Trip 5: Day 21 (The Woodlands)

Although I forgot my camera, I did make it out to the Mercer Arboretum & Botanic Gardens in Spring yesterday evening. This is a land preserve owned and maintained by Harris County, and features a beautiful botanic garden full of mostly native flowers. There's a visitors center toward the front. I was surprised with how well it was maintained, especially for a facility in a county that really tends to neglect its parks. I would imagine that they have volunteers who take care of the flowers.
I also went on a research bent regarding some never-developed, or built-then-abandoned, neighborhoods in the Houston area. On FM 1960, almost directly north of Downtown, there's a group of streets shown as gray on Google Maps. This is "Midway Plaza," a development that may have been laid out in the early 80's during the oil boom but, since I can remember, has been barricaded off and completely unbuilt. The sign sat along 1960 for many years, but that's now gone as well. I wasn't able to find any info on it online, and I was surprised to see that it hadn't been built on during this latest economic boom in Houston.
I also read about the story of Brownwood, mostly built to accommodate Exxon executives, the neighborhood sank into adjacent San Jacinto River due to subsidence, causing the streets to fill with water at each high tide. After Hurricane Alicia in 1983, the government declared the neighborhood unsuitable, but court cases and homeowners holding out for government buyouts left the site an open dumping group, for trash, stolen cars, and even sometimes bodies. By the mid-90's though, Baytown had bulldozed the remaining structures and turned it into the Baytown Nature Center.
There's also the famous Southbend neighborhood near Friendswood, which has become a superfund site. Astronomical cancer rates led to the entire neighborhood being abandoned, when it was discovered that the groundwater was contaminated by a former chemical dump. It included a park, a school and a number of paved roads, most of which are still there, though it's gated off. I used to drive by this quite a bit, as I lived just up the road, and it was a creepy part of the landscape.
There are many others. A lot of the neighborhoods closer to The Woodlands, which were just laid out with asphalted streets but no utilities, were eventually built out in the early 2000's.

Today (day 22), I may travel to Houston to see a movie and just spend time in the city.