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• 1998 – City councilman Ben Reyes, and Port Commissioner Betti Maldonado are con-
victed of bribery and conspiracy for taking bribes from an undercover FBI agent in order to
sway their vote on the hotel contract. Reyes gets nine years in a Georgia prison. Maldonado
does four-and-a-half at a lockup in Fort Worth.
• 21 December 1999 – The city chooses a location for the hotel.
• 28 July 2001 – Groundbreaking.
• 1 September 2001 – Construction begins.
• 17 February 2003 – Topping out.
• 4 December 2003 – The hotel opens one month late.
JONES HALL
It takes quite a large donation to get your name on a performing arts center. The Jones fam-
ily should ask for their money back. The exquisite work done inside by the Houston Symphony
and others is masked in a bland, featureless shell. It's easy to see what the architect intended:
stately columns and graceful curves – a cylinder inside a cube. But what actually happened was
something less. Is it a fallout shelter? Is it a loading dock? Is it the underside of a freeway
bridge? No. But it is falling apart.
In August of 2001, large chunks of the façade started crashing to the ground. The reason?
The hinges that attach the travertine to the building rusted through. These days a safety scaf-
folding surrounds the building in yet another lifeless collar, while clamps near the roof keep the
stonework from killing anyone below. In spite of its outward flaws, the interior is quite well
done. A grand curved staircase with balconies is the main feature, guiding patrons to their seats.
Inside the theater, 800 hexagons are affixed to the ceiling. They can be moved up and down in-
dividually to change the acoustics of the hall. The walls are lined in teak, and the seats with red
velvet.
• 2 August 2001 – Three 100 pound chunks of the Jones Hall facade come crashing to the
ground. The hinges that attach them to the building had corroded. Scaffolding goes up to pro-
tect pedestrians, and the facade is repaired over the next few years. 900 tiles are replaced,
10,000 extra fasteners are added, and the entire building is coated with a waterproofing chemi-
cal.
• 6 November 2002 – In the wee hours of the morning a worker plummets to his death
from a scaffold in the attic. He was removing asbestos from the building. The accident hap-
pened at 2:00am because the workers had to do the removal overnight so the musicians would
not be disturbed.
• May 2003 – Another stone panel leaps from the facade and tries to smash itself to bits on
the sidewalk below. It is saved by a safety net erected during the renovation to replace 899 of
its friends.
LONGHORN PECAN
Nature has a remarkable way of healing the scars inflicted by man if she's just left alone for
a while. Witness Buffalo Bayou downtown. It's still too polluted to eat any fish from the wa-
terway, but there are fish there. Many fish. Big fish. As well as alligators, migratory shorebirds,
and some of the biggest, scariest turtles in Texas.
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