Houston Sleight of Hand
Ohanian Comment: Schools can mold and crumble for decades while corporate politicos look the other way. All it takes to get other town sites spruced up is the prospect of 100,000 moneyed visitors and TV cameras. But who's surprised? It's business as usual.
Mold Mars a Crown Jewel
HOUSTON -- This city wants to look good on Feb. 1, when the Super Bowl brings TV cameras and an estimated 100,000 visitors to town. But it's a tall order.
Rising from the steamy South Texas plains, the sprawling city of four million these days is best known for traffic jams, mosquitoes and the Enron debacle. In a 2001 profile, the Economist magazine bluntly called Houston ugly. Ten years ago, during the 1994 National Basketball Association finals, the New York Post said, in a headline: "This place is a hellhole."
Stung by such criticism, the nation's fourth-largest city in recent years has begun investing in its appearance. Main Street, downtown's languishing asphalt commercial This doesn't look like an article about schools, but think about the fact that for decades politicos look the other way while schools decay and crumble. All it takes to get a sports arena cleaned up is the prospect os 100,000 visitors--and TV cameras.
Among the projects were two new downtown stadiums, including the Houston Astros' Minute Maid Park (formerly Enron Field but renamed in June 2002). The new Toyota Center is home to the National Basketball Association's Houston Rockets. A third new venue, Reliant Stadium, which opened last year next to the aging Astrodome eight miles from downtown, will host the Super Bowl.
In an effort to beautify the rest of the city, landscapers are feverishly planting trees along the freeways, about 20,000 in the past six months. Organizers have dispatched volunteer cleanup crews armed with weed whackers and leaf bags, and workmen are boarding up vacant downtown buildings. But even Chuck Watson, the eternally upbeat former chairman of Dynegy Inc., is realistic. As chairman of the Super Bowl host committee, he acknowledges, "We're not going to re-create the world here."
Indeed, the makeover cannot fundamentally address what Stephen Fox, an architectural historian at Rice University, calls Houston's "spatial anarchism." The new trees along the freeways, many of them seedlings, do little to obscure a patchwork of strip malls, car lots, topless clubs and seedy modeling "studios." Worse still, they're dwarfed by monstrous billboards and neon signs.
"It's an embarrassment," says Daniel Barnum, a local architect and member of the board of Houston's Midtown Management District. Last year, he wrote an opinion piece for the Houston Chronicle maintaining that the city's disregard for aesthetics doomed its bid for the 2012 Olympics. "Are we forever condemned to being this way?" he asked.
In part, this ragged look is the result of the city's business-friendly, anything-goes lack of zoning. But it is also a product of the oil-boom years, says Robert Eury, executive director of the Houston Downtown Management District, "when the opportunity was so great you could turn your eyes away from quality of life issues."
Host-committee members are hoping Super Bowl visitors will avert their eyes, too. But just in case they don't, they're offering official directions to visitors, cabbies and limo drivers so visitors won't see a particularly garish stretch of freeway leading from Bush Intercontinental Airport to downtown along Interstate 45.
The committee has a similar plan to avoid Broadway, the road that leads from Hobby Airport to Interstate 45 through a tough neighborhood. "We're not telling people where not to go," says Mr. Watson. "We're telling them where to go."
There are certainly sights worth seeing in Houston. Stylish hotels and nightclubs are popping up downtown, alongside the city's acclaimed theater district. The gracious Museum District is home to Houston's Museum of Fine Arts, which recently exhibited 200 masterpieces on loan from New York's Museum of Modern Art. And nearby Hermann Park, which is undergoing a dramatic $30 million transformation, is a forested oasis of gardens and ponds. "Good things are happening," says Mr. Fox.
But some of Houston's newest amenities have their own problems. The sleek new trains were involved in minor accidents with automobiles five times during testing and once since the official opening at the start of the year. Local leaders were so eager to avoid accidents during Super Bowl weekend they coughed up $110,000 in public money for a barrier along four downtown blocks. They also intend to leave the trains idle downtown during evening festivities.
Though about 85% complete, the reconstruction of Houston's downtown streets, including the replacement of utilities, is running about two years behind schedule. That is exasperating to the 140,000 people who work in the business district and has raised concerns that Super Bowl visitors will have to negotiate the orange netting and barriers that have become common downtown.
"The streets being redeveloped are not where we'll host our best parties," says G.J. "Jordy" Tollett, president and chief executive of the Greater Houston Convention and Visitors Bureau.
Then there's the strange problem with Minute Maid Park, which will be home to Major League Baseball's 2004 All-Star Game. Its white roof was designed to reflect the blazing Texas sun. But in four short years, it has come to look more like a dirty ashtray than a shining example of urban renewal. All the more troubling to local leaders: NFL officials here for the Super Bowl game between the Carolina Panthers and the New England Patriots will have views of the ballpark from the new Hilton Americas Hotel just blocks away.
"It's a sore point," says Billy Burge, chairman of the Harris County-Houston Sports Authority. "We're advertising three brand-new state-of-the-art stadiums and one's got a roof that looks like it's been there forever."
The manufacturer, GenFlex Roofing Systems of Maumee, Ohio, suggested a good scrub. Instead, the sports authority spent more than $5,000 on private testing only to find that what covered the roof was a common mold not unlike what grows on an overripe orange. A stalemate between the sports authority and GenFlex over how best to restore the roof to its original condition delayed any cleaning until Jan. 7.
GenFlex finally agreed to treat the mold chemically and address how to keep it off in the future. But when its contractor, Ken Barlow, finished his work on Jan. 15, the roof still looked, in the words of a front-page story in the Houston Chronicle, like "coffee-stained teeth." Mr. Barlow says the problem isn't mold, but dirt, a particulate resulting from Houston's polluted air and clay from the infield. He agreed to give it a scrub, but not before criticizing the sports authority for its inadequate maintenance program. Mr. Barlow expected to finish Wednesday, and the roof is definitely cleaner.
The sports authority, which hasn't cleaned the roof since the ballpark opened, says the roof should be maintenance free, with the rain keeping it clean. Meanwhile, the once-celebrated feature has become the butt of local jokes, including one suggestion that officials should put more dirt on it and plant trees.
— Thaddeus Herrick
Houston Knows We Have a Problem--They're Working On It
Wall Street Journal
2004-01-22
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB107473567924408475,00.html?mod=home%5Fpage%5Fone%5Fus
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
