A few readers note that work is underway on the site of the new parking garage planned next to music-themed office highrise Lyric Centre at the corner of Louisiana and Preston streets (catty-corner from Market Square Tower’s newly-filled sky-high resident display tank). The top photo above shows the crews digging around on the former surface parking lot as of yesterday afternoon; the city issued a permit for work on the building-to-be’s exterior shell earlier this month.  A glass-skinned design for the structure can be seen in the rendering above, which peers at the site from the north along Smith St., looking past the skybridge between the Wortham Theater and the Houston Ballet’s Center for Dance. The drawing shows folks making use of the ground floor of the structure, which is intended to house retail (in contrast to the garage going up a few blocks north at Milam and Franklin streets, which is intended to look like it could house retail).

The floorplan included with the listing for that 41,000 sq. ft. of space shows a ramp for the garage hitting Smith St.:

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Here’s a different angle on the site and on the Wortham, snapped by another reader earlier this week:

• 440 Louisiana St. [LoopNet]
• Previously on Swamplot: Fake Storefronts Help Downtown Parking Garage Get City’s Historical OK

Images: Ross Norwood (top photo), LoopNet (renderings), darktiger via Swamplot Flickr Pool (David Adickes’s The Virtuoso sculpture) Swamplot inbox (bottom photo)