Houston Texans Grille in City Centre on the West Side is Heart of Night Life Boom.
Yesterday our own Greg Lucas of FSHouston wrote an informative and entertaining column on the rise of Indianapolis as a Super Bowl host and major United States entertainment city center. The article was entitled “NFL Chose a Good City for Its Big Event: Indianapolis Makes Move To Even Bigger Time.” Check it out for yourself:
NFL Chose a Good City for Its Big Event
One of Greg’s interesting points is that Indianapolis, a city of 820,445 people, has about 6,000 downtown hotel rooms to offer – or about 1,000 more downtown hotel rooms than the City of Houston with its population of about 1.5 million more people than the City of Indianapolis. That comparison simply drove home the struggle we have here locally in generating any kind of sustained revitalization of downtown Houston.
We have built two, and soon to be three, major sports venues for baseball, basketball, and soccer in downtown Houston, but efforts to make the downtown area a “happening place” to both live and play seem to have again stagnated and slowed in growth as an attraction to the younger dynamic population that must be in place to make downtown viable again – or for the first time – depending on how you argue you the point.
WIth our vast availability of land for expansion, even early Houston did not stay downtown all that long – and now “going downtown” is still more associated with the long dreaded freeway to commute to work in an area that gets a little dangerous at night. That’s not exactly a magnet for people out looking for an easy, affordable good time on a Friday or Saturday night – nor is weekend business all an area needs to make it also work as a place to also live. You also have to have those everyday amenities like easy and safe to reach grocery and drug stores, shopping centers, movie house, and medical centers covered by you health plan to make it work – and you must have a place free of panhandlers and everyday street reminders of our worst ongoing, unsolved social problems. Downtown Houston developers haven’t figured out that one at all, so far. It’s just very complex.
Adding to the complexity of downtown Houston’s development problems, or maybe the strongest cause of them, is that Houston has some well-heeled business developers in the suburbs all around the southern, western, and northern perimeters of the city that are beating the pants off downtown in the development of attractive places to go for nightlife entertainment within minutes and an easy drive from people’s suburban homes. The City Centre at I-10 and the Sam Houston Parkway most recently looms as the best example of that fact nearest to me.
The Civic Centre on the west side is like a small town unto itself. Loaded with restaurants, bars, and entertainment options, the place is busy all the time and like a small segment of Manhattan on weekends. People are walking all over the place and lining up to get in the most popular spots, starting with the most popular spot on the west side Houston planet, the Houston Texans Grille. When the Texans made the NFL playoffs, many fans lined up the night before to make sure they got to see these games from inside the arguably biggest sports bar in town. I’m presuming the Texans football team either runs or license the use of their name in this enterprise. For now, at least, it is a pure gold moneymaker for those who run the NFL popularity show.
And they didn’t build the place on Kirby Drive where the team plays and few people live. They built the Houston Texans Grille on the west side, off Memorial, where many of the Texan fans live.
That being said as little more than an update, what do you think? Can Houston ever really bring downtown to life? Or is it important to the city that we even try? There doesn’t seem to be any shortage of new hotel space on the west side. I don’t know about Sugar Land, Pearland, Champions, Kingwood, Humble, or The Woodlands, but similar things seem to going on in those places too.
Just how much do we need a revitalized downtown Houston? And what will it take to make that happen? ANd can it happen with so many big spending investors tied up in micro-center suburban development?
Those of you who know me understand that my heart is on the side of history and Houston doing a much better job of honoring and preserving its history. Then I have days, or periods of time, when I look around at the quick fruits of these City Centre-like projects and think, “Wait just a minute. This IS Houston and what it does. It tears down the old and throws up the new – or whatever makes money for now. Then it tears that down and starts over – or uses the space as parking lots or strip malls until somebody comes up with the next boomtown quick-bucks plan.
This is the same city that put land aside for Hermann Park, the Texas Medical Center, the Museum District, Rice University and the University of Houston, the incredible Houston Ship Channel, and the heart of what used to be our space program. Don’t we have some historic reasons for doing something to preserve the land and culture of the downtown area that still serves as home to those two classic buildings we once called the Gulf and Esperson buildings? Or does it really matter?
Maybe I’m wrong, but it doesn’t appear to me that downtown interests will ever be able to compete with the suburban big boys for the easy night out entertainment dollar. The question facing downtown is: Can it ever attract enough growth in the residential base to make serious downtown development of entertainment offerings worth pursuing?
Tags: Downtown Houston
The Pecan Park Eagle 
February 4, 2012 at 3:26 pm |
I had the same thoughts with respect to the Hotel situation as when they decided to put a train on our beloved Main Street. I hate that Train. Maybe they just go hand in hand with the rest of the poor decision making process called city hall.
When I was 5 I was being walked down the sidewalks of Downtown Houston going to movie houses and having lunch in one of the many nice restaurants. Then I would set at a bus stop with my Grandmother waiting for an old smoking diesel bus, there was no air conditioning in the bus, the windows were all raised high so you might get a little breeze.
The ice house at the edge of town was still in business and the farmers market was like a magnet to most households.
A slow death is watching your home become a glass house with all the things that serve no one. I sometimes look at old photos of Houston just so I can still have some resemblance of being born there, the landmarks are already gone. No hotels just goes with the rest of the……progress!
February 6, 2012 at 2:21 pm |
great article. Only comment i have is that the I-10 and Beltway 8 complex is named City Centre, not Civic Centre. Regardless, its a great spot. I recommend a restaurant there called “Straits”. I also recommend a drink prior up on floor 2 of the Hotel Sorella at a bar called Monnalisa. The outdoor patio of the bar overlooks the center area of City Centre.
February 6, 2012 at 2:30 pm |
Thanks, Bob. I made the correction in the one spot where I mistakenly referred to the development as “Civic Centre.”
February 16, 2012 at 2:20 pm |
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April 4, 2012 at 7:42 pm |
I work downtown in the courthouse district and have seen the “revitalization” of downtown and its subsequent demise. The nightclubs and restaurants that flourished in the beginning died for a myriad of reasons: the gangs took over the clubs and drove off better heeled (and behaved) patrons from the same clubs and out of restaurants; restaurants died due to being entangled in red tape and waiting months and months for permitting; secure parking garages in the area are minimal, with surface lots being run by scam artists (Houston City Council permitted a company – the owner of which was a former council member – the exclusive right to boot and tow parking violators in privately owned lots. Many of those towed and booted were done so illegally (2 times for myself); the “train” is used heavily in the morning and evening to transport employees to and from the midtown area and medical center. The rest of the time it is used by vagrants and drug dealers dealing from their cellphone right in front of other riders on the bus. They set up deals at different stops right on the platform. Don’t believe me? ride the train at about 2 pm and just watch. Downtown Houston is NOT kid friendly and is just too far from the suburbs to make it worthwhile to spend money and time down there.