Earlier this summer we brought you the first installment of The Street Couches of Houston, and since then we've seen many more and also received a steady trickle of contributions from Abandoned Furniture Correspondents from the Med Center to the North Loop. Here is the latest installment.
(Those seriously interested in the topic should check out the work of Keith Plocek, a Houstonian in Los Angeles.)
A vertical dump found near Yale and W. 5th Street:
The "Couch of Woe," found by Clint "Hydro" Heider near the concrete banks of Brays Bayou:
The next three photos are a series taken between August 9 and yesterday evening in the welter of soon-to-be-demolished apartment complexes across the street from the West Alabama Ice House.
The pile begins...
And accretes more furnishings and a random shopping cart....
And here it is as of 6 p.m. last night...Truly a sight to behold.
Below, two more in "Flop Alley," the cut-through from Durham to North Shepherd in the Kroger shopping center near W. 11th. Flop Alley was featured in the first installment as well.
Another vertical dump:
Token easy chair, found in Montrose by Nick Hall:
The giant truck tire brings a little something special to this tableau captured by Daragh Carter in a northside Home Depot parking lot:
And here we have my very own street couch. My son had just moved into our backyard house and we were scrambling for furnishings when a neighbor put a two-piece sectional out on the curb. As a rainstorm built in the skies, my son and I hefted this half of the set and hauled it the two houses down our street to our place. As we did so, we realized that the thing reeked of dog, and then I remembered that these are the neighbors I'd seen walking a pony-sized Great Dane. By then the rain was falling hard, so instead of returning it, we left it in front of our house, where it squatted for a couple of weeks, or long enough to kill the grass beneath it and for a neighbor to call us (and our neighbor) "white trash" in the neighborhood listserv. Shamed, my son and I moved the couch to the side of the house and then back out front again on heavy trash day, and my days as a participant in the movement are over.
For now.
