Lauren Meyers, archivist of would-be Houston, digs up an earlier plan for a building at 4500 Bissonnet, on the corner of Mulberry St. in Bellaire. That’s the vacant property long in the possession of legendarily delinquent Wilshire Village landlord Jay H. Cohen, where Matt Dilick, the man who now apparently controls it, is planning to build a 2ish-story stucco mild-West meets retail-Tuscan strip center and sell off the rest of the land.
Back in 1946, Cohen’s father, who had developed the Wilshire Village Apartments on West Alabama and Dunlavy 6 years earlier, planned a 122-home subdivision on the 30-acre strip between Avenue A (now Newcastle St.) and Mulberry St. with a partner. And at the southern end of the property, facing Richmond Rd. (now Bissonnet St.), a sweeping, low-slung modern structure spanning Howard St.: the Mulberry Manor Community Center, designed by Houston architects Lloyd & Morgan.
Meyers quotes a Houston Chronicle report from September 1, 1946:
Comment of the Day: Wilshire Village Logic
“I am really amazed at this debate. The principle is very simple. The land is too valuable for the revenue generating capacity of existing structures. You can’t rent those spaces for enough money, no matter how you remodel. This is definately a high density project and could be high-rise site in a better market, where are you going to find north of 7 acres in an area like this? The Fiesta across the street is in the Cohen family, so that could be in play. The Cohen family is surrounded by real estate guys. The real shame here, is that you have complicated personalities that probably prevented any new construction during a time in which it would have been viable, so now they are trying to market a property in a climate that almost no one can get financing that would make a deal work. A new project would have provided comfortable living space in a convenient and desirable location, with maybe even a mixed use component. You tear down 40+ year old properties, that have a great deal of deferred maintanence, for marketing purposes, and now they can showcase those beautiful magnolia trees, which I hope they can preserve as many as possible, but it has to make economic sense. I am sure that if someone will make a fair market value offer, and they are a credible buyer, they would sell. Death to rumors. The dirt could be as much as $100 a foot, if you turned back the clock 2 years. It is special so may still demand it.” [Alexander, commenting on All Cleaned Up and Ready for Sale: What Can We Get for Wilshire Village?]