This afternoon a wall of orange and white barricades along the edge of the Heights hike & bike trail just south of I-10 is hemming in the construction equipment recently migrated onto Tarkett’s former Texas Tile Manufacturing warehouse site. Permits for some earthmoving on the former industrial side were issued just before the close of the year under the name Lower Heights District, and the Katyville property showed up on last week’s city planning commission agenda for some preliminary approvals and flood-potential scrutiny. No official word yet whether the site’s owner’s previous mention of stacked big box possibilities is still on the table.
Reader and tower scrutinizer Lucky Gutierrez also took a closer look at the oil derrick hanging around next to the site, on the edge of the bike trail:
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The rig is the same one the folks at the Verandah Cos. had planned to incorporate into their never-got-built Verandah at Woodland Heights residential complex on the site of the former Bowen Tool Co. warehouses in the early 2000’s; both the plan and the old warehouses had been scrapped by the time Verandah sold the land to Target in 2004. Some photo-sleuthing by a determined HAIF-er suggests that the derrick may have been scooted over to its current location back in the early 1980s from a previous home across what’s now the Target parking lot .
- Previously on Swamplot:Â Daily Demolition Report: Tarkett Practice;Â Tarkett Shutting Down Its Manufacturing Facility Behind Sawyer Heights Target;Â Comment of the Day: What Do You Call the Transformed Industrial District South of the Heights?
Photos: Lucky Guttierez
Sigh. They better not mess up the bike trail.
I stopped to talk to some of the construction guys when I was on my evening jog yesterday. They said there’s a movie theater and an Academy going in–but they said there’s a lot of soil remediation that needs to happen first. They thought it would be a couple years before it’s all said and done.
mtraka, Dick’s is a whole better
If you’re interested in seeing just what they have to deal with, you can check out their VCP data. Looks like an oil water separator and an underground storage tank that leaked, and “scrap metal filings, unauthorized discharges”. Not too bad, considering that’s been an industrial site for at least 100 years.
http://www15.tceq.texas.gov/crpub/index.cfm?fuseaction=iwr.pgmdetail&addn_id=200532142015144&re_id=859612262001341&lgcy_sys_cd=ARTS
There are metals and some organics in ground water, but I bet a lot didn’t come from them. There’s already an MSD for the area for a really nasty state superfund site (Harcross Chemicals) that was right next to Tarkett, plus an old bumper chroming place where Kroger is, and the warehouse across Summer Street used to be a wood preserving works. “Katyville” is really a little piece of Pasadena near downtown.
Site work is happening on this property! Total Wine has a sign up for future location!!!