A few doors down from the Main Street Theater at 2516 Times, Naked Body and Bath is closing on February 28, an employee tells Swamplot. Opening here not quite 7 years ago, the shop is looking to get out from under that blue awning in Rice Village and move its bath bombs and body butters to a smaller storefront sometime next year.
Photo: Allyn West
TELEPHONE ROAD SMOKEHOUSE REPLACES TELEPHONE ROAD SMOKEHOUSE 
The low-slung building that used to be Pete’s BBQ has re-opened as a barbecue, reports Eater Houston’s Eric Sandler. Run by husband and wife Brian Lewis and Lisa Kuhfeldt, Oak Leaf Smokehouse had a “soft opening” at 1000 Telephone late last week — and was “slammed,” selling out of meat by 1 p.m., says a February 21 post on Facebook. “Once the restaurant gets things dialed in,” reports Sandler,” they’ll expand the menu beyond the five meats and four sides currently on offer.” For now, the smokehouse is open during lunch hours from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. [Eater Houston] Photo: Allyn West
A source close to Blanco’s ownership tells Swamplot that by November the West Alabama bar and grill will close. Meanwhile, Blanco’s will be scouting for a new location, the source says, “somewhere in the area.” Swamplot reported in January that St. John’s School was buying 13 acres of property in River Oaks that include 3406 West Alabama St., where the incongruous honky-tonk and its dusty parking lot — owned for decades by Barry E. DeBakey, the heart surgeon’s son who died in 2007 of liver failure — have been for 30 years.
COMMENT OF THE DAY: SCRAMBLING THROUGH TRAFFIC “There is a chicken and the egg problem with bike transit in Houston. People do not think that it is worth it to support anything to make the city more bike friendly because it seems like there is too much traffic in the city for any sane person to try to ride their bike inside the loop. Yet, the best way to make riding inside the loop safer is to get more bike traffic out there. More bike traffic contributes to greater driver awareness and pushes the municipality to make big changes to improve bike mobility like providing real bike lanes, adding bike racks, etc.” [Old School, commenting on Headlines: Push for Bike Parking; Buc-ee’s Bathrooms]
Most of this East Downtown property, according to city records, was purchased in November 2012 by CitySide Homes; signs recently posted here suggest that the contemporary townhome’s eastward expansion will continue to continue — this site is just 5 blocks from where Urban Living says it’s building around that leaning Leeland St. live oak — on these 2 purchased parcels between Polk, Clay, Nagle, and Delano that add up to a little more than an acre.
DRIVING IN HOUSTON? SO DéCLASSé 
Artists Carrie Schneider and Alex Tu — that’s Tu in the homemade Hazmat at right — recently walked the first leg of their revamp of Art Guy Michael Galbreth’s “The Human Tour,” a 40-mile hike through Houston in the shape of a body that he devised as a UH student in 1987; OffCite’s Edward S. Garza meets Schneider and Tu in a Midtown restaurant and looks to a higher source to understand what the artists “hope to accomplish,” he writes: “The televisions in Natachee’s are tuned to an episode of The Brady Bunch. Peter Brady is twirling a baton and doing a little jig in the living room. I think of how the Brady family would fit in well in Houston. They would certainly live outside the 610 Loop or, more likely, outside Beltway 8. Mr. and Mrs. Brady would seek somewhere ‘nice’ — that is, suburban, homogenous, and car-centric — to raise their children, and they would relish the array of choices: Pearland, Sugar Land, The Woodlands, Friendswood, Kingwood, Tomball, Spring, Clear Lake, Cypress, Katy. Anyone who has lived in this city for a considerable time will say it: in Houston, to be middle class is to spend a lot of time in a vehicle.” [OffCite; previously on Swamplot] Photo: OffCite
IF YOU CAN’T BEAT ’EM . . . 
Two single-family houses in Midtown, 1505 Rosalie and 1917 Ruth (pictured here), have been home since 2010 to an assortment of yoga instructors, police sergeants, and college students, all of whom share the cooking and cleaning in a cooperative housing project, reports the Houston Chronicle’s Nancy Sarnoff. Part of Houston Access to Urban Sustainability, the houses require all tenants to sign a “sustainability pledge” before they move in, but that doesn’t mean it’s all rainbows and rain barrels: “Each person is responsible for contributing five hours of labor to the house per week. Those who shirk their domestic duties are fined $10 for every hour missed.” Sarnoff adds: “There are regular parties and events, though the housemates are quick to stamp out comparisons to hippie communes or college frat houses. Such misconceptions frustrate Rabea Benhalim, a corporate finance attorney who says some think the residents can’t be professional and they all do drugs and sleep together.” [Houston Chronicle ($)] Photo of 1917 Ruth St.: HAUS
A native Houstonian has set up a one-man bicycle-messenger service, reports Culturemap’s Whitney Radley: Within an hour, Clutch Delivery’s Liam Musgrave will pedal to your place almost anything — except dry cleaning, pets, and “illicit substances.” This map shows his service area, extending west out to the Loop and east to Lockwood.
COMMENT OF THE DAY: LONG INTO THE NIGHT MAY IT WAVE “ . . . Leaving the flag out in the rain and up at night unlit is also considered desecration. Are you going to arrest all the car dealers in Houston?” [sjh, commenting on Houston’s President Obama Muralist Strikes Again]
The old Warwick — now Hotel ZaZa — provided one of the most beautiful views in the world, as far as Bob Hope was concerned, but that was long before photos of the Main St. hotel’s Room 322 showed up on Reddit. User joelikesmusic started a thread on Monday in which the room — booked for a colleague by mistake, apparently — is described as a “goth dungeon closet.” And the photos do reveal the room’s peculiar decor:
MINI COOPER PARKED ON KIRBY STORE WALL NOW PERMITTED 
Call it the artifice on the edifice: It took a few months, but the City of Houston seems to have embraced — or, at least, bureaucratically allowed — the fake Mini Cooper parked on the wall that was slapped with a red tag in early January at Internum, the interiors and design store at 3303 Kirby: “After some back and forth about permitting,” explains The Highwayman’s Dug Begley, “the city granted a permit in late January. Turns out you need to let the city know when you hang something over the sidewalk, even if it is a temporary ad and not a permanent sign. Otherwise, you get a lot of attention . . . .” [The Highwayman; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Lisa Garvin
PRESERVATION TEXAS DECLARES GERMANTOWN “SAVED” 
Remember that City Council approved the historic designation of the former Grota Homestead Neighborhood on December 5, naming the area northwest of Downtown just between Houston Ave. and I-45 the Germantown Historic District? First placed in 2006 on Preservation Texas’s list of Most Endangered Historic Places, says a press release, Germantown was declared by the organization in a ceremony yesterday — or Preservation Day, as it was called in Austin — to be “a saved site.” [Preservation Texas] Photo of Germantown bungalows: David Bush
Sharing a wall with Chinatown Printing, The Green Bone threw a grand opening last Saturday, debuting its hemp doggie treats and recycled-wood doggie daycare digs in the East Downtown Art Deco building shown here. Located at 2104 Leeland St. near the corner of St. Emanuel, the shop also has a lounge for masters with wireless Internet and an espresso bar. It’s not up and pouring yet, but a store employee tells Swamplot that it’ll sell homemade snacks meant to be eaten by either species.
