03/07/19 6:00pm

As of today this site’s daily publishing schedule is coming to a halt. Swamplot has been covering Houston’s real estate landscape for 12 years. That’s longer than the runs of most successful teevee sitcoms, all but one U.S. presidency, and a lot of great Houston restaurants. It’s been long enough to cover 3 hurricanes, several boom-and-bust cycles, a half-dozen or so 100-year floods, and the rise and fall of Tuscanization. More than a few high-school freshmen when Swamplot started in 2007 are now armed with PhDs and ready to launch their careers. It’s time for us to move on as well.

We’re proud of what Swamplot has accomplished: the reporting it’s assembled; the commenters, readers, contributors, and tipsters it’s attracted; the conversations and reconsiderations it’s fostered; the groups of people from different walks of life it’s brought together in some way; the coinages you’ve come up with; and the community that’s been built here around the notion that our local built and natural environments are worth our attention and our jokes.

Houston has always been a funky town. It’s rarely been served well by those who ignore that, or who promote it with a chip on their shoulder, or who build in it without recognizing the profound handicaps and weirdnesses that continue to shape it. In Swamplot’s dozen years of documenting the odd details of its growth and destruction, we’ve noticed a gradual but steady change of attitude — one that we hope we’ve helped to effect: People here, we get a sense, now pay more obvious attention to the things that make Houston unique, bizarre, wacky, frustrating, and lovable. If Swamplot has, in any way, played a role in altering your sense of this place — by reporting on things normally paid little attention to, by presenting things in ways you wouldn’t otherwise expect to see them, by dangling in front of you the comments and perspectives of people who see this city very differently from the way you do, or by striving each day to highlight the absurdities that underly and shape so much of the Houston experience — well, then hanging out with y’all for some or all of this time has been well worth it.

Beginning next week, we’ll have a few announcements and questions to post here about Swamplot’s past, present, and future — so please do come back and visit to see what’s up. For now, though, we want to thank you — our readers, commenters, tipsters, photographers, advertisers, sponsors, and contributors — for making Swamplot what it’s been, and maybe making Houston a little bit better place for us all.

Photos: Russell Hancock (aerial); Bill Barfield (sign) via Swamplot Flickr Pool

So Long
03/06/19 4:00pm

Look closely in the photo above from yesterday evening, writes one of the 2 Swamplot readers who sent in dramatic pix showing the demolition-in-progress of the Timbergrove H-E-B at 1511 W. 18th St. (near Ella and T.C. Jester), “and you can see all the store aisle signs hanging (signs that say coffee, paper towels, etc).” The groceries themselves had previously been evacuated: The very-close-to-White-Oak-Bayou store closed at the end of January, just as the new, larger, and more highly elevated double-decker Heights H-E-B opened a mile away on N. Shepherd Dr. between 23rd and 24th streets.

CONTINUE READING THIS STORY

Market Turbulence
03/06/19 2:00pm

A leasing brochure just released by Midway reveals a detailed site plan for the first phase of the company’s planned development on a 150-acre former industrial site lining the north bank of Buffalo Bayou — here upgraded to riverine status. East River‘s drive-up urban conquest of the former KBR (previously, Brown & Root) campus begins on the far western edge of the Fifth Ward site, fronting Jensen Dr. and lining Clinton Dr. Portrayed in the plans and renderings: a 9-plus-screen multiplex movie theater, a new waterside home for the Houston Maritime Museum, a central plaza with a coffee pavilion (pictured), and almost 100,000 sq. ft. of retail and restaurant space, spread among the ground floors of 8 separate structures (including one enormous parking garage). Three of the structures are multi-story office buildings.

Here are some overall site plans of the development:

CONTINUE READING THIS STORY

Fifth Ward Incoming
03/05/19 3:00pm

Here’s one way to make a graphic comparison of the tight-knit electric streetcar routes that crisscrossed tiny 1895 Houston (pop. 44,643) to today’s more spindly 22.7-mile light-rail network: Zoom way in, so that Buffalo and White Oak Bayous, not the more familiar target-like succession of looping freeways, appear as the major urban landscape feature — and stops in the Museum District and at UH line up at the edge of the frame like far-flung commuter suburbs. That’s the approach New York-based serial transit-system cartographer Jake Berman has taken in his latest in a series of now-and-then rail comparisons, also suitable for framing.

Maps: Jake Berman

03/05/19 11:30am

THE HOUSTON HURRICANE POLLUTION-SNIFFING NASA FLIGHT THAT NEVER TOOK OFF A week and a half after Hurricane Harvey hit Houston, as damage to smokestacks, pipelines, and chemical storage tanks were still being assessed, flooded Superfund sites went unmonitored, and clouds of benzene and other chemicals assembled in the skies over the city, the crew of a California-based airborne NASA chemical lab offered to help figure out the state of affairs — by diverting its specially equipped DC-8 from a planned trip to Oklahoma to take measurements in Houston instead. But EPA and TCEQ officials vehemently passed on the offer. An email response from TCEQ air toxicologist Michael Honeycutt noted that “state data showed no sign for concern,” report the L.A. Times‘s Susanne Rust and Louis Sahagun. “We don’t think your data would be useful for source identification while industry continues to restart their operations,” wrote Honeycutt, who the following month was appointed to head the EPA’s Science Advisory Board by President Trump. David Gray, the EPA official in charge of the Harvey emergency response, agreed. Citing emails from Texas officials “stating unambiguously that they do not want NASA to use the DC-8 for any data acquisition,” Michael Freilich, the director of NASA’s Earth Sciences division, called off the mission. [L.A. Times] Photo of Atmospheric Tomography Mission DC-8 interior, September 2017: NASA

03/04/19 3:00pm

This street- and car-front spot now occupying the ground floor of the Chase Bank building parking garage at 2900 Weslayan, just down the road from Central Market, smelled like pancakes this morning, an actual human reader (and photographer) tells Swamplot.

And so it is likely to continue throughout the day and week: Baggy’s Grill, which opened for business here over the weekend, serves breakfast all day. You’ll also find burgers, sandwiches, and some Greek dishes on the menu. The new restaurant takes over from the shuttered Weslayan Café.

Photos: Youngcatherine

Breakfast in the Air
03/04/19 1:00pm

TRUE ANOMALY IN LOCAL ROBO-JOURNALISM New sour-beer hotspot True Anomaly Brewing Company, which opened last month in the former electrical warehouse at 2012 Dallas St. just west of the main East Village campus in East Downtown (and possibly in the path of the planned expansion of I-45) “seems to be a welcome addition to the neighborhood,” declares a writeup appearing on the Houston Chronicle website. But this is not your average new-place-opening report — well, at least not yet. A note at the bottom indicates the report was “created automatically using local business data” (presumably from the Eater Houston story and 3 Yelp reviews noted in the text), “then reviewed and augmented by an editor.” The source: Local-story bot purveyor Hoodline, “a collaboration between experienced local reporters and innovative data scientists and engineers, combining the latest computational methods and tools with journalistic insights, news judgment, and thoughtful design to develop a new form of news reporting.” Hoodline has been quietly feeding stories and listicles to both ABC News and Hearst Media since last year — but you can skip the middlemen and soak up the company’s regular stream of assembled and ready-for-publication Houston auto-stories directly from this link. [Houston Chronicle; Eater Houston; Hoodline] Photo of True Anomaly Brewing Company: Charles W.

03/01/19 4:00pm

WHEN THE CAR’S JUST TOO NICE FOR THE GARAGE “It takes a little bit of maneuvering,” explains Nick, the proud owner of a blue-and-orange McLaren Senna and the reworked 1954 William Floyd bayou-side home just north of Woodway Dr. whose living room he parks it in. “I usually leave 2 cars in here. I usually have to come in,” he explains to globetrotting carhound Alex Hirschi, “drive one into the kitchen and then bring in the other one. If you would have came here last night you would have found there was a purple Porsche sitting right here and the McLaren was pulled in there — because it was raining.Video: Supercar Blondie via KHOU 11

03/01/19 2:00pm

Time’s almost up for a whole mess of trees lining the south side of Buffalo Bayou between Eldridge Pkwy. and Dairy Ashford (pictured at top), where the Harris County Flood Control District plans to construct the first 3 of a series of overflow basins. Removal of vegetation across the bayou from Nottingham Forest’s southern border is scheduled to begin within a few weeks; construction company Lecon has the $1.8 million contract to build the “linear stormwater detention compartments,” which are meant to accommodate a temporary visit of up to 90 acre-ft. of bayou water during a flood.

The trees and basins will be carved out of Terry Hershey Park. The district notes that some trees and vegetation may be preserved — forming a buffer “where possible” between the basins and private property to the south. Large sections of the popular Anthills Mountain Bike Trail, which the district notes “were built on publicly-owned land without written permission and without compensation to the public” will be cleared, though a portion that sits between the 2 westernmost basins will remain.

CONTINUE READING THIS STORY

Under Detention
02/28/19 3:30pm

VICTORIAN’S BARBECUE BAILS ON THE EAST END BUILDING THAT BEARS ITS NAME Despite its new paint job, the low and flat building on the corner of N. York and Sampson will not play host to Victorian’s Barbecue, pitmaster Joey Victorian announces on Instagram, “but that’s not going to stop us from pursuing our dreams of a brick and mortar” somewhere else, he adds. The markings Victorian left on the structure last summer were the first real signs of change there since an entity connected to Houston real estate company Ancorian bought it in 2017. [Victorian’s Barbecue via HAIF; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Victorian’s Barbecue

02/27/19 2:00pm

A building permit filed yesterday reveals what’s going up on the half-acre vacant tract across Caroline St. from the Oaks On Caroline condo building: a 16,000-sq.-ft. parking garage. Home previously to a pair of 2-story homes, the property’s been vacant since early 2016, around the same time Nan and Company put the finishing touches on its neighboring 5-story condo structure which sits between Arbor and Rosedale streets. As shown in the photo at top, the garage’s construction site is surrounded entirely by townhomes. Not pictured: the Houston Museum of African American Culture, which is situated just north of the garage, at the northeast corner of Caroline and Wentworth St.

Photo: Swamplot inbox

Museum Park
02/26/19 4:00pm

FORT BEND ISD WON’T BUILD NEW SCHOOL ON TOP OF THE GRAVEYARD IT ACCIDENTALLY DUG UP LAST SUMMER Fort Bend ISD agrees that the Sugar Land 95,” the group of black prisoners whose remains the ISD accidentally unearthed during construction on the James Reese Career and Technical Center on University Blvd. last June, “need to be memorialized at the site of discovery,” the school district’s board president Jason Burdine says in a statement. Accordingly, “The district’s plan to build the portion of the building that is within the cemetery area has been cancelled,” says Burdine, along with legal action the district had been pursuing to relocate the bodies to the nearby Old Imperial Farm Cemetary, an existing 1800s-era graveyard less than a mile away. Activists pushed for the remains to remain in their original spot for months after experts exhumed them and determined they likely belonged to convicts that the State of Texas leased out to work on a local plantation in the 19th century. (One vocal local, Reginald Moore, actually warned the district ahead of time to study the planned construction site before building on it, but to no avail.) Now that the remains are staying put, the ISD is brainstorming with Fort Bend County on how to get them back in the ground. County Judge K.P. George told News 88.7 last week that they’re aiming to redeposit them in the same spot where they’d been buried in the first place, however, there’s still chance they’ll be moved to a location in “close proximity” to their original resting place. [abc13; previously on Swamplot] Rendering of James Reese Career and Technical Center: Fort Bend ISD

02/26/19 12:00pm

Houston’s roadway overlords have begun eyeballing a proposal to swap out 11th St.’s current 4-lane setup between T.C. Jester and Pecore St. for a 3-lane configuration instead, consisting of one lane in each direction plus a center turning lane. The plan, says the city, would help to calm down residents who’ve been particularly frustrated trying to turn off 11th St. “at key intersections, such as Nicholson Street and Heights Boulevard.” It’d also give walkers and bikers less to look out for on their way across the street. And it paves the way for new landscaped barriers to run between the east and westbound sides of the road, offering pedestrians even more protection from oncoming automobiles.

Got an opinion about it? The city will be all ears at the Heights Fire Station at 12th St. and Yale next Tuesday from 6:30 to 8:30pm. There, officials plan to lay out their case for the changes and field some questions from the audience on the proposal.

The Straight and Narrow
02/25/19 3:00pm

Here’s the latest roadmap of where the Grand Pkwy. currently exists (in green) and where it plans to go (yellow) as it assumes its full, 184-mile circumference. Construction on segments H and I-1 — which serve Liberty and Chambers counties — has been in progress since last year, although it wasn’t until last week that the federal government decided to chip in for it with a $605 million loan to the public nonprofit that’s behind the highway’s construction (a companion to the $840.6 million loan the feds arranged to fund the first 5 segments of the road). That’ll cover about a third of total $1.9 billion pricetag for the 2 northeastern segments, reports News 88.7’s Gail Delaughter. Construction on them is scheduled to wrap up in 2022.

Down south, work on segments C and B remains in the planning stage — and in the case of segment A, the indefinitely stalled stage. If TxDOT were to consider building that all-but-dead portion of the parkway between State Hwy. 146 to I-45 however, it could begin as far north as Kemah or as far south as Texas City.

Map: TxDOT

Rounding Out the Job