THIRD WARD RESIDENTS PROTEST HISD PROPOSAL TO CLOSE HISTORIC SCHOOL 
The steps in front of Ryan Middle School were the site of a rally yesterday in protest of an HISD proposal to close and consolidate the historic Third Ward school. HISD says the proposal calls to move students to Cullen Middle School on Scott St. because of low enrollment at Ryan, shown at right, which opened on Elgin St. when Yates High School moved to a new location in 1958. But teevee reporter Demond Fernandez says that the protestors see it “as a pattern of closing schools in predominately African-American communities. . . . And they say if HISD trustees move to pass a decision like that tonight, they may be prepared to go to court.” [abc13] Photo: Wikimedia Commons
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THE SPORTS BAR THAT’S REPLACING THE SAXOPHONE ON RICHMOND 
Will we soon see a 70-foot red pitchfork here? Now that the Orange Show has moved that big blue horn out of the way, the former Billy Blues club at 6025 Richmond near Fountain View is getting a new sign and a renovation, a Swamplot reader notes, for the sports bar Diablo Loco Wings y Mas. Last week, Bob Wade’s 70-foot “Smokesax,” made out of Beetle parts, was trucked across town to the Orange Show’s Munger St. warehouse. [Previously on Swamplot] Photo: Swamplot inbox
CHANGES COMING TO OFF-STREET PARKING IN HOUSTON 
City council approved today by a vote of 14-2 changes to the off-street parking ordinance that hasn’t really been tweaked since 1989. The changes, reports the Houston Chronicle’s Mike Morris, will remove one-size-fits-all requirements that seem to have been rankling smaller bars and restaurants — and their support groups like OKRA — inside the Loop: “The ordinance loosens rules on how close parking lots must be to a building’s front door, makes it easier for businesses to share parking, allows substitution of bike parking for car spaces, cuts parking for historic buildings and allows the creation of “special parking areas” so neighborhoods can create new rules tailored to their needs.” [Houston Chronicle; previously on Swamplot] Photo of parking lot behind Tony Mandola’s Gulf Coast Kitchen: Swamplot inbox
WHAT IT MEANS TO WALK WITH THE ART GUYS 
Following them in his van as they hiked all 26 miles of Little York, photographer Otis Ike seems to have had time to come to terms with the piece the Art Guys are calling “The Longest Street in Houston:” “Having to explain the project in its most basic form allowed me, early on, to see Little York Road as an intricate social passage in which the Art Guys and myself were temporary and secondary to the basic necessities of the road’s users,” he writes today on Glasstire: “Yet there was something spectacular that started to emerge . . . . The Art Guys had become a moving target for me to frame the city and comment on the way that we manipulate, pave and . . . program the earth in the name of selling shit to people in cars.” [Glasstire; previously on Swamplot] Photo of the Art Guys on Highway 290: Otis Ike
COMMENT OF THE DAY: THE PAY WAY “ALL new highways should be toll roads. Every last one of them. If you use it, you pay for it. If you don’t use it, no harm to you. You don’t HAVE to drive it. YOU decide by your actions if you wish to pay more. Nothing makes more sense economic equality-wise than that.” [Thomas, commenting on TxDOT Presents Toll Lanes Down the Middle of 288]
Each of these purple specks — or black holes, depending on your perspective — represents a demolition permit issued by the city in 2012. The planning and development department has posted this and a few other maps online with an overview of demographic data.
After the jump, you can see in more detail the demos inside the Loop from 2012 and 2011, juxtaposed with other maps showing the permits for single- and multi-family construction. You know. For balance:
LOW-CAL RESTAURANT TO OPEN INSIDE WESTHEIMER’S HIGH STREET REDEVELOPMENT 
The shell shown here was about as high as High Street got before the ambitious mixed-use development was scrapped in 2008. In 2011, the property was sold and the project downsized by Dinerstein and given a timeless, compensatory new name: Millennium High Street. Yesterday, reports the Houston Business Journal, the redevelopment at 4410 Westheimer announced a new tenant: Season 52, a low-calorie restaurant with 2 other Texas locations, will open sometime this April. Besides the restaurant, reports Olivia Pulsinelli, Millennium High Street is expected to include 15,000 square feet of retail and 336 apartments. [Houston Business Journal; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Swamplot inbox
HOUSTON PAVILIONS TO BE RENAMED, REBRANDED 
Clearly, former NBA star Earvin Johnson knows the value of renaming — and Houston Pavilions, which Magic and other investors bought back in August, will be given a new moniker of its own, reports the Houston Business Journal’s Shaina Zucker: Today, @HouPavilions tweeted an invitation to a party on April 4 at San Jacinto between Dallas and Polk during which the mall-ish complex will reveal its new name and new brand strategy. “[R]etailers and restaurants,” the invitation says, “will have booths featuring complimentary tastings and interactive activities including Wii Bowling, a basketball hoop-off for the chance to win a signed Houston Rockets basketball and more.” [Houston Business Journal; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Flickr user cjt3
Note: A TxDOT spokesperson has confirmed that the total cost of the project is $1.3 billion. Story updated below.
This map shows where commuters would get in and out of the toll lanes that TxDOT says it will build in the grassy median of Texas 288 — part of a project it’s proposing to help deal with Med Center congestion and development southwest of town by widening 26 miles of the highway between U.S. 59 and County Road 60. Several new overpasses at intersections and upgraded connections to the Loop and Beltway 8 are also included in the project, which TxDOT says will cost about $1.38 million $1.3 billion. The full extent of the project will be rolled out tonight at a public hearing in Houston and again on Thursday in Pearland.
- Public Hearing [TxDOT]
- TxDOT schedules 2 hearings on proposed Texas 288 improvements [Houston Chronicle]
- More Concrete Coming on SH 288: 26-Mile Toll Road to Pearland [Hair Balls]
Map: TxDOT
COMMENT OF THE DAY: THE DRIVE FOR OAK FOREST RETAIL “The Oak Forest area is probably as good as its going to get right now in terms of retail. There is still a vacancy in the newish shopping center where Plonk sits, behind the Starbucks drive thru. At least we avoided a payday loan storefront, so that’s something. At Ella and the railroad tracks we got a storage place. Where Theatre Suburbia used to be, across from Oak Forest Elementary, we got a credit union. We bundle the children into the car, drop them off at Oak Forest Elementary, drive thru Starbucks to get a latte, drive thru Walgreens to get our prescriptions, drive thru Shipley’s to get donuts, drive thru Chase to make an ATM withdrawal to pay for our coffee and donuts. There is absolutely no reason for Oak Forest area residents to expect anything other than what we have. As long as residents have to get in their car to get a bite to eat, or pick up groceries, most won’t mind driving a bit further to Central Market or Whole Foods for a more upscale shopping experience. The only recent project I can think of where someplace actually became more pedestrian-friendly is the addition to the Oak Forest Public Library, with a new entrance on Oak Forest Drive.” [matx, commenting on Comment of the Day: That’s a Different Kind of Growth in Oak Forest]
MACY’S DOWNTOWN: WHILE SUPPLIES LAST! 
A Macy’s spokesperson tells Nancy Sarnoff that after 66 years on Main St. the department store will be locking up for good “probably Saturday.” As Kenneth Franzheim’s former Foley’s awaits an expected demolition, Sarnoff reports a rather unglamorous retail experience inside: “Only two floors in the 10-story building were open Monday. The first housed the store’s remaining merchandise. It included everything from dishes to fur coats, but the pickings were slim. . . . The second level had furniture and fixtures. Everything was for sale, including lighted display cabinets, mannequins and cardboard boxes for holding small pieces of jewelry.” [Prime Property; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Jim Parsons
This corner at Mandell and West Main near Richmond and the Menil Collection has lost another tenant; Sophia bowed out of the freestanding brick building at the end of February. It was back in 2008 when Sophia’s predecessor Café Artiste kept this “closed today” sign posted in the window for an entire month, receiving your questions and comments without betraying a word; Sophia’s sand-bagged sign, spotted by a Swamplot reader at the end of last week, doesn’t appear to have inspired the same level of community feedback just yet.
- Casual Dining in the Neighborhood [Sophia Houston]
- Guerrero Moving Alma to Montrose; Sophia Shuttered [Eater Houston]
- Previously on Swamplot: “Dude, What Gives?â€: Cafe Artiste’s Disappearing Act
Photos: Jack McBride (Sophia); Flickr user DrPantzo [license]
And the celebratory stunt that the Art Guys pulled this month was walking the entire length of Little York Rd. Moving on, apparently, from their uprooting in early January at the Menil Collection, the shadowy figures Michael Galbreth and Jack Massing completed “The Longest Street in Houston” last Tuesday, walking the 29.6 miles of Little York from Mesa Road to where the concrete ends at Jasmine Crest Lane in Settlers Village.
This is some of what they saw:
THE BOOK OF JOHN STAUB 
Maybe literature does have an impact in the real world — or the world of real estate, at least: “After the 2007 publication of The Country Houses of John F. Staub, by [architectural historian] Stephen Fox,” reports Nancy Keates from The Wall Street Journal, “momentum gained to save Staub homes that were being torn down, particularly in the affluent River Oaks neighborhood.” And this retroactive interest is happening all over the country, writes Keates: Homebuyers are looking back, when they’re looking to buy, for “an original source of traditional architecture — as opposed to the newer ‘McMansion’ variety.” Houstonian Calvin Schlenker and his wife paid $6.3 million for their John Staub, a “neo-Georgian” that dates to 1930: ”There’s a very limited inventory, they don’t come on the market very often and there’s great demand,” [Schlenker] says. . . . Houston real-estate agent Janie Miller says Staub homes have more of a premium than ever. ‘You pay so much more it isn’t funny. It’s like buying a diamond from Tiffany’s.'” [Wall Street Journal; previously on Swamplot] Photo of 2110 River Oaks Blvd.: HAR
COUNTING DOWN TO GARBAGE TIME IN WALLER COUNTY 
The fight over the dumping ground proposed for Highway 6 seems to be coming to a head, now that a draft of a state permit has been issued — despite, reports the Houston Chronicle’s Cindy Horswell, “a near record 6,000 emails and letters [sent] to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, urging the agency to deny the permit.” Waller County residents, reports Horswell, have until March 12 to respond to the draft that would allow the proposed 223-acre Pintail landfill north of Hempstead to go ahead; GreenGroup Holdings, which bought the property in 2011, doesn’t seem to have been moved by the residents’ opposition so far: “President Ernest Kaufmann contends the protest typifies the ‘not in my backyard’ syndrome that happens whenever his company tries to put in a new landfill. ‘Unfortunately, it’s the same argument that you hear wherever you go. It’s always about the groundwater and the smell,’ he said. ‘But our landfills are engineered to be very safe.'” [Houston Chronicle ($); previously on Swamplot] Image: GreenGroup Holdings
