This might be the last recorded view of the slightly peaked facade of the former Loehmann’s Clothing storefront, on the land owned by Houston Baptist University’s for-profit Beechnut Street development company at the southwest corner of 59 and Fondren Rd. A reader noted the green construction fencing late last month around part of the shopping center building that once housed $1.09 CD, Fondren Doctors Medical, and Libreria Cristiana on its narrow frontage-road-facing north end; the shot above looks southwest past the edge of the free-standing Mattress Firm on the center’s corner (right), next to the Shell station and the Burger King.
The strip was issued a demolition permit on the 26th, and by yesterday afternoon, much of the structure was being scraped up by an excavator and its handlers:
“I’ve wondered why this building has maintained its old name socially but other buildings in town haven’t. Many residents still refer to the building as Transco Tower instead of Williams Tower. The name change was in 1999. Why don’t folks in Houston call the JPMorgan Chase Tower the Texas Commerce Tower? The Bank of America Building is formerly known as the RepublicBank Center, the NCNB Center, and the NationsBank Center. Enterprise Plaza used to be called the Southwest Bank of Texas Building. Gulf Tower became Chevron Tower and is now the Fulbright Tower. I guess because the building is [one of] the tallest in Houston, and the most recognizable.” [
“I’m one of those townhouse dwellers in the Third Ward, and one of my six-pack neighbors got around the problem of obstructed views in a literal sense: She built an observation deck on top of her house that’s only accessible by a ladder. Good for views . . . bad for late-night, outdoor drinking.” [
Following the University of Texas’s 
“Yup. I saw another apartment crisis coming in Houston, and true to form, it’s here. . . . If you managed to keep your job, you’ll find that you can now afford a better apartment for the same rent due to concessions. But it could be a terrible, awful thing for older Class D apartments and the neighborhoods around them. Tenants in Class B apartments will find that they can now afford a Class A apartment, and so on down the line. The Class D apartments that lost their good tenants to Class C apartments will have nowhere to turn. Crime on the property will skyrocket as they give up on what little tenant screening they had. Maintenance will be deferred even more as they try to control the financial bleeding. Worst case scenario, the two problems will feed each other until the complexes are totally derelict and need to be condemned. Granted, this is just a worst case scenario. The damage could be limited to only a handful of complexes. Fingers are crossed.” [
“I said to the county attorney’s representative, this looks like the spot, this looks like a cemetery,” University of Houston anthropology professor Ken Brown told ABC 13’s Ted Oberg, discussing a visit two years ago to the land currently being developed as the Alden Woods subdivision. Darling Homes is developing the 70-acre tract off Huffmeister Rd., just north of the intersection with Maxwell Rd. in Cypress, into a 
