SOUTH BEACH IS TAKING A BREAK IN AVONDALE 
A bulletin posted on South Beach Houston’s Facebook page announces that the nightclub on the corner of Pacific and Grant streets is closed immediately and indefinitely for “remodeling.” The venue opened in 2001 at 810 Pacific St. in place of owner Charles Armstrong’s previous bar in that location, Heaven. Last December, Armstrong sold the former Montrose Mining Company across the street from South Beach to developer Fred Sharifi. South Beach’s Facebook message now directs would-be club-goers to JR’s Bar & Grill next door — also owned by Armstrong. [South Beach Houston] Photo of South Beach: Lou C.
Sign up for the Newsletter
Featured Posts
Now on its way to a portion of the Village Arcade building on Amherst that La Madeleine restaurant abandoned last March: Shop Rice Owls, a clothing and merchandise store selling exclusively Rice University gear. The 1,071-sq.-ft. off-white-walled space beneath the rooftop Rice Village parking garage was once the east end of La Madeleine’s space on the corner of Amherst and Kirby. A partly-built Shack Shake has since taken over the French bakery’s former home — but not all of it, leaving room for the off-campus store to squeeze in between the back side of the fast-food spot and the staircase leading up to the garage.
A view looking east down Amherst shows more renovated storefronts lining the street to the right of the stairs, in place of the black-awninged brick building that stood on the block before 2016: Â CONTINUE READING THIS STORY
Rice Village Homecoming
Update: Despite Swamplot’s earlier report, The Ginger Man’s Rice Village building is not up for lease, says a Braun Enterprises representative. The W. Gray location will be an expansion for The Ginger Man.
A flyer now being passed around by Braun Enterprises shows The Ginger Man’s 1,907-sq.-ft. house and outdoor furnishings in Rice Village up for lease ahead of its planned relocation expansion to a vacant Fourth Ward building. An entity connected to Braun bought the tap house at 5607 Morningside Dr. last December.
Renovations are now underway on a soon-to-be new location of The Ginger Man at the crossroads of W. Gray and Webster — in the building where the Junction Bar & Grill shuttered last year. When it opens, the expansion will be the 7th Ginger Man in Texas. 4 exist in and around Dallas and Fort Worth, and one is located in Austin. The chain also claims a more tenuous connection to a group of restaurants on the East Coast.
The photo below shows the Fourth Ward building with a new green paint job:
Village Bar Expansion
Local grassland steward the Katy Prairie Conservancy is for the first time branching out beyond its natural habitat with a 5,332-acre ranch about 90 miles outside the area the organization is named for. The Spread Oaks Ranch — part of which is shown above — sits near Hwy. 35 in Markham, just outside Bay City and about 70 miles southwest of Sugar Land. Last December, Spread Oaks’s owner closed a deal with the Conservancy giving the organization’s land trust the power to restrict development and subdivision of the coastal prairie property forever. Spread Oaks still owns the land and can pass it on if it chooses, but the Conservancy gets the power to limit its use, regardless of who has the deed.
Spread Oaks is the name given to the Morrow, Cuenca, and LeTulle ranches — pieced together by a single landowner between 2012 and 2015. The property is a working cattle ranch that “prides itself on raising some of the finest quality Brangus cattle in Texas.” Farming and hunting also take place on the land, which includes lodging for overnight guests. The Colorado River runs along an eastern section of the property.
Before the agreement, all of the roughly 20,000 acres the Conservancy protected were located inside the green ring on the map of west Houston below:
Lending a Ranch Hand
A new Aldi supermarket is on the way to the vacant 3-acre lot at 5300 W. Bellfort once home to the longer vacant Westbury Centerette shopping center, torn down in 2015. Plans for a LA Fitness location on the site submitted the year before the Centerette’s demolition didn’t work out. Since then, not much has been in store for the space northeast of AutoZone and Pizza Hut on the corner of W. Bellfort and Chimney Rock — until a leasing agreement for the new supermarket was inked late last year.
In addition to Aldi, the site plan above from NAI Partners indicates a new 26,000-sq.-ft. building of land available for lease on the corner of Chimney Rock and Cedarhurst, in the spot that a vacant gas station disappeared from in 2016.
- 5300-A W [LoopNet]
- Previously on Swamplot: Westbury Centerette Site Will Remain Dry; LA Fitness Will Flex Excavator, Scrap Westbury Centerette at Chimney Rock and Bellfort
Site plan: NAI Partners
Westbury Crossroads
Which suits the new Washington Ave better: sidewalk-fronting buildings or strip centers? If ever there were a project that illustrated that fundamental choice, it’s this one. New exterior renderings from developer NewQuest show the block of Washington between Leverkuhn and Jackson Hill St., just west of Five Guys’s strip center spot, redone as Washington Central — a shopping center with one building set back from the street and the other left out on the curb.
The 9,040-sq.-ft. planned strip center building shown fronting the parking lot in the renderings above provides some company for the existing brick building east of it. Planted on the corner of Washington and Leverkuhn since 1930, the 2-story structure has been empty since Guadalajara Bakery shuttered in it nearly 6 years ago.
New large windows open the bakery building — shown below with some legalese on its face — onto the street:
Walk or Drive?
The turf is down and the Adirondack chairs are seated in the front courtyard of Frank’s Backyard — the new 2,520-sq.-ft. beer garden wedged in Frank’s Pizza’s side yard on Travis St. Frank’s opened the lawn 2 days ago in place of a parking lot that once spanned all the way from the historic restaurant building on the corner of Travis and Prairie — home to both Frank’s and El Big Bad —Â north to Preston St. Hines’s Aris Market Square apartment has since taken over the northern portion of that lot along Preston. Its ground floor tenant Bravery Chef Hall borders Frank’s Backyard’s northern side.
At the end of the courtyard, an Airstream trailer-turned-bar sits parked beyond the garage door:
Downtown Beer Garden
“On almost any map that plots some form of wealth,” writes the Kinder Institute’s Leah Binkovitz, “a familiar arrow takes shape over the Energy Corridor, Memorial and River Oaks, pointing east toward downtown.” Nowhere is that arrow clearer than on this map from fitness brand Strava, which visualizes running and biking activity in Houston from 2009 through last October. Strava updated its map — which includes 200,000 years worth of global exercise time — in November (although it’s been in the news more recently than that). Beginning just east of Hwy. 6, the arm of the indicator travels straight into Downtown, forming a point right around the Elysian St. bridge across Buffalo Bayou.
A little more zoom shows where the arrow’s edges run to the northwest and southwest of the city center:
Citywide Fitness Tracking
A show-stopping announcement posted on the Walter’s Downtown Facebook page yesterday brings sad news for thrashers, metal-heads, punks, and indie fans: the 18-year-old live music venue on the corner of Naylor and Vine streets plans to close down on February 4. Walter’s moved to its current location — the former classic car showroom, video production studio, car parts distribution center, and cabinet warehouse pictured above — in 2011. Before that, the club was located on Washington Ave, in a building just east of Thompson St. that’s since been transformed into the office of Carnegie Custom Homes.
The photo below views the venue from its north side on Naylor back in 2014:
The Last Set
The Fish ’n Flush toilet-tank aquarium can’t support life without a connection to a power outlet — unavailable in this particular guest bath — but that didn’t stop the owners of the 3-bedroom at 3838 Southmore from extending the piscine theme to the rest of their bathroom after moving into the home. The couple bought the house in 2016 and renovated the room, which was previously featured on Swamplot. Having documented the work on their own blog, they now send these photos in an update on the porcelain apparatus.
The photo below shows the bathroom with new wainscoting, navy paint, and two framed fish renderings hanging above the window next to the shower. To the right of the window, the toilet sits in a separate room:
Water Feature
The newly built shopping center on the corner of W. Alabama and Mandell St. is of the business in the front, parking in the back variety — and will soon be even more so when 2 restaurants and a dentist’s office open in its ground floor. BuffBurger, new Vietnamese restaurant Lúa Viet Kitchen, and Lovett Dental are all slated to debut in the gray box with what look like wooden slats on its forehead, under construction since last January opposite the Menil’s territory in Montrose. TABC signage now up in BuffBurger’s window near the corner shows that the store — on its way to Mandell Place from its original location on Wirt Rd. — is seeking beverage permits ahead of its first business day.
A view from the sidewalk shows where the ground floor beef joint will fit in a 2,500-sq.-ft. space below the strip’s lettered-up corner tower:
New Fillings
The lights are off and the gas station signs have come down from the 4,400-sq.-ft. building formerly home to Doc’s Motorworks Bar & Grill on the corner of Westheimer and Graustark St. The nighttime photo above shows the auto-themed Montrose restaurant before it closed down at the end of last year.
Underneath the restaurant’s sign on Westheimer, the rusted flatbed truck has also hit the road from its long-term parking spot:
A Montrose Goodbye
DRINKING WINE AT LUNCH IS NOT A CRIME, pleads signage outside of Postino, a chain of 7 restaurants in Arizona — and one in Colorado — now on its way to the west side of the Heights Mercantile development on W. 7th St. The photo at top shows construction underway on Postino’s patio, which will sit outside the restaurant on the corner of Yale and 7th St.
Clothing stores Rye 51 and The Gypsy Wagon opened adjacent to Postino’s planed spot last year inside the structure labeled “Bldg. 1” in the Heights Mercantile site plan below:
7th at Yale
- 10011 Orangevale Dr. [HAR]
Pictured above during its final stand on Slowpokes cafe’s patio last Saturday as workers took it down limb by limb: one of a pair of oak trees the landlord had long threatened to remove. The 2 trees — now fully chopped — stood on a lawn where Slowpokes patrons hung out between the strip mall that houses the cafe and Gardendale Dr., which runs to its south. The leafier photo shows the same tree alive in the coffee shop’s backyard last year.
A view from the corner of Alba St. and Gardendale looks west to show that tree about to be chopped and the other one already stumped:
Shade Away
