Water Wall and Williams

I've been trying to get to know my new city, and see the things there that are cool. So, yesterday afternoon, I took a couple of my kids (half of them refused to leave their video games to come along, but I was fine with that considering how the last attempt had gone), and we went down to the Water Wall.

Aptly named, the water wall is a great big wall that water pours down from.

It's a sort of man made waterfall in the middle of a park.

It's pretty neat.

It even acts just like a waterfall. If you get close enough, you get all wet from the spray. Which wasn't particularly pleasant. It may be Houston winter, but it's still winter. It'd probably be amazing in the summertime though.

The Water Wall is on one end of a small park. On the other end of the park is this building:

This is the Williams Building:

I don't know if this marks me as a bumpkin or something, but I'm a little bit obsessed with this building, all the tall buildings in Houston really, but this one especially.

This building is the third tallest building in Houston. Wikipedia says it's 901 ft. tall (274.6 m. for all you imperials), which makes it the 200th tallest building in the world, and the 4th tallest in Texas.

It is, however, the tallest building in the world not located in a central business district.

Houston has a downtown, that I took pictures of and posted here to my blog a few weeks ago. But it is a bigger city that just that. Similar famously large cities like New York, there's a downtown as well as an uptown...and a midtown I think too. So, the Williams Building is in Uptown, or as it is more commonly known, the Galleria Area. And the reason I'm so obsessed with the building is just this fact. The building is HUGE, and it sits in the middle of an area that only has average-sized buildings. Here's the picture of the Galleria Area's skyline from Wikipedia:

By Henry Han - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Notice how the building, over on the left side, towers above everything else around it. The buildings on the right side look like they're comparable in size, but don't be fooled. That's just a trick of perspective. It's enormous, and nothing else anywhere near it even compares. It's still in the middle of a really big part of town. Uptown is comparable to the downtown of Denver or Pittsburgh. But again, the buildings around it are pretty average-sized.

Every day, as I drive past the building going to and from work, it jumps out at me. Especially at night. The building has a spotlight on the top of it that circles the sky all night long. Looks like this:

By w:Flickr user Bill Jacobus - http://www.flickr.com/photos/billjacobus1/125073346/, CC BY 2.0, Link

And whenever the beacon is circling in a cloudy sky, it totally reminds me of this:

I suppose that's the main thing behind my obsession. At least now I can say that I've been to the heart of Mordor and I came away alive and well.

So, to finish things up, here's a low angle picture that turned out to just be a shot of my crotch. Be careful of low angles, they can be more dangerous than the Nazgul.