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Featured Posts
02/20/18 3:45pm

Signs of Rotating Sushi, Roundhouse Kicks Now Appear on Mid Main Lofts

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Midtown, Openings and Closings, Retail
2 Comments

2 new signs are now up on the Main St. side of the Mid Main Lofts across from MATCH: one for Kura Revolving Sushi Bar, and the other for kickboxing gym 9Round. The photo at top looks across the platform of Metro’s Ensemble Theatre stop to show Kura’s new name tag affixed near the corner of Main and Holman. Identical markings appear on the Holman St. side of the new raw fish restaurant, which uses touch screens and an automatic conveyor belt to deliver your food. The 3510 Main location is Houston’s second Kura; one opened in the Westchase Shopping Center last year. Another debuted in Sugar Land last month.

9Round — shown in the photo above — sits further south down the block on Main, near Double Trouble Caffeine & Cocktails’s spot at Winbern. All 18 of the workout venue’s current locations are in west South Carolina. The new gym follows 4 others the chain already operates inside the 610 Loop.

Photos: Natalie W

And in This Corner
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Featured Posts
02/20/18 1:45pm

Texas Central Has Nearly a Third of Properties Needed for Bullet Train, It Says

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Public Transportation, Quicklink
14 Comments

TEXAS CENTRAL HAS NEARLY A THIRD OF PROPERTIES NEEDED FOR BULLET TRAIN, IT SAYS Would-be bullet train builder Texas Central tells the Chronicle’s Dug Begley it has secured nearly a third of the properties it needs for the planned rail line between Houston and Dallas. But Begley notes that company “officials have not specified where those tracts are located or how much of the 8,000 [required] acres they include.” The train developer is currently negotiating with landowners to buy up parcels along the route. As for plan B: “Though state lawmakers essentially have barred the company from using state authorities to condemn property, Texas Central maintains it has some options via federal authorities as a railroad, under Texas law.” [Houston Chronicle ($); previously on Swamplot] Photo of Texas Central public hearing at Woodard Elementary School, Cypress: Marc Longoria via Swamplot Flickr Pool

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Featured Posts
02/20/18 10:45am

Label Warehouse Calling It Quits on W. 19th St.

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Houston Heights, Openings and Closings, Retail
21 Comments

The Label Warehouse clothing resale store 3 doors down from Boomtown Coffee on 19th St. is now selling off the last of its stock ahead of the planned closing announced on its Facebook page earlier this month. The Heights thrift venue and its Midtown sibling location on the corner of Main and Eagle streets — also on its way out of business — are the last 2 spots remaining in the chain, which once held outposts in Conroe, Misouri City, and Angleton, as well as others in Houston. Its first location — opened at 6708 Harrisburg under the name Insurance Claims Fire Sale Warehouse in the early 60s — closed last year.

The photo at top looks south across 19th St. to show the few items left in the soon-to-be shuttered 7,425-sq.-ft. Heights building.

Photos: Some Random Property Gossip (storefront); Chelsi H. (sign)

Hand-Me-Down
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Featured Posts
02/16/18 12:15pm

The Woodlands at South by Southwest This Year: One Day Only

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Quicklink, Real Estate Marketing, The Woodlands
1 Comment

THE WOODLANDS AT SOUTH BY SOUTHWEST THIS YEAR: ONE DAY ONLY The Woodlands is doubling the spending but seventhing the duration for its upcoming tour stop at Austin’s South by Southwest, reports the Chronicle’s John S. Marshall. “The Woodlands on the Road” will take place in the afternoon on March 15 and feature “live music, food & refreshments, yard games, art demonstrations,” plus a chance to win prizes including a trip to The Woodlands at an “expanded booth with a prime location” in Brush Square, a downtown park. The township announced earlier this week that 4 local sponsor organizations had stepped up to match the $35,000 the township had already budgeted for its sophomore showing on the seventh day of the festival. Last year, The Woodlands’ debut inside the Austin Convention Center also had an outdoorsy bent: the 2-man booth featured a pair of bicycles hooked up to teevees that screened a simulated ride along the town’s bike paths as guests pedaled. [Houston Chronicle; event listing] Photo of Brush Square during 2008 South by Southwest: George Kelly [license]

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Featured Posts
02/16/18 10:30am

Shake Shack Will Be Taking Over Former Burger King Drive-Thru on Westheimer at Montrose

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Hyde Park, Montrose, Openings and Closings
17 Comments

Shake Shack has taken over the lease on the building Burger King left last month at the corner of Westheimer and Lincoln, a block west of Montrose. The fast-casual restaurant with 2 current Houston locations and one in the works signed off last week on at least a 15-year residency at 1002 Westheimer, next to Blacksmith. Behind the soon-to-be re-burgerized building’s frontage on Westheimer — shown above — a parking lot backs up to California St. along Lincoln.

Photo: MontroseResident

Fast Food Turnover
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Buildings for Sale
02/15/18 4:30pm

Two Homes-Turned-Retail on W. Gray and Stanford, Now Waiting for Their Next Gig

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Montrose, North Montrose, Retail
1 Comment

If the Platform Group has settled on a plan for redeveloping the corner of W. Gray St. and Stanford, it hasn’t made it known yet. An entity connected to the developer bought the white corner building home to the Traci Scott hair salon and the former Skinny Rita’s restaurant adjacent to it last December. The firm’s website now explains it’s “in the early stages of feasibility studies” for the pair of 2-stories at 615 and 607 W. Gray.

The 2 buildings share the parking lot visible in the snow-capped aerial above with entrances on W. Gray as well as one on Stanford, behind the hair salon. Not pictured is a narrow patio that runs along the chop shop’s Stanford side. A larger fenced-off seating area and upper deck currently front W. Gray outside the former restaurant, which closed last February after just under a year in the building.

Here’s a closer up view of Skinny Rita’s seating taken from the parking lot entrance between the 2 buildings just after the restaurant vacated the premises:

CONTINUE READING THIS STORY

Skinny Rita’s Plus One
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Featured Posts
02/15/18 2:00pm

Meet Heights Village, the New Strip Center Going Up at Yale and 5th St.

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Houston Heights, New Construction, Retail, Strip Centers
19 Comments

The skeleton of a new strip center across the street from the Alexan Yale St. apartments — dubbed Heights Village by a banner attached to its construction fencing — is now rising on the corner of Yale and W. 5th St. Construction began on the just-under-an-acre parcel last month, reports the Swamplot reader who snapped the above photo of the site from outside the Alexan complex. The corner — on the opposite end of the block from where Better Luck Tomorrow opened last year — had been vacant since 2010, when a warehouse on the site was demolished.

The aerial rendering above from Cisneros Design Studio shows what an upper-story Alexan Yale St. resident might see out the window when the retail center is complete. Parking lots hug the building on 3 sides and include entrances on Yale, 5th. St., and Yale Ct. — a short dead end that runs behind the property. Patio seating is shown fronting the chamfered corner on the building’s northwest quadrant, and an elevated walkway runs along its storefronts, a few steps up from the lot.

CONTINUE READING THIS STORY

Yale Retail
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Featured Posts
02/15/18 9:30am

UH’s Phone Survey Pollees Want To Make Flood Record a Given in Home Sales

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Flooding, Quicklink
20 Comments

UH’S PHONE SURVEY POLLEES WANT TO MAKE FLOOD RECORD A GIVEN IN HOME SALES Here’s a tidbit from the UH Hobby School of Public Affairs’ new post-Harvey telephone questionnaire: 90 percent of Harris, Fort Bend, Brazoria, and Montgomery County residents who responded think sellers should be required to disclose prior flood damage to their homes and prior flooding in the surrounding neighborhood. Aren’t sellers already obligated to reveal their homes’ flood histories? Well, almost. State law requires most sellers to spill the details — but only if their home was previously occupied (and not if it was foreclosed on or if they’re selling it to execute someone’s will). For developers selling newly-built homes — sometimes in entirely new subdivisions — the rules are foggier: not all surrounding flood designations need to be disclosed to buyers. Among those details that can be withheld: whether the home is located in a flood pool, an area of land prone to inundation when water builds up behind a reservoir dam like that of the Addicks and Barker, as Lise Olsen wrote in the Chronicle last year. [University of Houston Hobby School of Public Affairs] Photo of home at 8th St. and Arlington during Harvey: Swamplot inbox

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Cypress
02/14/18 4:00pm

New Coworking Space Plays Houston City Limits

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Office Buildings, Openings and Closings
3 Comments

Here’s a good spot for people doing business in both Cypress and Houston: new coworking space The Work Well. The 23,000-sq.-ft. shared workspace takes up the top floor of the 3-story office building shown at top on Wortham Center Dr., just off the northwest tentacle of Houston’s jurisdiction, which runs along the Northwest Fwy. and links the city to Cypress. The red arrow on the map above indicates where The Work Well sits at 13100 Wortham Center, east of Goode Co.’s Cy-Fair location and just inside the city’s territory. Nearly all structures beyond the red shaded zone — save for a few along other major roads Houston keeps for itself — are outside of Houston city limits and inside unincorporated Harris County.

The Work Well’s first business day was back in December. A grand opening is now planned for March.

Photo of 13100 Wortham Center Dr.: LoopNet. Map: Houston Map Viewer

The Upper Reach
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Featured Posts
02/14/18 11:45am

Braun To Swap Out Brown Brick Next to Johnny’s Gold Brick, Redo Warehouse Behind It All

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Houston Heights, New Construction, Proposed Developments, Retail, Sunset Heights
2 Comments

Braun Realty is gearing up to replace Johnny’s Gold Brick’s next door neighbor and redo the warehouse behind the 2 structures as part of a new retail development it has planned for the corner of Yale and Aurora. An entity connected to the developer snatched up the property on Yale — as well as a few adjacent parcels east on Aurora — last October. The site plan above taken from Braun’s leasing flyer for the complex now indicates all 3 buildings decked out with new adjacent patios. East of the buildings, a parking lot sports entrances on both Aurora and an alley that runs north of the site.

The photo at top shows the front door to Johnny’s Gold Brick next to the brown brick building that Lucas Craftsmanship contractors moved out of in 2015. Here’s the view from the corner of Yale and Aurora showing the 2-story structure that’s slated to replace the former construction office:

CONTINUE READING THIS STORY

Heights Corner Shake-Up
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Featured Posts
02/13/18 3:45pm

The Galleria’s New Food Court: Stacked Restaurants in Former Saks Space

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Galleria, Renovations, Restaurants
1 Comment

4 new restaurants of 4 different culinary persuasions are planning their migration to the Galleria’s coming chow center — beyond the curved wall that fronted Saks Fifth Avenue before the department store moved to a straighter-edged building just next door along Westheimer. Renovations to transform the building’s face into something new tenants could get behind have been in progress for the past few years. The site plan above from Simon Properties shows where Blanco Tacos + Tequila will arrive below Japanese restaurant Nobu, east of the building’s main entrance hall. West of the hall is where Fig & Olive as well as its upstairs Indian neighbor Spice Route will move in. They’ll go behind and in front of the new first- and second-story windows pictured at top — punched in the building’s facade last year.

Heavily blanched renderings put out by Fig & Olive show the patio fronting its 7,000-sq.-ft. interior:

CONTINUE READING THIS STORY

Multicultural Cook Off
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Featured Posts
02/13/18 11:00am

The Great W. Alabama Grocery Store Corridor

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Retail, Upper Kirby
38 Comments

The addition of H-E-B’s planned new supermarket on Kirby will create — as checkout counter intelligence agent Jason Estrada notes on Twitter — a mile-long corridor along W. Alabama of 4 grocery stores, including Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, and the existing H-E-B off Dunlavy. Already 11 other grocery stores lie within a 2-mile radius of the new H-E-B site, indicated on the far left in the map above.

Food Oasis
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Bars and Clubs
02/12/18 4:30pm

New Swimming Pool Bar Next to Navigation Cement Plant Now Holding Water, Waiting on Liquor

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New Construction, Second Ward
9 Comments

Coming soon to the long-vacant lot next to the Cemex cement plant on Navigation east of Lockwood: El Segundo Swim Club, a swimming pool bar shown still under construction but already watered in the photos above. Work on the 1,350-sq.-ft. pool and its surroundings began last July, 2 months after an entity connected to developer Matthew Healey bought the property on the corner of Avenue L and N. Edgewood St. The photos above look over the barbed wire up on the corner of Avenue L to show the 15,000-sq.-ft. yard planted with umbrellas, chairs, a hammock, and a converted shipping container.

A view from N. Edgewood St. shows the freight container fronting the pool:

CONTINUE READING THIS STORY

Adult Swim
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Featured Posts
02/12/18 2:15pm

Mattress Stores Making a Sleepy Retreat from Shepherd

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Montrose, Openings and Closings, Retail
3 Comments

Landlord Kensinger Donnelly has replaced previous flyers claiming that the Mattress 1 One location on the corner of W. Alabama and Shepherd was shut down for “renovations” with the new one pictured above declaring it has locked the retailer out of its spot at the far north of the strip that includes Mega DJ and Jenni’s Noodle House, across from CVS. Just south at the corner of Shepherd and Richmond, Mattress Overstock is another casualty of the continuing mattress shrinkage trend — it shuttered toward the end of last year.

Now your best bet for bedding is to head north on Shepherd to Westheimer where a Mattress 1 One and competing Mattress Firm have been holding a standoff just south of the intersection since the former showed up on the west side of the street in 2014. It’s one of the 12 Mattress 1 One locations that exist within a 5 mile radius of the shuttered store off W. Alabama — down from 15 last October.

Photos: Swamplot inbox

Down for the Count
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Featured Posts
02/12/18 12:15pm

How the City Skipped Out on a Sunnyside Apartment Complex for the Past 9 Years

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Quicklink, Sunnyside Place
8 Comments

HOW THE CITY SKIPPED OUT ON A SUNNYSIDE APARTMENT COMPLEX FOR THE PAST 9 YEARS How does a 24-unit apartment building — one of those 1,000-plus Houston complexes the University of Texas School of Law’s recent study identifies as missing a Certificate of Occupancy — go nearly a decade without having the document? In 2012, public works inspected the Bellfort Townhomes on Bellfort St. between Cullen and Scott and called it a “material risk to the physical safety or health of the building’s tenants.” The building’s owner told an inspector that he’d apply for a Certificate — granted after landlords bring their buildings into compliance with city code — when the city contacted him the next year. But then, public works simply lost track of things. For 3 years starting in 2014, the department had no contact with 4410 Bellfort until it came time for the building’s next inspection last January — which resulted in the same findings as the previous one. Why the lapse? “According to the head of Houston’s Multi-Family Habitability Division, after the Division identified properties without a Certificate in the first round of inspections, the Division’s practice was to close the property’s inspection file as long as the owner submitted an application for a Certificate of Occupancy,” write researchers Heather K. Way and Carol Fraser, “even if the owner never successfully obtained the Certificate.” At least one group made sure to stay in touch with the city, though: “During this three-year period, tenants and nearby residents called 311 at least eight times to report sewage overflow issues at the property.” [UT School of Law Entrepreneurship and Community Clinic; previously on Swamplot] Photo of Bellfort Townhomes: Swamplot inbox  

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