- 20040 Keenan Cut Off Rd. [HAR]
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Mounds of dirt are stacked high next to the West End Roofing building off Ella between 12th St. and Grovewood, which the developers of the Broadstone Heights Waterworks midrise a mile and a half away are using as a dumping ground for earthen debris involved in their project. A TCEQ notice posted by the dirt piles states that a plan was in place to prevent too much stomwater from running off the property between January 9 and June 1.
The new 8-story Broadstone building is planned on a portion of the original Heights Waterworks at the northwest corner 20th and Nicholson streets that Alliance bought from the city a few years ago. It’ll go up, catty-corner to the development Braun Enterprises has planned on the neighboring soon-to-be reworked waterworks parcel, as indicated in the map below:
Timbergrove
When Paws Pet Resort finishes renovating the 2 warehouses south of its current one on Couch St. — east of Ella and in between 34th and 34th 1/2 streets — its total paw-print will include over an acre and a half of continuous land. Following about 5 years in the 6,000-sq.-ft. Garden Oaks warehouse building pictured above, the boarding house is expanding to the nearly twice-as-big former industrial building behind it at 3415 Couch St., as well as another smaller adjacent structure further south. The owners of Paws Pet Resort bought the soon-to-be-converted spaces last year — both of which sit off camera to the left.
Photo: Cortney K.
Paws Pet Resort
- 14827 Cindywood Dr. [HAR]
Enter stage east in the video rendering above Gensler published of the new HOPE Clinic planned for 13800 Bellaire Blvd., a block west of Eldridge Pkwy. After a look around the fountains bubbling up in the L-shaped building’s plaza right along Bellaire, you’ll be ushered through the doors to its cafe-like intake center on first floor (no need to open them).
No buildings stand in the way of the soon-to-be built structure; it’s slated east of an auto shop on a never-before-developed tract abutting Alief’s Metro Blvd. that the Asian American Health Coalition of the Houston Area has owned since 2016. This health center — serving uninsured and unable-to-pay patients — would be its fourth in Houston. An existing Alief location sits less than a mile down the road, in the Presidio Square shopping center off Hwy. 6.
- New Houston Hope Clinic Along Bellaire Blvd [News Blog via Urbannizer on HAIF]
Video: Gensler Houston. Image: HOPE Clinic
Renderings, Stat!
The final page of the Harris County Flood Control District’s final report on Hurricane Harvey includes the map above, with orange indicating where bayous, rivers, creeks, and gullies set new high water marks between August 25 and 29. Aside from Sims Bayou and a handful of smaller waterways, every other liquid landmark in the county outdid itself along some portion during the storm. Several — such as Cypress Creek and Carpenters Bayou (shown in detail above) — set new flood records along their entire lengths.
Less distinguished are White Oak and Little White Oak bayous, which broke records along only tiny stretches near Buffalo Bayou:
Watery Award Tour
- 1115 Briar Bayou Dr. [HAR]
Here’s where the neighbors of the soon-to-be filled and graded Stanley Park subdivision will go, in a larger, adjacent 207-home community dubbed Palisades Park that’s also planned by the floodable rail yard west of T.C. Jester and south of Timbergrove Manor. Unlike the tract next door, it’s almost entirely outside White Oak Bayou’s 100-year floodplain (but still almost entirely inside the 500-year).
Its current occupant: the complex of industrial buildings eyed from the sky at top — which sits behind Grace Bible Church and adjacent to Better Bags, Inc.’s facilities off 11th St. In order to connect to that street, a new roadway would be built through what’s now the church’s parking lot, as indicated in the subdivision map below:
By the Tracks
Current and proposed views from high above Lyons Ave. show what the St. Elizabeth Hospital would look like repurposed as a 110-unit housing complex, as the Fifth Ward CRC proposes. The biggest change architect Van Meter Williams Pollack has in store for the place is a teardown of the central wing that runs back behind the 3-story north face — pictured above — to make room for a new parking courtyard.
Behind that lot, a newly-constructed, 3-story building would front Chisum St.:
St. Elizabeth Place
Asbestos abatement crews are on the scene at the former Houston Post building on the corner of Polk and Emancipation that Lovett Commercial plans to redevelop. The photo at top from St. Charles St. looks east to show the building’s parking lot — now serving as a staging area for contractors that have been there all week, according to a Swamplot reader. The other shot views the building’s corner at Polk and St. Charles, which — according to a site plan put out by Lovett last May — would be demolished to make room for more parking.
Fronting all those parking spaces would be a CVS at Polk and Emancipation and a newly-constructed Sprouts Farmers Market off Bell St.:
Seeds of Sprouts?
- 12622 Eiker Rd. [HAR]
Hillocks of dirt dot the landscape west of T.C. Jester, adjacent to the train tracks near the end of Shirkmere Dr. where Lovett Homes is now elevating some of the 77 lots that’ll make up its new Stanley Park subdivision. Since receiving a commercial fill permit from the city in April, the developer has stacked soil across the site — which lies entirely within White Oak Bayou’s 100-year floodplain and has never before been built on.
Also included in that flood-designated realm: the Timbergrove Manor neighborhood just north of the development. Its southernmost street, Queenswood Ln., had it up to here during Harvey:
Next to Timbergrove Manor
A new eatery is on its way to the Montrose shop called Montrose at 1723 Westheimer, a block west of Dunlavy. The toponymic women’s clothing boutique had about a 3-year run in the space before it went out of business, leaving the building vacant. Just last week, the developers behind the coming Eastern European restaurant filed plans with the city to remodel the 1,830-sq.-ft. structure into something more Turkish and culinary: Cafe Bosphorus. A banner hung up on the left storefront window store heralds its arrival.
- Coming Soon [Cafe Bosphorus]
Photos: Hipster Hotspots (Montrose Shop); Cafe Bosphorus (sign)
Cafe Bosphorus
- 5115 Heatherbrook Dr. [HAR]
The map above — taken from this week’s city planning agenda — provides a candy-colored indication of how Midway plans to divvy up the 136-acre former KBR site along Buffalo Bayou, east of downtown, that it’s redeveloping into an office, retail, and residential neighborhood dubbed East River. Among the more colorful land uses revealed for the site: a park-fronting hotel slated for the semi-circular red parcel to the east, as well as a nameless museum — shown in grape — that’s planned along Buffalo Bayou near the neighborhood’s western edge.
Sprinkled along the water is an extension of the existing trail that runs along Buffalo Bayou’s north bank. It would traverse the entire development, from its western edge to the boat dock planned at its eastern boundary. Along the way, “Pedestrian bridges are being discussed with Buffalo Bayou Partnership to connect the two sides of the bayou,” according to the plans Midway submitted to the city.
Those 7 consecutive yellow blocks at the north end of the site along Clinton St. represent the citadel of townhomes that’ll look out onto the surrounding Fifth Ward. It’s bookended by 3 blocks of retail to the east along Hirsch Rd. and one to the west on Jensen Dr.
As heralded by the sign — pictured below — now hanging the site’s construction fencing, Houston’s city planning commission will take up the special exemption request that Midway submitted for the development later this week:
Sweet Deal
