The Bill White Vermin And Solid Waste Memorial Park
Todd Spivak reports in the Houston Press that one of the stranger priorities of the White Administration, a new downtown park, is off to some kind of start:
We walk the winding pathways together. Most benches are occupied by homeless people, lying on their backs with their shoes kicked off. During the course of a few minutes, we see a half-dozen rats scurry past. Along the sidewalk a large cloud of flies hovers over a pile of [feces].
Is that…from an animal?
"Oh, no," Guidry says. "That's human."
Guidry has a grab bag of horror stories regarding the park. He tells one particularly bizarre tale that involves a penis, a groundskeeper and a shovel.
It's midday a couple of weeks ago, the story goes. Guidry steps outside his building for a break. He watches as a groundskeeper pushes a lawn mower past a homeless man who's asleep on a bench. Apparently angered by the intrusion, the homeless man "all of a sudden pulls out his penis and chases the groundskeeper over the hill." The groundskeeper's supervisor fast approaches holding a shovel over his head and cussing out the homeless man, who yells right back.
"Here it is," Guidry says, "three in the afternoon, and this guy is standing in the middle of the park, for like two minutes, shouting and holding out his penis and shaking it."
It wasn't always this way.
Guidry says the problems began at the park only within the last six months. For years, the park was privately owned and maintained by Crescent Real Estate Equities Limited Partnership, which owns Houston Center. In those halcyon days, Guidry says, the park was clean and peaceful, brimming with strollers and picnickers.
In August 2004, Crescent sold the westernmost parcel to an "undisclosed buyer," according to Crescent spokeswoman Jennifer Terrell. This parcel, which sits adjacent to the Four Seasons, is clearly the most poorly managed of the three and is home to perhaps hundreds of rodents.
Crescent sold the remaining two parcels, which total 5.3 acres, to the City of Houston in a somewhat complicated deal. A group of private foundations ponied up most of the $27 million for the property. About $8 million came from city coffers. The city then transferred the land to the nonprofit Houston Downtown Park Corporation, which holds the titles on the properties, according to the mayor's deputy chief of staff, Richard Lapin.
This fall, Lapin says, the city will unveil design plans to combine these parcels with two nearby city-owned parking lots to create a 12-acre park -- downtown's largest. Meanwhile, before construction begins on the new park, the two parcels are being managed by the city's Convention and Entertainment Facilities Department.
Former Mayor Lee P. Brown had the new METRO building named after him. It will only be fitting if the city's new vermin and solid human waste ecosystem/park is named after the current mayor.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 08/04/05 11:04 PM | Print |
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