Looking at some of the pictures on this guy's site it's amazing to see that traffic sucked big time back in the 60',70's and 80's as well as today. The more things change, the more they stay the same. One road that he left out, but would be great to see how "well" it functioned was the Old Galveston Road bridge. If you're travelling to Galveston, you will see it on your left as you go up the causeway. I think there are train tracks on it now, but to think that that small bridge was the only way to and from the island for, I don't know how long. You know, with the exception of downtown and the Transco tower, there aren't many landmarks to help you with your way around town if you just moved here or are visiting. But it's not as bad as LA.
I grew up in the neighborhood to the right of Gulfgate, outside of the photo. We used to ride our bikes to Gulfgate and eat at the Piccadilly for 50 cents. Good times. We explored every inch of that mall... going up on the roofs, down into the bowels of the earth. It used to be a fallout shelter. The bowling alley was pretty good.
You guys have re-lit a fire for me to hunt for historic pics and stuff about Houston. I found this site that apparently was started recently : http://houstorian.wordpress.com/
the bowling alley was hidden somewhere between earth and hell. seriously, how could anyone notice where it was?
Ah good old gulf gate mall. Used to love that bridge when i was a kid. First movie i remember watching there was Return of the Jedi.
Ok who remember the place called Pipe Organ Pizza? I think there were a few locations around town, but I used to frequent the one on Monroe. There is now a Slick Willie's there I think. I'd love to see a picture of that old place.
Maybe this is tangentally related, at best, but I found a pretty cool Houston website and wanted to share: http://houstonhistory.com/. It does have some historic photos, though I was mostly interested in reading the local history stuff.
Check this site out : http://texashistory.unt.edu/ Lots of pics in it. Within the site, I searched for "houston" on this search form : http://texashistory.unt.edu/searchform.tkl and it gave me a ton of pics. If you thumb through them, you'll find a few old pics/images of Houston-related stuff.
man, lots of memories while i worked at astroworld. a lot of hot chicks too. your post prompted me to look for some old friends i made from astroworld. found a couple of them on myspace.
"Shuttered" is too mild a word. Try shuttered, disassembled, jack-hammered, crumpled-up, scraped clean and placed in a dumpster. In about a month.
Yea, that place was great for the first 4-5 years of existence. It was great to have a nice, indoor theme park with arcades, laser tag, bowling, movie theater, putt-putt, etc, etc. Even had a water park next door and briefly had an area across the street where you could drive mini tanks that shot tennis balls at each other. I lived a couple of miles from there growing up and remembered watching the fireworks on 4th of July and New Years from my bedroom window. It whent to sh** quickly though. The movie theater started only showing movies from India and most of the people that went there were little gangster kids and the place fell apart. The bowling alley is still open I believe if you're open for some cheap bowling on the crappiest lanes you could ever play on. The water park is still open as well I believe.
