purchased a a new "TrashCat" brand boat, a type of vessel specially designed to skim floating debris from the waters of Buffalo Bayou.

It's bad luck to have a boat without a name, so to celebrate its arrival, they're asking for the public's help in choosing a fitting moniker. From BBP:

The most environmentally and creatively inspired name for the skimmer boat will be selected as the winning name.The winner of the boat naming contest will receive a complimentary chartered pontoon boat trip aboard BBP's The Osprey, for you and your 20 guests.

Six years ago, The Mighty Tidy was named by a second grader from Lamkin Elementary. Hair Balls thinks we're smarter than a second grader, so here are some of the names we've thought up:

Hearts started racing with the announcement that downtown's vacant Savoy Hotel had to be demolished immediately because it was a danger. Hearts especially raced across the street at the Houston House apartments, where residents pondered being a neighbor to the implosion of an asbestos-filled building.

Things weren't quite as apocalyptic as initially envisioned. First, it wasn't the recognizable Savoy Hotel itself meeting its maker, it was the non-descript six-story apartment building attached to it. And rather than going out with a big boom, it went out with the proverbial whimper.

Yesterday the end came for the hulk, as these photos show.

Photos by Rich Connelly

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​Who the hell says we're stoopid here in Houston? Besides The Daily Beast, we mean.

Houston is only the second city in the entire nation to host a convention called "The Guy Expo," an orgy of cliches about sports, beer, babes and cars.

"It caters to the guy's guy and there's nothing wimpy or soft spoken about it," the show's organizers say. "It aims to be fun, loud, entertaining and slightly irresponsible. Want proof? The Almost-Darwin Award goes to the guy with the best story about the way he almost died."

Could anything be funnier than that? We doubt it. Because we're a guy.

The George R. Brown Center will host the event November 6-8 and it will even feature those wacky doodz from Habitat for Humanity "tricking out" a garage with a "plasma TV, hydraulic lifts, bar area and tool bench."

Because Habitat for Humanity doesn't have anything better to do. And we're sure the type of "guys" who go to The Guy Expo will race to sign up as Habitat volunteers.

​Most people in the world of music videos may not recognize the name Nahala Johnson, but lately, they've recognized his nom de film: Mr. Boomtown. The Port Arthur native (he now splits his time between Houston and Dallas) is a nominee for the BET Hip Hop Awards' Director of the Year. The show will be held October 10th in Atlanta.

He's nominated for his work on two videos that really couldn't be any more different from each other -- Slim Thug's "I Run," with its breathtaking night-time aerial views of Houston, underground clubs, bling, and wads of cash; and Mike Jones's "Next to You," which features the aforementioned Mr. Jones and his sweetie shopping at Greenspoint Mall and eating Corn Flakes in unbridled domestic bliss.

But after ten years of producing videos for the likes of Scarface, Bun B, Paul Wall, and Mya, Mr. Boomtown is ready for just about anything. We caught up with him this week, but only for a brief phone chat -- as you can imagine, a fellow with the name of "Mr. Boomtown" has quite the busy schedule.

We started by asking him what Slim and Mike differed in their approaches to making videos.

Photo by @Hella

​The American Planning Association, an organization that no doubt takes planning very seriously, has named Montrose one of the ten "great neighborhoods" in America.

Says the APA:

One of Houston's original streetcar suburbs, Montrose has a sliver of everything. Eclectic and urbane, the neighborhood is a fusion of architectural styles, land uses, and people (former residents include President Lyndon Johnson and billionaire Howard Hughes). The neighborhood has a thriving art, museum, and cultural scene, and local businesses. It has been the center of Houston's gay and lesbian community since the 1970s. The neighborhood retains much of its early 20th century character: one-third of the city's historic districts are here.

The announcement will be celebrated tomorrow with speeches by politicians, which is always the best way to celebrate something.

Montrose is great, of course (If you want to be really hip, call it "The" Montrose, even though the APA doesn't). But after a nuclear boom of townhome construction and strip-mall building, it ain't what it used to be.

We wish the APA were around in Montrose's good old days.

​The Daily Beast has ranked the IQ of each of America's 55 metro areas with populations over a million. Here is how they arrived at the concept of a municipal IQ.

They measured how many residents had bachelor's and graduate degrees, nonfiction book sales, the ration of institutions of higher education, and political engagement, as measured the percentage of eligible voters who cast ballots in the last presidential election.

And where does Houston rank? Well, ahead of San Antonio (Number 53 of 55) and more importantly, Dallas (Number 48). That's the good news.

The bad news is that we are tied with Orlando at Number 46, where we lag behind such august seats of erudition and ivory tower-studded metropolises as Baltimore, Detroit, Oklahoma City, Birmingham, Miami and Jacksonville. Our civic IQ was listed at 66, which original IQ inventor Lewis Terman classed at the top end of the "definite feeble-mindedness," "mildly retarded" range.