I'm going back to Lubbock tomorrow, and I planned on getting some Tech photos then. I didn't want to put the nice looking Texas Tech photos in the same thread with the downtown photos. That would be like eating rotten meat before having cheesecake, the bad taste would still overwhelm the good.
Thanks for the compliments. Many people tend to compare Lubbock and Amarillo because they are so close in distance (120 miles) and size (about 200k metro). They are however quite different. Downtown Lubbock has long since seen its heyday, and there have been no serious attempts to revive it since then. Some of that can be attributed to the tornado, but not all of it. The simple fact is that Lubbock is more economically anchored around it's true cash cow, Texas Tech University, than it is around its commercial center, so downtown takes a back seat.
Aesthetically, the city doesn't seem to care as much about its image as most other cities, in my opinion anyway. With the exception of the Texas Tech campus, the newer developments in the southwest, and the many playa lakes around the city, there is very little green to be found. The city is laden with enough asphalt parking lots to provide parking for a population 3 times its size.The roads are atrocious. There are nasty dips everywhere, and in most cases you cannot even see the lane striping. There have been many times where I'm not sure if I'm on a 2 or 3 lane avenue.