- 4123 Howcher St. [HAR]
Sign up for the Newsletter
Go ahead, name a few of Houston’s most heavily-Instagrammed hotspots. The Waterwall, North and South boulevards, maybe the “We Love Houston” sign that — until recently — sat along I-10. But who ever wanted to go pose next to the Katy Fwy. just to pick up a few new followers? If only there was a location where the photogenic offerings sat under a roof — preferably in one of those hip Houston retail-and-restaurant strips where the food might merit a few pics as well.
Enter Flower Vault, the budding brick-and-mortar Instagram destination shown at top that’s taken over half of Joybird Furniture‘s storefront at 1735 Westheimer, 2 blocks west of Dunlavy. For $20 per person (and $10 per pet), you can spend an hour taking pictures inside the studio’s blossoming interior spaces. The admissions fee won’t preclude other patrons from visiting at the same time, so you may have to take turns in front of the backdrops. But check out the results so far; it appears everyone’s been happy to share.
Not Your Father’s Florist
COMMENT OF THE DAY: THE NEXT HEIGHTS WANNABEES NEED A BRIDGE TO GET WHERE THEY’RE GOING 
“They are trying to punch Patterson St. to the north and call it an extension of the Heights. There was an apartment group looking at the Baton Rouge tract a while ago.” [bocepus, commenting on Daily Demolition Report: Swift Removal] Map of 8.6-acre tract between the MKT trail and W. 6th St., across the bayou from Paterson St.: Houston Planning Commission
  
Following “four or five 3-month lease extensions,” the landlord of 2318 Waugh Dr. dropped by Corazon last Friday to give the business its 30-days notice, reports store owner Chris Murphy. Its exit date is now set for November 20, a Tuesday, so final sales will take place the weekend before. Murphy says he’d been working to track down a new location for the store since learning it’d have to leave more than a year ago — but hasn’t had any luck. Barring any last-minute workable option, “we’ll reluctantly have to liquidate fixtures and retreat to various online platforms,” he says, in order to keep dealing guayaberas, Luca Libre masks, and other imports like the store has been doing since 1998. It’s shown around that year in the across-the-street photo above, which also gives a view of the landmark red dot on the building’s south side. (The taller building behind it occupies the same piece of land but was torn down in 2016.)
Next up for the 6,250-sq.-ft. parcel: a trio of townhomes. The landowner’s plan, says Murphy, “is to demolish the building immediately once we vacate,” and plant the new residences in a line like this along Fairview St.:
Towhomes Imminent
CITY COUNCIL TO CUT CHECK FOR SECOND WARD SENIOR HOUSING TODAY 
This afternoon, City Council is set to approve a $3.5M loan to the private developer who wants to build 3 stories of senior housing on Commerce St., inside the red box shown above. Roughly $2.2M of it would come from grant funds the city got its hands on from HUD, but hasn’t spent yet. The other $1.3M is sitting in a stockpile of Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone money that the city’s been planning to spend on projects like this one. Of the 120 units planned inside the apartments — dubbed Campanile on Commerce — 105 would go to tenants earning 60% or less than the area median income. [Houston City Council; previously on Swamplot] Map: Houston Planning Commission
- 2214 Canterbury Ct. [HAR]
Renovations to turn the former Parsley Studios building at 1504 Yale St. into Blue Line Bike Lab‘s new Heights location are now nearly finished, and the most dramatic change is the new coat of light blue paint the structure’s 15th-St. side, pictured above. During the 75 years it housed the family photo business and functioned as a portrait studio for mayors and celebrities like Roy Rogers and Loretta Lynn — according to The Leader — the building underwent its fair share of paint jobs; the last big one washed out a checkerboard pattern along its Yale-St. side, leaving the structure mostly brown.
Last September, a liquidation sale emptied the place of “a quarter of a century’s worth of photo equipment, furniture, frames and photos,” reported the Chronicle‘s Jaimy Jones. By that time, most of the owners’ work focused on photo restoration, so brick-and-mortar amenities like formal seating — “and even a small dressing room with bright, round bulbs that frame a mirror atop an old-fashioned dressing table,” wrote Jones — were no longer necessary. The building sold to a group that’s linked to Blue Line, which has its nearest shop on the corner of White Oak Dr. and Columbia St. That existing location (which predates the shop’s other spot on Telephone Rd.) is now set to close, but not until a fleet of new bikes arrives the Yale St. building.
It’s shown empty in the photo below, although a newly-hung sign along Yale makes clear what will fill it:
1504 Yale St.
A SATURDAY NIGHT SWAN SONG AT SPRUCE GOOSE: SOCIAL FLYERS CLUB 
This past weekend was the last one ever for the concert venue known as Spruce Goose: Social Flyers Club on the second floor of 809 Congress, across from Market Square Park and directly above Henke and Pillot. The 100- to 300-person club only opened up earlier this year, but managed to stay booked through the summer and all the way up until its finale on Saturday, which featured — among others — self-described “Punkish?” band Branagan, shown sending things off in the photo above. [Spruce Goose: Social Flyers Club] Photo: Branagan
GOLDMAN SACHS FOLLOWING BARGAIN SALE OF BILL KALLOP’S YACHT BY MARKING DOWN HIS RIVER OAKS HOUSE, TOO 
Having already cashed out on the retired offshore oil and gas billionaire’s 217-ft. yacht Natalia Natita after he defaulted on a loan that it backed, Goldman Sachs is now attempting to sell Bill Kallop’s 5-bedroom mansion at 1708 River Oaks Blvd. Some of the highlights inside: a glass-domed living room and colonnaded natatorium with a sky ceiling mural above it. The property was previously listed for sale earlier this year at $15.9M but shortly after, Kallop filed for Chapter 11 (through his punnily-named business entity R.O. Mance 1708 LLC) and the home fell into foreclosure. The new asking price is a bargain: $9.75M. But it’s still nowhere near the markdown the bank took on the boat last year, which it sold to a Maltese buyer for $27.5M after originally asking $60M, according to the Wall Street Journal’s Liz Hoffman. At that time, Kallop’s other properties totaled “at least eight residences, including a Peruvian mansion, two homes in the Dominican Republic and a working cattle ranch in Texas,” reported Hoffman. [Wall Street Journal; walkthrough] Photo: HAR
Note: This story has been updated
Late last week, associates of Capital Retail Partners filed a building permit to get started on the pair of back-to-back gabled buildings it’s had planned for Durham and 18th St. in place of 2 side-by-side houses torn down there earlier this year. It’s the second spot where Capital will begin replacing a pair of old Heights houses with 2 new house-like retail buildings, having already begun work 4 blocks north between Durham and Shepherd on its planned Bungalows on 22nd St. a few months ago. Despite the decidedly less bungalow-like design proposed for 18th St., the firm’s going with the same nomenclature for the duo (shown at top), dubbing it the Bungalows on 18th St.
Pictured but unconfirmed plans of the Bungalows show its half-as-large north building taken up by some sort of restaurant fronted by a patio and corner landscaping including street-address topiary. A main parking lot sits west of the building and its encircling new sidewalks and crosswalks. You can see a few angled parking spaces peeking out in the aerial rendering below:
The Bungalows on 18th St.
- 6 Azalea Trail Ln. [HAR]
The map above shows the land (in red) that Rice is confirmed to have grabbed around the Midtown Sears (orange) it bought out last October, including 2 new parcels (green) it snatched up through holding companies within the last few months. In an email sent out to university staff on Monday, Rice U. President David Leebron said the school “will ultimately redevelop approximately 14 acres of Rice-owned property,” near the Sears building into what it’s calling the Midtown Innovation District. So what are the latest spots it’s gotten its hands on? The first, catty-corner to the Sears building itself at the corner of Wheeler and San Jacinto, is Jack in the Box‘s nearly half-acre lot; Rice bought it in August.
More recently, the school pushed east by picking up 4201 Caroline St., the brick office building shown below that occupies a quarter-acre directly next to Fiesta:
Sears and Friends
MONDAY’S TRUMP-CRUZ RALLY UPGRADING FROM HOUSTON RODEO TO B-BALL VENUE 
Citing “huge and unprecedented” audience registration numbers, the president’s campaign announced that his Monday rally to drum up support for Ted Cruz will no longer be held at NRG Arena (capacity: 8,000), but instead at the Toyota Center (capacity: 18,043). Trump said in August he planned to pick “the biggest stadium in Texas we can find” for the festivities, at which Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick will also appear. But his schedulers seem strangely to have ruled out the state’s fifth biggest one, NRG Stadium (seats 71,500), which — as Houstonia’s Morgan Kinney noted — sits right across the parking lot from the Arena and remains unbooked on Monday. [Politico] Photo of the Toyota Center: Russell Hancock via Swamplot Flickr Pool
“Houston must have looked huge to Lyndon Johnson as he drove toward it across the flat Gulf plains in his battered little car,†writes Robert Caro in his biography of the former president. Johnson’s destination: Sam Houston High School (shown at top), which opened in 1921 in place of the even-older Central High School on the block bounded by Austin, Rusk, Caroline, and Capitol — the same spot where the new Kinder High School for the Performing and Visual Arts is now “90 percent complete,†according to Paper City’s Annie Gallay.
Hired to teach public speaking and coach the debate team, Johnson — writes Caro — promised his new principal he’d win the state championship. He didn’t, coming in second at the tournament in Austin. Still, Johnson had succeeded in making a name for himself among staff — who gave him a $100 raise and a contract for the next school year — and among the school’s 1,800 students — who jockeyed for enrollment in “Mr. Johnson’s speech class†during the following school year. By the end of LBJ’s first full year at Sam Houston, reports Caro, enrollment had increased from 60 to 110 new students.
Sam Houston High to HSPVA
- 403 Little John Ln. [HAR]
