A little bit of healthcare reform over by the Willowbrook Mall, plus other destructive delights.
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A pioneer tin house prototype in Rice Military gets turned into scrap. And an Allwood structure too.
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Do you think if these buildings come back its going to be okay by magic? What’s going to change? What’s going to be different?
Culling just a couple pieces of the city today.
Getting some blunt refurbishment: the old Mervyn’s and Steve and Barry’s at West Oaks, plus a couple of smaller single-stories.
And the great Katy Freeway-friendly Marq*E remodel begins:
They’ve decided to make the ongoing demolition of Downtown Y official. You should be able to find a relic or two a few blocks away in the new Tellepsen Branch.
Look out for the smaller homes in the nicer neighborhoods. Those are the ones they tend to go for.
A buyer has at last been found for the carefully constructed Forbidden City exhibit at the shuttered Forbidden Gardens attraction in Katy. Well . . . for a portion of it, at least. Ben Cornblath is director of the museum and cultural center that closed under mysterious circumstances in February, then held an open-to-the-public selloff of many of its holdings. He tells Swamplot that a group of people in an “environmental” company associated with the Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo has expressed interest in . . . that big shed that’s been standing over the model and protecting it from things like sleet, Hurricane Ike, and the Houston sun. The park is still awaiting the company’s bid. Cornblath says such structures appear to be a rare commodity around the metropolitan area, and this one has a strong track record of sheltering an entire miniature Middle Kingdom city for nearly a decade and a half. But getting the steel structure out of there won’t be easy: The move may require a crane.
What about that thing beneath the sought-after roof, the one-twentieth-scale model of Beijing’s Forbidden City?
Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
Fore! We tee off the week with these shots into the rough:
Listed just last week for just under $1.8 million: the maxxed-out home in Southampton that NBA star Shane Battier and his wife, Heidi Ufer, bought just a couple of months after he joined the Houston Rockets in 2006. Battier was traded back to the Memphis Grizzlies this past February. A few pro basketball players who’ve spent time in Houston have held onto their homes here, but Battier is putting this one up: a quaint little 1905 farmhouse-looking thing expanded and tricked out by previous owners to just under 6,000 sq. ft. Sure, there’s the media room, the game room, the commercial-grade appliances, the big barrel-armed furniture, and the earthy tones straight out of NBA interior design school you’d expect to find here, but there are a few surprises too:
It won’t hurt too bad if we just take all four of these out real quick. One motion. Right off.
Maybe it was something he couldn’t get, or something he lost. Anyway, it wouldn’t have explained anything… I don’t think any demolition can explain a man’s life.
