Featured Posts
10/26/17 4:15pm

Starbucks Store No. 48023 Comes to Richmond Ave

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The mocha-colored drive-thru Starbucks that’s been brewing at 1801 Richmond Ave. since its predecessor building was torn down in January now appears just about ready to serve. Landscape crews are plopping in plants on the Richmond Ave. side; this view taken from an upper floor of the nearby Fairmont Museum District Apartments shows how the new building looks nestled next to its notable neighbors, which include the Big Tex Storage facility and King Cole liquor store across Richmond and Mexican restaurant La Tapatia just across Woodhead:

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Montrose Drive-Thru
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Featured Posts
10/26/17 11:30am

Exploring the Size and Scope of Houston’s ‘Houston, We Have a Problem’ Problem

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EXPLORING THE SIZE AND SCOPE OF HOUSTON’S ‘HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM’ PROBLEM How many more times will this city have to experience major flooding events before Houston can evoke an alternate image powerful enough to supplant the catch-phrase with which annoying outsiders regularly refer to it? The “Houston, we have a problem” line popularized by the movie Apollo 13, write the WSJ’s Miguel Bustillo and Erin Ailworth, is “annoying to many Houstonians, and others, who consider it the laziest of clichés. ‘Houston, we have a problem’ resurfaced with regularity when the Astros nearly squandered the ALCS series against the Yankees last week before pulling it out in the decisive Game 7. Should a problem arise in the World Series between the Astros and Los Angeles Dodgers, Houston knows it will be subjected to ‘Houston, we have a problem,’ again and again.” The writers briefly profile Snapstream’s Ugh Houston Twitter account — which devotes itself to surfacing hackneyed media mentions of the city — before conducting some research and analysis of their own: “A LexisNexis search shows that ‘Houston, we have a problem’ has shown up in more than 12,000 news articles and broadcasts since 1982, and on at least 10 occasions in this newspaper. Part of the reason it is so overused, Houstonians suspect, is that it is one of the few things most Americans can readily recall about the nation’s fourth-largest city, which is home to 2.3 million.” [Wall Street Journal; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Jennifer Alderman

Featured Posts
10/26/17 10:30am

Occasional Hazards of a Feeder Road Strip Center

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OCCASIONAL HAZARDS OF A FEEDER ROAD STRIP CENTER The Shogun Japanese Grill and Sushi Bar in a strip center fronting the northbound feeder of the Grand Parkway in Richmond opened its storefront involuntarily this morning to accept an oncoming 18-wheeler. The Fort Bend County Sheriff’s office has sent out the photo shown here of the restaurant at 7417 W. Grand Parkway South, showing the truck swallowed completely by the restaurant. The adjacent Gossip nail salon was also damaged after the truck broke through the interior wall separating the 2 businesses. According to the Sheriff’s office, the truck was carrying hazmat gasses; the words “nitrogen refrigerated liquid” are visible on the back of the trailer in the photo. The driver is in critical condition, and 3 people who were in the building suffered “minor injuries,” according to the report. The building has been evacuated. Update, 11:45 am: More from the Sheriff’s office: “The driver of the 18-wheeler has passed. We believe the crash was caused by a medical issue he was experiencing.” [FBCSO] Photo: Fort Bend County Sheriff’s Office.

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Featured Posts
10/25/17 3:45pm

The Zombie Skeleton Army Slowly Storming the Mansions at Main and Montrose

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Folks are always dying to get in and get a peek inside prominent homes fronting major Houston intersections. And here, adjacent to the roundabout at the southern end of Montrose Blvd. surrounding the Mecom Fountain just north of Rice University across from the main entrance to Hermann Park, a Halloween-season folly has been showing off a fantasy reenactment of just that scenario.

The tableau: Gotta-get-inside skeletons scale the security fences, crawl across the lawns, commandeer the topiary, and clamor for the entrance:

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A Shadyside Halloween
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Featured Posts
10/25/17 1:45pm

A Mattress Store Has Closed in Montrose

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An intrepid mattress-store-monitoring reader notes that the Mattress 1 One (yeah, that’s how the company spells it out) in the northernmost spot of the strip center at S. Shepherd and W. Alabama across from CVS has closed down. Desperate mattress seekers need not worry, though: Plenty more outlets are available to pick up the slack. A note taped to the front door of the spot at 3101 S. Shepherd Dr., which despite the prominently placed Kensinger Donnelly FOR LEASE signs on the space insists that the location is only “closed for renovation,” directs would-be customers to the chain’s nearest still-open store: a full 3 blocks north on Shepherd, just south of Westheimer.

If that location doesn’t work for you, the Texas-and-Florida mattress chain lists a total of 16 Mattress 1 One locations within a 5-mile radius — though that includes the still-listed Shepherd-and-Alabama spot. And don’t forget competitor Mattress Firm, which has 18 locations of its own within that same area.

Photos: Margo

Mattrose
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Featured Posts
10/25/17 12:30pm

When Café Ginger’s New West Gray Shopping Center Square Corner Tower Spot Will Take Over from Its Current Round One

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Café Ginger is already at work on its new outpost in its next West Gray St. shopping center corner, taking the places vacated by both Mama Fu’s and Verts Mediterranean Grill. The Chinese food and sushi restaurant arrived at its original and current spot at the eastern end of the northern half of the River Oaks Shopping Center 8 years ago, taking over from a restaurant whose addition to the center was marked by the tacking-on of a flying-saucer-like corner tower to the previously low-slung art deco center. At the new spot at 1574 West Gray, on the western end of River Oaks Plaza, the endcap corner tower is already in place — it was there when the center was constructed.

But inside, there’s more construction to do: As new signs on the doors announce, the new location is scheduled to open in March of next year. That’s the same month Weingarten Realty plans to hold the groundbreaking for the Driscoll tower — directly on top of Café Ginger’s current spot.

Photos: Margo (River Oaks Plaza); Katie Schon (River Oaks Shopping Center)

End Cap Tales
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Comments
10/24/17 4:45pm

Comment of the Day: A Quicker End to Memorial Bend’s Mod Era

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COMMENT OF THE DAY: A QUICKER END TO MEMORIAL BEND’S MOD ERA “The Memorial Bend neighborhood (which includes the featured Faust Lane home) was impacted hard by Harvey. It has/had some of the best collections of mid-century modern homes in Houston. Due to escalating land values, their numbers were already dwindling annually before the storm and I’m afraid this will only reduce their numbers faster. At least, we’ll have historic Google street view as a reference.” [Native Houstonian, commenting on Daily Demolition Report: The Faust and the Furious] Photo of 442 Faust Ln.: Griffin Vance

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Featured Posts
10/24/17 4:00pm

Former Brown & Root Building 3 Moving on from Amazon Lure to World Series Contention

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The lights have been changed again in the vacant office building at the center of Midway’s newly renamed East River site on Buffalo Bayou in the Fifth Ward. The 12-story former Building 3 on the KBR campus the development firm bought last year has progressed from referencing Amazon minus a couple of vowels to spelling out our city’s well-accomplished hometown baseball team minus its initial A. The view above was captured by a Swamplot reader from Clinton Dr. last night

The AMZN lettering lives on, though, at the end of a promo video Midway produced to rep Houston — and its mostly vacant 150-acre former industrial site:

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’Stros in Lights
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Bars and Clubs
10/24/17 3:30pm

The Up-Scaled Bungalow Bar Now Puffing Up in Shady Acres Across from Cedar Creek

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This exterior rendering of Bungalow Heights, the new bar-restaurant going up at 1919 Beall St., the former site of Air Cool and the Junk Goes Green recycling center one block west of the Cedar Creek Bar & Grill on 20th St., shows a building with a lot of bungalow parts assembled in somewhat bungalow-ish fashion, being patronized by what appear to be normal-sized humans. But take a close look at the scale of the thing in proportion to the surrounding figures — and the actual framing now up on the site pictured above — and you’ll soon realize this is a building where every part is probably going to be a whole lot bigger than what it’s modeled after.

For starters, the structure itself measures 5,000 sq. ft. — about the size of the typical lot you might find a bungalow sitting on. This site itself is two-thirds of an acre. Contractor Avan Construction installed the building’s trusses last week with a crane. (The longest truss spans almost 70 ft. and weighs over 400 lbs.) Inside, you’ll find a floor plan significantly different from the typical living-dining-kitchen on one side, bedroom-bath-bedroom on the other arrangement of an unexpanded bungalow:

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Bungalow Heights
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Apartments
10/24/17 12:45pm

The Most Exciting Crane Erection Video You’ll Get All Year, from High Above Buffalo Heights

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Not too much in the way of timelapse settings, drone footage, pulsating but string-infused soundtracks, supertitles, or accompanying sound effects appears to have been spared in the making of this video ode to the Arch-Con crane assembly now hovering over the southeast corner of Washington Ave and S. Heights Blvd. That’s the location of the planned H-E-B Market with the office space and 5-story apartment building on top of it soon to be known as the first phase of Midway’s Buffalo Heights development, on the northwest corner of the former Memorial Heights apartments.

Video: Midway Companies

Going Vertical
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Demolitions
10/23/17 4:00pm

Shell Now Breaking a Few Buildings on Its Woodcreek Campus

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A reader shows us a few through-the-fence glimpses of the massive demolition project that now appears to be taking place on the Shell Oil Company’s Woodcreek campus, just south of the Addicks Dam: 7 connected triangular 5-story office buildings and a separate cafeteria structure on the west side of the campus at 200 N. Dairy Ashford are all on the crushing block, according to a demo permit filed a couple of weeks after Harvey hit.

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Energy Corridor Clearance
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Disaster Aftermath
10/23/17 12:30pm

Selling a Memorial Dr. Lot Across from CityCentre and the Sam Houston Waterway

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That’s not a retention pond pictured near the center of these aerial shots highlighting the vacant lot at 12906 Memorial Dr. — or at least that wasn’t its original main purpose: It’s the Sam Houston Tollway, shown filled almost to the brim after Hurricane Harvey flooding. “Lot has been cleared and is ready for construction,” declares the listing description for the featured 11,760-sq.-ft. vacant property, one house away from the corner of Memorial and Beltway 8. It’s now marked down to $505,000.

The only photos of the lot included in the listing are drone views that include the adjacent Memorial Dr. underpass, shown in its full-of-water configuration:

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Where the Water Goes
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