The Pecan Park Eagle

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?