Audubon Place
02/06/19 10:30am

A Worn-Out Audubon Place Pioneer Braces for Impact

by
4 Comments

The yellow excavator pictured above showed up yesterday in the driveway behind 912 Marshall St., a roughly 100-year-old home that’s been empty since its previous owners moved out December, according to a neighbor. Its new owner, an entity known simply as Montrose & Marshall LLC, also holds the deed to the vacant third-of-an-acre field next door that ends at the corner of — as you might expect — Montrose Blvd. and Marshall St.

Formerly home to a lowrise building, the deserted lot more recently served as a parking lot and is now doing time as a grassy backdrop for Bacco’s Wine Garden’s boozy patio next door:

CONTINUE READING THIS STORY

912 Marshall St.
, , ,
Featured Posts
02/05/19 1:00pm

One Woman’s Massive Collection of AstroWorld Hardware Is Getting Auctioned Off Online and at an East Fwy. Lucha Libre Bar

by
1 Comment

Local AstroWorld debris hoarder Maria Medeles has listed nearly 400 pieces of park merchandise including giant ride entrance decorations, fiberglass statues of cartoon characters, concession menu boards, bathroom signs, and other whatnots on an online auction portal where the current bids range up to $2,300 for the item pictured at top. It’s only a fraction of everything she’s got, though: According to the auctioneer she’s engaged to get rid of the stuff, the list of items available will at least double in the days leading up to February 23, when Medeles and SITE Auction Services plans to hold a live, in-person auction at Emiliano’s, a sports bar and pool hall at I-10 and Wayside with a fighting ring out back where frequent lucha libre matches go down.

What other goodies could be made available at the event 2 and a half weeks from now? Probably some considerably large props and signs, but also some more mundane memorabilia as well. According to KHOU’s Jason Miles, “Medeles’ Astroworld obsession began with buying a bench when the theme park closed in 2005.”

Photo: SITE Auction Services

Going Once, Going Twice
,
Featured Posts
02/04/19 3:00pm

Is Something About To Go Down at the Upper Kirby Building on Bissonnet?

by
8 Comments

The arrival of chain link fencing outside the arched office complex at 2715 Bissonnet known as The Upper Kirby Building last week caught the attention of several Swamplot tipsters, who’ve sent in photos looking across the street at the new perimeter and the vacant scene beyond it. The image at top looks southwest to show the complex’s largest building, an L-shaped structure that fronts the central parking lot on 2 sides. In the second photo, you can see where that building abuts its neighbor, a smaller, rectangular structure that runs along the east side of the parking lot on its way out to the curb. Not depicted: a pair additional small 2-story buildings and their adjacent parking lots to the west, which take up the rest of the block ending at Wakeforest St.

An entity connected to Cornerbrook Development bought the whole 1.56-acre tract housing the 4 buildings last December and since then has filed a few permits to disconnect the plumbing, but it hasn’t laid a hand on the structures themselves yet. They all went up in late ’60s and early ’70s and — though currently vacant — recently played host to Montage Bridal, Synergy Day Spa, an Allstate insurance office, and an assortment of hairdressers.

Photos: Swamplot inbox

West U.
, ,
Featured Posts
02/04/19 12:37pm

A Sign That Sushi May Return to the Empty Storefront at Silver St. and Washington

by
2 Comments

A Swamplot reader sends the photo at top showing a bright yellow permit notice for something called Kubo’s Sushi and Washoku up in the window next to Tacodeli’s storefront at 1902 Washington Ave. The portion of the building now sporting the sign — designated suite C — most recently housed a different sushi restaurant dubbed Kukuri, but not for long: It closed last March after just over 6 months in business.

The new Kubo’s sushi spot is backed by the same team behind former Japanese restaurant Kubo’s Sushi Bar & Grill, which closed its second-story spot in the former Rice Village building between Kelvin and Morningside drives in 2016 after about a decade and a half in business.

Photos: Swamplot inbox (sign); Kukuri (restaurant)

Raw Fish Redo
, , , ,
Featured Posts
02/01/19 4:00pm

The Continuing Story of Where John Biggers’ Scenes from Ship Channel History Wound Up After He Painted Them

by
2 Comments

Probably the oldest thing hanging in the International Longshoremen’s Association Local 24 building in Pasadena is the 24-ft.-long mural shown at top, depicting — from left to right — the way black workers’ jobs at the Ship Channel evolved from the early 1900s to 1957 when the painting was completed. How the artwork made it from the banks of Buffalo Bayou to brand-new union building at 4060 Red Bluff Rd. is a story that spans about the same number of decades:

In the late ’50s, members of Houston’s black longshoremen’s union, I.L.A Local 872, commissioned an artist named John T. Biggers to paint something they could put on the walls of their meeting hall at 75th and Memphis St. Biggers — who after founding Texas Southern’s art department nearly a decade prior would go on to become one of the century’s most well-known black muralists — was pressed for time: “A UNESCO grant that I applied for two year earlier, to study traditional life in Africa, had come through. I was told be in Ghana by July 1, 1957 — three weeks away,” he recalled in a later interview. So he got to work like crazy in a studio at TSU, painting, “from 3 a.m. until classtime and after classes until midnight,” with the aid of sketches he’d made at the Port of Houston and the Ship Channel, writes historian Ollie Jensen Theisen. He met his deadline and turned over his work, History of the International Longshoremen’s Local 872, chronicles decades of history — from the heavy lifting of days past to a present moment in which a group union bosses foreground a few men on forklifts.

By order of a federal court in 1983, Local 872 merged with its whites-only counterpart Local 1723 to become Local 24. Biggers’ painting wound up in the second-floor auditorium of the new joint union’s building, which sits at 7811 Harrisburg Blvd. — between 78th and 79th streets — but received a demolition permit late last week.

Local 24 officials have already moved into their new home in Pasadena, completed following about 2 years of construction:

CONTINUE READING THIS STORY

Houston Art History
Demolitions
02/01/19 1:00pm

3000 Richmond Will Come Crumbling Down in April

by
9 Comments

Tenants have been filing out of the 5-story office building shown above at the northeast corner of Richmond Ave and Eastside St. in anticipation of its planned collapse 2 months from now, according one employee who’s still inside but won’t be for long. Building management gave all occupants — including Imparali Tailor, luggage retailer Kipling, and dozens of other business and medical groups — notice last year that they’d need to hit the road.

Designed by Wilson, Morris, Crane & Anderson, the building is one of a dozen vertically-windowed mid- and lowrises that then-not-yet-famous Houston developer Gerald Hines built along Richmond in the early 1960s to accommodate businesses looking to spread out away from Downtown for the first time. (3100 Richmond, on the other side of Weslayan Eastside, was his work too, as well as 3101 Richmond, which sits catty-corner to the soon-to-be demolished building.) By the time the Richmond Ave corridor of similar-looking office structures was complete from Kirby to Weslayan, it had served as a sort of “MBA course,” write Houston architect Barry Moore and preservationist Anna Mod, “for Gerald Hines and arch-competitor Kenneth Schnitzer [of Century Development],” the 2 of whom soon graduated to designing taller and more notable Houston buildings inside and outside of Downtown.

Photo: Capital Realty

Richmond Ave Adieu
, , ,
Featured Posts
01/31/19 12:45pm

Renderings Show Midtown Sears Building Donning Upper Story Glass Cap, Welcoming In Both Tech Stars and Wannabees

by
17 Comments

The first illustrations of what Rice University wants to do with the Midtown Sears building it bought 2 years ago and has since stripped down emerged yesterday, casting a glance across Fannin St. to show what the northeast corner of the building — to be renamed The Ion — could look like once it’s been reworked into a nexus for tech entrepreneurs and students of various academic institutions who want to be like them. Among the Art-Deco-era bells and whistles shown intact are the sets of vertical mosaic tilework that flank the building’s corner entrance; they’ve got some new shine going on courtesy of light fixtures that appear to be installed directly above and below them. Up above the original late 1930s structure, the 4 architecture firms at work on the building (Gensler, James Carpenter Design Associates, James Corner Field Operations, and SHoP Architects) propose adding a 2-story glass-curtain-walled topping that’d help funnel sunlight into a whole bunch of empty space they’re calling a “central light well.” It would run vertically through the building’s interior, from the roof down to the lobby.

Work and meeting areas would go along the perimeter of the abyss:

CONTINUE READING THIS STORY

Midtown Growth Spurt
, , , ,
Featured Posts
01/31/19 9:30am

Transportation Buffs Are Staking Out Houston’s Most Dangerous Intersections To Better Understand What’s Wrong with Them

by
16 Comments

TRANSPORTATION BUFFS ARE STAKING OUT HOUSTON’S MOST DANGEROUS INTERSECTIONS TO BETTER UNDERSTAND WHAT’S WRONG WITH THEM A handful of intersection inspection personnel were out at Long Point Rd. and Gessner on Tuesday for their second round of roadside surveillance at what they’ve deemed one of the city’s most dangerous crossroads for pedestrians. The team — made up of an engineer from Houston’s public works department, a Federal Highway Administration rep, and members of local advocacy groups LINK Houston and Bike Houston, reports News 88.7’s Gail DeLaughter — has been scrutinizing what goes on out there and at 5 other intersections where a 2017 map showed pedestrians take a beating from cars: Fondren and West Bellfort, Bissonnet and Wilcrest, Shepherd and Allen Pkwy, Taylor and Spring St., and Spur 527 and Holman St. What they’re paying attention to: traffic counts, the times of day that crashes occur, the usefulness of pedestrian traffic signals as well as “how long it takes to safely cross the street, and how cyclists use the roadway,” reports DeLaughter. After wrapping up observations at the end of this week, the group will submit a report to the city recommending changes that’d make each intersection safer. [Houston Public Media] Photo: LINK Houston

Featured Posts
01/30/19 11:00am

What the Timbergrove H-E-B Looks Like on Its First Day of Retirement

by
2 Comments

And that’s a wrap over at the 18th St. H-E-B, closed since yesterday so as not to distract from the new, double-decker H-E-B that opened today at 2300 N. Shepherd Dr. between 23rd and 24th streets. The photos above show the old store’s front entrance stripped of all red, hyphenated signage, blockaded by shopping carts, plastered with closure notices, and — in case that wasn’t enough — fronted by stack of wooden pallets with a blaze yellow flyer addressing anyone who’d still hoped to get inside. A few weeks ago, workers inside stopped restocking the aisles, slapped a few discounts on what they had left, and watched as the store’s inventory dwindled up until it shut down.

By 5 p.m. yesterday, reports a Swamplot reader, the parking lot was mostly empty:

CONTINUE READING THIS STORY

1511 W. 18th St.
, , , ,
« Previous Page Next Page »