What if we could start from scratch and go with the idea to carve out a piece of Memorial Park?
Imagine UH between River Oaks & Memorial Villages.
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Actually, the actual divide from the comfort charts and tables used to track the HVAC load show that Houston, Texas is too hot 1/3 of the year, too cold 1/3 of the year and perfect 1/3 of the year.
…and this is without us taking city planning initiatives to make our streets and built environment more cooler and comfortable.
Yes, our summers are brutal but the temperate days from Fall, Winter, Spring actually are quite comfortable from a pedestrian standpoint.
Compare that with pedestrian cities which are too cold for close to 50% of the year.
Look at a Chicago or Buffalo today and compare that to our 70 degree mid January day.
We can walk in shade but walking around in sub freezing weather is far less comfortable.
My point is that WE decided to design the worst possible city for a Hot Humid climate. We CHOOSE to add huge heat sinks (wide streets + parking lots) that reflects heat and reduce cooler vegetation which emits less heat…it actually absorbs heat instead of sending it back out.
Narrow streets + shade + landscaping reduce heat increases
I think it was more east of campus near the railroads.
And I think the old Port City Stock Yards was
over there too. Supposedly there is a monument marker on Spur 5 that commemorates it . I have very early memories
of going to the cattle auctions there as a child.
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Monument is on Spur 5 before Wheeler—there’s even a pull-in so you can read it—Click to embiggen
Anybody on campus want to go by & post a photo of it?
Google Images —
That would be nice. Houston would’ve probably been another SMU in that case.
I stopped by once. Long enough ago that now I can’t remember the details, but I thought the marker referenced the “champion” mesquite tree of Harris County, which was at that location. Also referenced the Stockyards being the reason why there was a mesquite tree there.
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UH doesn’t seem to have a cohesive idea on what it wants to be. Urban or Park? UH’s campus isn’t that dense and we seem to keep building at the outskirts instead of in filling. Heck, I thought we should have built the med school on campus.
We are losing the large open space park look as buildings are being stuck closer together IMHO.
The Student Center North over what was the UC Underground, we lost a lot of open feel space. The 3 newer buildings like University Classroom and Business Building + Cemo Hall + Agrawal Eng Res Building are very tight by traditional UH building placement and close to SC North. The new HUBB over the old UC Satellite also adds to the more cramped feeling. Then there is the Science Teaching Laboratory
building attached to Fleming Bldg and very close to McElhinney. Across that entrance way you have the SERC and S&E Classroom Bldg all put in front of S&R I.
As for the medical school, I don’t see a lot of available space to put it and account for future growth.
And from this map, it kinda of on campus , or adjacent to it.
I think the best we can hope for is to preserve 4 or 5 large open areas like Lynn Eusan Park, Butler Plaza by the library, Cullen Family Plaza, Student Life Plaza, and the area around the Architecture bldg.
Fall, winter, and spring in Houston is not a continuous period. We have a few days of fall here and there in November and December. We have a few days of winter here and there in December, January, and February. We have a few days of spring here and there in February, and March. We have continuous summer from April to the middle of October with summerlike days sprinkled in throughout the rest of the calendar.
Regardless of all of the weather stuff, what some on here seem to be missing is that all of the modifications are intended to make the experience better for the students and staff of the university. What the folks that use Cullen as a thoroughfare are not taken into the equation except that they are being discouraged from using Cullen as such. That makes complete sense to me; UH is there for them, not the traffic patterns of Houston.
As for the convenience of parking access and egress, UH is not that bad. A poster above posted about LSU, well I am from Baton Rouge and went to LSU for 5 semesters and am very familiar with their football game days. Campus parking has always been a problem during the week for students and cars being blackballed were common when I was there (admittedly that was over 50 years ago). For game days, parking was all over the area and it was common to park all the way across campus, even around the lake. That was when the stadium only held 65K, now that it’s over 100K , I can only imagine. I did go to the 3 games in the 90s when it had been expanded to about 80K and it seemed about the same as earlier.
However, access and egress were much faster because they brought in state troopers from all over the state to handle game day traffic. For a period before the game many streets were converted to one way into campus and post game one way out. There were troopers at all intersections for many blocks away from campus waving traffic in or out. UH has a couple of cops at Holman and Scott, at entrances to the garage, and that’s all I can think of.
Our campus is a microcosm of the city architecture with a mix of old and modern all together. I’ll say I like what they have done on the north side of campus with the new law center and work around the communications school. We are headed in the right direction.
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I went out to Sealy to buy some calves and wondered why it was called Port City. Now I know. Thanks
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