This post is entirely too positive.
I'm gonna leave this thread for a while, and when I come back I want to see some posts denigrating Arky and the SEC.
I've got nothing. I'm happy with this. Sorry. Too many memories of the Southwest Conference.
Pristine:
Forgot to update you after my Lubbock visit. I didn't really time to walk around campus, which was disappointing, but the area around campus was nice and is going through a lot of renewal.
Yeah. As a lawyer, you'd dig this story. The Overton Park area where your hotel now stands, and most of the area around it, was the site of the largest privately-funded urban renewal project in U.S. history. One developer, Delbert McDougal, had the vision for the whole project in 1993, a complete purchase of over 900 parcels of land over 325 contiguous urban acres, demolition of everything except for the churches in the area and a few historic or otherwise significant buildings, and a rebuild as a "new urbanism" walking/biking type neighborhood for living/work/retail.
Most of that whole area was once nothing but cheap apartments, a few shabby motels, and small, run-down, cheaply-built postwar homes. It was always called North Overton technically, but nobody called it that. It was commonly known as the "Tech Ghetto." I lived there my first year at Tech. I owned a gun. It was so bad, that in 1999, after six years of planning and researching who owned what, McDougal began buying. He had easily bought up over 40% of the entire area for his redevelopment project in just 90 days, and nobody even realized it. Even after he came out to make his plan public, (in order to speed up the project and get the city involved in case eminent domain--which was used only four times for the whole project...all settled without the courts--would be required,) instead of having landowners holding him up for higher prices as one would expect, the opposite was true. Owners were still so willing to sell that the developer ran out of money and had to bring new bankers in to help him finance all the paper.
In Jan. 2002, demolition started, and by the end of the year, most of that whole side of the city was reduced to rubble, which had to all be carted off, as there was a lot of asbestos and lead and everything else you'd expect in mostly post-WWII construction. It looked really eerie there. Looking at the pictures of the town in Oklahoma devastated by the tornado made me think of it immediately. Complete destruction and desolation as far as the eye could see, yet in a city.
Pretty amazing to see the project winding down now and looking almost like it never happened, just a decade later. What you are seeing now is mostly the work of other developers building around McDougal's original project. For example, they are building an Alamo Draft House (a really amazing motion picture theater chain based in Austin that caters to film geeks in amazing ways) in Lubbock just across from the main campus, in another, smaller redevelopment project called North Slide Square.
The busy-bee developer who started all this is now doing a $1.2 billion overhaul of Downtown Lubbock, which is already quietly underway, and will likely get bigger as new investments are coming forward. First step is getting all the old power/telephone lines underground. The plans look amazing. The City of Lubbock is notoriously conservative (most would even say cheap) in terms of spending money, but they've done a good job moving these projects along and spending money for the future where it will surely be needed, like securing water for the next 100 years. With all the new oil/gas finds in the area, and all the money McDougal made on the ambitious Overton project, there will be no lack of private money for the project, for sure.
If I had to pick one word to describe Lubbock, it would be "flat."
Yup. It's the high plains. Think of it as basically being on top of a
huge flat-topped mesa, geographically. Lots of people don't realize the altitude is so high either. 3,256 ft above sea level.
We ended up working through lunch, so I didn't get to try any of your lunch suggestions. For dinner, we ate at Cafe J, which was fucking awesome. Highly recommend it. If you ever eat there, you have to try the Cream of Green Chili Soup. Best soup I have ever eaten. I canot recommend it any more.
I've seen it many times, but always passed by. I know it's owned by the folks behind the Grapevine, which was really good. That soup sounds delicious. Thanks for the tip. Sorry you missed the 50-yd Line and Triple-J's Chophouse and Brewpub though.
Hope you had a good time, even though you were obviously busy working. Lubbock is a friendly place, and the coeds are top-shelf Texas.
No, but I remember when we had Trogan fans. Before Cyan started permabanning them.
LOL
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