- 12131 Fallbrook Dr. [HAR]
Sign up for the Newsletter
A BUNCH OF NORTHWEST MALL’S TENANTS MAY SHUT DOWN THIS MONTH 
Swamplot hasn’t heard back from the management office of borderline zombie shopping center Northwest Mall yet to confirm plans for the structure — but some of the mall’s tenants have been advertising their own impending closure, including alcoholic cake shop Bundt Cake-a-holic (which is currently trying to crowdfund its own relocation). Rumors on Reddit and The Leader suggest that a few shops like Thompson’s Antique Center of Texas and the in-mall College of Healthcare Professions will stay open, but that most of the tenants are getting booted for remodeling by March 31st.  [Previously on Swamplot] Photo of Northwest Mall: Moni
FACEBOOK COMMENT OF THE DAY: CARL SANDBURG ON GROCERY STORE AESTHETICS 
“Pile the carts high at Auchan and Weingarten. / Shovel them under and let me work— / I am the beige. I cover all. / And pile them high at Globe / And pile them high at Sage and Gemco / Shovel them under and let me work. / Two years, ten years, and shoppers ask the manager: / What place is this?/ Where are we now? / I am the beige. Let me work.” [Jerry Wright on Swamplot’s Facebook page, commenting on Secretly Preserved Weingarten History Quickly Erased from Side of Weingarten-Owned Heights Kroger; original poem here] Photo of briefly revealed Weingarten’s signage at W. 20th St. Kroger: Chris Barnes
Facebook Comment of the Day
The body-oriented retail strip across from the recently browned-out Alabama Theater has just swapped second-or-more-hand clothing retailer Buffalo Exchange into the spot by Kipling St. last occupied by Centre Fitness Fusion, a reader notes. (Centre Fitness took over from Orange Shoe Fitness, which itself succeeded bike shop and implicit fitness purveyor Cycle Spectrum.) Buffalo Exchange joins Epique Massage next to Darque Tan, separated only by a driveway and some parking spots from Demeris Bar-B-Q.
And what of the old Buffalo Exchange spot, recently spotted sporting a variance request notice out front?
Fashion Recycler Recycling
COMMENT OF THE DAY: WAIT, SO ‘KEEP ADDING FREEWAYS’ WAS THE LONG-TERM FIX? 
“The Chronicle article made a fairly big deal out of the following H-GAC quote: ‘Future growth and the resulting travel is expected to surpass our ability to meet regional mobility needs by relying solely on increased roadway capacity.’Â I question the significance of this excerpt. Is that not the case at the present time? Has that ever not been the case?” [TheNiche, commenting on Houston #1 in Sublease Office Space; Downtown Getting a WeWork] Illustration: Lulu
The skewed look of the retail center planned by Braun Enterprises for 2401 N. Shepherd Dr. comes in large part from the misaligned footprints of the upper and lower stories of the eastern building, each twisted in opposite directions off of the right angles of the Heights street grid (though the lower layer appears to get mashed flat up against a setback line on the north side). Renderings of the site posted recently by Tipps Architecture show the twisty building paired with another single-story structure stretching west along W. 24th St., with some hangout space wedged between the 2. Some bent vertical strips and boxcutter window angles add that sat-on-the-delivery-box touch to the upper story of the eastern building, tentatively labeled with spots for retail, a café, and an upstairs fitness studio.Â
How does one stray from the straight-and-narrow of classic Houston strip mall design while still fitting in all those required parking spots? Braun’s leasing flier shows a parking lot behind the 2 buildings, some angled-in street parking along W. 24th, and — perhaps taking a hint from the double-decker design of the H-E-B planned catty-corner across N. Shepherd — an additional level of parking tucked away on the roof:
Rising Above on N. Shepherd
All that booing over the last year and a half from Houston’s most expansive university system and its legislative friends looks to have paid off: UT has cancelled its plans for a new research campus south of the Astrodome, citing fears that continuing to press for the project could throw a wet blanket on projects at its other campuses. The school’s press office announced the pivot this afternoon, adding that UT’s real estate office will look into how to sell the 307 acres they’ve spent the last year collecting, though it might take some time to put together a sale that makes sense.
UH Board of Regents chairman and reality real estate TV star Tilman Fertitta said today that the sustained backlash to UT’s land buy was really a team effort, assisted by elected officials, administrators, and other folks aiming to prevent what Fertitta calls an unnecessary duplication of state resources. UT had previously announced that the campus wouldn’t have been a 4-year university; chancellor Bill McRaven suggested this afternoon that plans for the land might have shaped up to include a big data science center with a focus on health care, energy, and education, and that the ideas from the task force put together to plan for the land could be put to use elsewhere instead.
- Chancellor McRaven ends plan for UT project in Houston [UT Press Office]
- UT System Says It Won’t Proceed with Houston Campus [Texas Tribune]
- Previously on Swamplot:Â McRaven: New UT Houston Campus Not a ‘Dump’; Just a Contaminated S. Main Industrial Site Like Any Other;Â UT Writes Back to UH Pen Pals, Lawmakers on Houston Campus Plans;Â Texas A&M Weighs Houston Expansion As UT Collects Land for Its Planned Campus;Â What That Land UT Bought on Friday for Its Houston Campus Might Have Turned Into Instead;Â The Best Views of the New UT Houston Campus Are Available Now from the Fairway on the 5th Hole, Above a Trash Heap;Â What You’ll Find In and Around UT’s New Houston Campus
Conceptual rendering of UT Houston campus:Â Houston Public Media
Higher Ed Shutout
Update, 6pm: UT announced this afternoon that the Houston campus plans are cancelled — more here.
UT system chancellor Bill McRaven objected in letter form this month to senator and Astrodome scrutinizer John Whitmire’s characterization of the 300 acres UT’s been buying in Houston as “a dump,” the Austin American Statesman’s Ralph K.M. Haurwitz reports. Excerpts from the letter assert that the property, nestled amid the industrial-residential jumble south of the Astrodome, has never in fact been a landfill. Sure, there’s a little bit of contamination from an old polymer facility that needs to be mopped up.  And sure, there may be a healthy smattering of old oil wells from the Pierce Junction boom days, as illustrated by the Rail Road Commission’s map of current and former wells drilled in the area. (UT’s new parcels are just inside the crook of the Holmes Rd.-S. Main St. elbow, to the northwest of the ring of wells drilled around the salt dome’s buried upper reaches.)
But Whitmire’s comments, McRaven’s letter notes, might “lead a listener to conclude that the property and the surrounding area are blighted and unlikely to ever be developed. In fact, the property is adjacent to apartments, neighborhoods, and commercial buildings, and it is highly likely that these adjacent developed lands had similar characteristics.â€Â Meanwhile, the Wildcat Golf Course directly across Holmes Rd. from UT’s campus-to-be actually was a bona fide landfill; the only giveaway is all those rolling hills.
- UT System’s $215M Campus Site in Houston Is Not a Dump, Chancellor Says [Austin American Statesman]
- Previously on Swamplot:Â UT Writes Back to UH Pen Pals, Lawmakers on Houston Campus Plans;Â Texas A&M Weighs Houston Expansion As UT Collects Land for Its Planned Campus;Â What That Land UT Bought on Friday for Its Houston Campus Might Have Turned Into Instead;Â The Best Views of the New UT Houston Campus Are Available Now from the Fairway on the 5th Hole, Above a Trash Heap;Â What You’ll Find In and Around UT’s New Houston Campus;Â The Houston Zip Code Where the Kids Don’t Leave Home
Image: Texas RRC Public GIS Viewer
What Lies Beneath
The removal of the “Right Store Right Price” sign tacked onto the side of the Kroger at 239 W. 20th St. briefly revealed long-buried evidence of the building’s long-hidden relationship with Weingarten, a parking lot cruising reader notes. Yes, that Weingarten (which currently owns the shopping center): the company’s account of its own history notes that the Weingarten family started out in the grocery biz, then got into real estate to build its own stores. The company dropped supermarkets altogether in the early 1980s and went into real estate full time.
By mid-afternoon yesterday, the newly unearthed traces of the company’s former association with the building had already been beiged out:
Uncovered on W. 20th
- 3416 Tangley Rd. [HAR]
Bankruptcy and, today, demolition — so ends the journey for the Black-eyed Pea at 4211 Bellaire Blvd. Swirling rumors and previously filed variance requests suggested that apartments would go up on the site, and an actual design for a multifamily midrise was even floating around as early as last year — but the property changed hands again in the fall, as a reader noted.  The new plan for the site, evidently part of Dallas-based serial apartment developer Ojala Holdings’s bid to cash in on the Texas big-box storage market, looks to be a 4-story storage facility. And permitting reviews look to have started in the fall, not long after Ojala’s Uncle-Bob’s-turned-Life Storage got wrapped up across from the no-longer-listed-for-lease Wabash Feed Store:
Clean Plat in Southside Place
COMMENT OF THE DAY: HOW TO BUILD ON THE EIGHTH WONDER’S EMERGENCY HOUSING LEGACY 
“We’ve already got a built structure that has housed people in distress before. We are already paying millions of dollars a year in upkeep for a useless building. Showers, bathrooms, food prep, these services all already exist in this space. We’ve got a round peg, let’s just fit it into the round hole: The Astrodome is the perfect building to house our homeless!” [toasty, commenting on Mansion Flats Reincarnated; What a Homeless Campground Might Cost; previously on Swamplot] Photo of Astrodome: Russell Hancock via Swamplot Flickr Pool
A few wee-hours shots of the bus shelter at the southwest corner of W. Gray St. and Waugh Dr. show the stop’s short-lived cosplay as a thatch-roofed, mask-encrusted tiki hutch before the Friday morning rush last week. The shelter’s ensemble included carpeting, some upgraded bench upholstry, and flora of varying degrees of believability. The stop, directly in front of the orange-faced units of the W. Gray Public Storage facility, was purportedly back in standard business attire by 9am — though a tipster suggests that more such evanescent redecorating jobs may pop up around town in the future.
Catching Waves the 32
Pieces of the fencing surrounding the MacKie and Kamrath-designed ExxonMobil Upstream Research facility on Buffalo Spdwy. were spotted sprawled out on the grass yesterday along the campus perimeter after being plucked from their stations; more barriers are getting yanked up this morning, as seen in the second shot above. The property (which appears to have been transferred to the nonprofit Exxon Foundation in 2015 after the oil giant’s plans to offload the site were announced) was  sold this month to an entity directing its mail to real estate investment and development firm Spear Street Capital. A couple of readers report that other major shuffling around and cleaning out appear to have been going on at the facility for at least the last few weeks, with vehicles bearing the Precision Demolition logo making periodic guest appearances on the scene.
Across W. Alabama St. from the building’s more curvaceous end, the spot occupied until early last year by the empty shell of honky tonk Blanco’s has since been filled in with athletics stuff for St. John’s School:
Exxon Exit
- 5216 Holly St. [HAR]
