COMMENT OF THE DAY: WHY ISN’T LONG AND SKINNY ALWAYS OUT OF STYLE? 
“Maybe it is just me, but I feel like the folks that are for the high speed rail are the same people that are against the Dakota pipeline. The HSR will undoubtedly have large environmental concerns for the state.” [Bocepheus, commenting on High Speed Rail Case Heads to Trial] Illustration: Lulu
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Artist Ken Mazzu’s been back at the easel and back on the Houston demolition beat lately, finishing up some new works to be featured in next month’s building-themed art show at the William Reaves / Sarah Foltz Fine Art Gallery at 2143 Westheimer Rd.. The show will feature some of Mazzu’s paintings of ’round-town teardowns, along with works of 2 other Houston-focused artists (late photographer Jim Culberson and living painter Richard Stout). The gallery will even host Houston archi-historian Dr. Stephen Fox for a talk about The Changing City on the 14th.
Mazzu’s had a lot of subjects to choose from since a set of his demo-themed canvases went on display back in 2013; he sends over some previews of new pieces, including the scene above commemorating the disassembly of the former Downtown headquarters of the Houston Chronicle. Other recent works feature newly-parking-lotified 509 Louisiana St., the dissolution of the octagonal Solvay mid-rise, a pile of post-blow-up downtown Foley’s debris, and more:
New Works Retrospective
The main star of Atlanta rapper Gucci Mane’s newly-released music video for the song Nonchalant is arguably the townhome-sized closet in Lamar and Theresa Roemer’s Woodlands mansion, still up for grabs since its 2014 listing. It’s the swankiest rap stripper video filmed in The Woodlands all year!
The Roemers bought the home in 2013 and spent a couple million renovating it, including the addition of the 3-story closet-slash-wet-bar-slash-charity-party-venue. The closet was visited by a writer for Neiman Marcus’s blog in 2014, shortly after which a burglar stopped in — then attempted to blackmail Roemer into buying her own stuff back. Theresa Roemer listed the house herself at the end of 2014, after which it went on the market a few times (most recently for $7.95 million, down from an original asking price of $12.9 million). The place was supposed to be auctioned off last summer, but wasn’t; Platinum Luxury Auctions’s listing for the house does, however, imply that a new auction date might be set for this spring.
Much of the new video is set within the closet, as well as in the connecting full bath with garden tub (which gets some PG-13- to R-rated action):
Nonchalant in Carlton Woods
TODAY’S YOUR LAST CHANCE TO VOTE IN THE 2016 SWAMPLOT AWARDS 
You’ve got just a few hours left to vote in this year’s Swamplot Awards for Houston Real Estate — all polls close at 5pm tonight. Until then, you can still put in votes for all 8 categories: Favorite Houston Design Cliché, Best Demolition of 2016, The “Where Are They Now?†Award, Best Industrial Incident, Special Achievement in Parking, The Houston High Water Award, Neighborhood of the Year, and Greatest Moment in Houston Real Estate. If you need a final refresher on how to vote, read back through the voting rules. Tune in later this week as we tally the votes and announce our 2016 winners. Best of luck to all of this year’s worthy candidates!
Hey, wait! One last thing before we dash off for the holiday — now’s a great time to make sure you’ve voted for all 8 of the categories in this year’s Swamplot Awards for Houston Real Estate!
All votes are due in by 5pm Tuesday, December 27th — so you’ve got all weekend to whip up support from friends and family for your favorite nominees, too. As a quick recap of the awards at stake, here’s the complete list of this year’s official ballots, built out of your thoughtful and entertaining nominations:
- Favorite Houston Design Cliché
- Best Demolition of 2016
- The “Where Are They Now?” Award
- Best Industrial Incident
- Special Achievement in Parking
- The Houston High Water Award
- Neighborhood of the Year
- Greatest Moment in Houston Real Estate
For the complete guidelines on how to stuff the ballot boxes with all 4 of your votes for each category — that’s once each by comment, by email, by Comet and Vixen Facebook and Twitter  — check out this explainer page. Now vote away, vote away, vote away, all!
Merry Christmas! Happy Chanukah! Swamplot is skipping off a little early to go get into the spirit of the holiday, uh . . . “season,” such as it is. We wish you a joyous and peaceful remembrance of whatever brings you and yours together this time of year, be it Kwanzaa, Boxing Day, or the birthday of Emperor Akihito. We’ll meet you guys back here on Tuesday to wrap up that last bit of 2016 together.
Photo of Hermann Park and refurbished Memorial Hermann seasonal lighting: Meredith Nudo
Deck the Halls, Crank the AC
This is it, folks. We’ve reached the final ballot in the final category of the 2016 Swamplot Awards for Houston Real Estate: the award for the Greatest Moment in Houston Real Estate.
What makes something great? This award aims to honor the event this year that stood out above all the rest. Is that a Houston real estate happening that made the city a better place? Or is it something that left its mark on the local landscape in other ways? It’s up to you to decide who gets this award, and what it means — so be sure to explain yourself when you cast your ballots!
You can vote by adding a comment below, or by email, Facebook, or Twitter. And you can vote using all 4 methods — as long as you follow these rules. Tell us which of the following nominees represents the greatest moment in Houston real estate — and then tell us why.
Here they are — your 2016 nominees:
The 2016 Swampies
The map above (a snap from Luke Whyte’s click-and-zoom-able original version, published this week by the Texas Tribune) shows the abandoned oil and gas wells scattered in and around the Houston area, per the official accounting of the Texas Railroad Commission. The state agency (which has had nothing to do with railroads since 2005) regulates pipelines, oil, and gas, and keeps tabs on so-called “orphaned wells” whose original owners have stopped keeping tabs on them for one reason or another, writes Jim Malewitz this week — the ones that were reported in the first place, that is. Kerry Knorpp, formerly on a defunct state committee overseeing oilfield cleanup efforts, also tells Malewitz that “there is about to be a tsunami of [newly] abandoned wells — wells were drilled at $110 oil that you would have never completed otherwise.â€
The shaded hexagons above are meant to help show the density of those holes, not the degree to which they might pose a pollution hazard (though the agency ranks each well by its hazard potential, too, to help it decide which ones to plug up first, of the more than 10,000 currently on the docket).
Just what kind of hazards can a bunch of abandoned holes pose, anyway?
Boom and Bust
HIGH SPEED RAIL CASE HEADS TO TRIAL 
A trial has been set for July 3rd for the case over the would-be bullet train between Houston and Dallas, Kyle Hagerty reports today. Judge Halbach denied bullet train developer Texas Central a preliminary injunction it had requested, which would have forced some unenthused landowners along the proposed rail route to allow the company surveying access to their properties. The surveying is only one of the hangups currently facing the project; in addition to delays on the project’s environmental impact studies, Hagerty writes that the rail company “admitted to having less than 1 percent of funding needed for the project,” and notes that the estimated completion date has been scooted back from 2021 to 2022. [Houston BisNow; previously on Swamplot] Map of proposed high speed rail routes: Texas Central
COMMENT OF THE DAY: COMPARING THE INGREDIENTS IN HOUSTON’S NIMBY STANCES 
“Just amazing what our city can do in [terms of] jeopardizing huge sums of taxpayer money to help Southampton fight off developers and laughable amounts of ‘increased traffic’ — and then turn a blind eye to communities having to do garage and bake sales just to fight to keep their children’s sanity and dignity.” [joel, commenting on Ban and Bake Sale for White Oak Music Hall; Hurricane Ike’s Last Blue Tarps] White Oak Music Hall lawsuit map: Harris County District Clerk’s office
The density of fast-food chicken options at S. Rice Ave. just south of 59 is increasing precipitously, a couple of readers note. The most recent addition: the newly-constructed Chik-Fil-A at 5325 S. Rice Ave. (visible above on the right, just south of Pollo Loco and across the street from Raising Cane’s). The Chik-Fil-A is not yet officially open for fowl distribution (though it does appear to be giving away prizes on Facebook. The Pollo Loco and Chik-Fil-A represent the fulfillment of the Wal-Mart Supercenter version of the Shoppes at Uptown Crossing site plan, passed around back in 2014; the Marriott Town & Place shown on that plan has since come to be as well:
Flocking Together in Gulfton
... "Pin It")
- 705 C.R. 411 [HAR]
Voting begins this afternoon for the penultimate category in the 2016 Swamplot Awards for Houston Real Estate: the Neighborhood of the Year Award. A big thanks to everyone who took the time to submit a nomination!
Please note: This category is not meant to recognize the Houston area’s “best” neighborhood (whatever that might mean). It’s meant to recognize the area’s Neighborhood of the Year — which affords you, the voter, much more latitude in your choice. It also means that it’s especially important that, as you vote, you take time to tell us why the nominee you’ve selected deserves special attention above all this year’s other worthy contenders.
You can votes 4 times for this category (as is the case with all of this year’s awards) — once each by means of a comment below, an email to the Tip Line, and a proclamation of your affections on Facebook or Twitter.  If you aren’t familiar with Swamplot voting rules, check out the explainer here — and be sure to get your friends in on the action (which ends on Tuesday, December 27th at 5 pm, when voting for all categories will close).
Without further ado, we present the nominees for 2016 Neighborhood of the Year:
The 2016 Swampies
Rice University announced this week that the opera house it plans to build in the parking lot next to the Shepherd School of Music will, in fact, be designed by the classic-leaning architecture firm of Allan Greenberg — and formally released what appear to be a couple of the same renderings that Swamplot posted back in June, after a reader’s encounter with the above presentation materials on campus. Like the Baker Institute, the design looks to be covered over in classic-ish details more or less reminiscent of Rice’s older buildings; the towers on the south side of the opera house also roughly match the one on the Humanities building, which Greenberg also designed.
West Lot U-Turn
