08/08/17 4:45pm

The 25-story SkyHouse River Oaks apartment tower, completed at the end of 2015 on a portion of the site of the former Westcreek Apartments just west of the San Felipe Target, has actual streetfront retail on its ground floor. And as of last week, it’s all full and open. That’s when Inferno Pizza began serving in the 2,400-sq.-ft. space at 2031 Westcreek Ln. Suite N1. The neighboring space has been a Glow Spa and Nails since last year.

There’s designated parking for spa- and pizza-goers in the first floor of the building’s garage. Pizza Inferno’s interior is organized like most fast-casual you-tell-us-how-to-assemble-it restaurants, though the buildout also added a 600-sq.-ft. mezzanine dining area and some patio seating (tables are coming in a few weeks) in front:

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Tower Pizza
08/08/17 1:45pm

Wrecking balls may have gone out of style, but cable hookups still put on a good Houston show. A reader with a front-row view of the soon-to-be north end of CityCentre shows us how, in videos and a photo showing the continuing section-by-section disappearance of the 1977 office building at 908 Town & Country Blvd. known as Town & Country V.

First, demolition workers weaken some of the building’s steel support beams by heating them with torches and making a few strategic snips. Then they attach one end of a cable to the beam:

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Cable Hookups and Yanks
08/08/17 11:00am

What’s happening at the corner of Navigation Blvd. and Engelke in the East End? A mix of alcohol and demolition: Mixed beverage, late-night, and beverage cartage permits were issued by the TABC last month to a yet-to-be-opened establishment named Straylight in the 20,878-sq.-ft. metal warehouse building with the brick front at 3229 Navigation Blvd. This spot is 4 blocks down the street from Ninfa’s, just past where Navigation starts to curve east toward Buffalo Bayou. Adjacent to that property, excavators are finishing up their work demolishing the former General Supply & Equipment Co. building at 3203 Engelke St.

The newly vacant lot now spreads just to the north of the building where Straylight is planned, as shown in these photos taken by Swamplot reader Johnny Mann Jr.:

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Straylight
08/07/17 3:00pm

A section of John Nova Lomax’s new Texas Monthly essay on Montrose’s continuing “it was better in the old days” rap chronicles a sequence of prominent changes to the neighborhood from the last decade. That it’s possible to find at least one Swamplot story corresponding to each noted example speaks to the longterm vigilance of this site’s tipsters — if not the author’s research methods. (Lomax in fact wrote a few of our stories himself; he’s a former Swamplot contributor and editor.)

Here’s the passage, altered by a peppering with Swamplot links to provide an annotated and illustrated version of Montrose’s recent journey from former counterculture haven to . . . uh, former counterculture haven:

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You Were There
08/04/17 1:00pm

Architectural details, building materials, windows, and flooring are now being picked from the the Midtown building at 1505 Hadley St. known as the Rice Mansion, a reader suggests. The photo sent above from this morning appears to show someone pulling boards from the threshold at the front door. The triple window fronting the building’s attic has already been yanked out.

Also removed from the property: a large amount of Destiny’s Child memorabilia — but that was last year, when the band’s former manager, Mathew Knowles, sold the entire block to the parent company of the neighboring Midtown Advantage BMW car dealership. The Rice Mansion served as the headquarters of Knowles’s Music World Entertainment for 15 years, and was considered the birthplace of the careers of his daughters, Beyoncé and Solange Knowles.

Another building on the property with a Destiny’s Child connection and a later stint as a wedding and event venue — the House of Deréon Media Center at 2204 Crawford St. — was torn down last month.

 

Photo: Swamplot inbox

Killing Time
08/04/17 11:30am

Demolition has begun, a reader notes, on the Ripple Creek Townhomes at 1015 S. Ripple Creek Dr., a 3-building assembly of 2-story structures fitted onto a 2-plus-acre site directly east of the Second Baptist Church complex on Woodway Dr. The gently named Ripple Creek Dr. is the first north-south street east of Voss on the north side of Woodway; the townhome buildings, which were built in 1970, are wedged between it and the more workaday Bering Ditch, an actual waterway known to carry actual water north to Buffalo Bayou on its straightened, concrete-lined haunches.

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Woodway Breakout
08/03/17 1:15pm

YOUR BEST SOURCE FOR WILLOWRIDGE HIGH MOLD INFESTATION UPDATES Curious about the extent of the mold found throughout Fort Bend ISD’s Willowridge High School this summer? Wondering if all the penicillium discovered on the campus at the tail end of Chimney Rock Rd. can be cleared out in time for the first day of school? As of today, there’s a new website for that: Check out this page for updates on remediation efforts; an accounting of band, JROTC, and athletic uniforms locked inside (they’ll be professionally cleaned); as well as a bit of backstory noting how investigators think the whole fungus fest began — after power was shut down in late June in advance of a planned construction project: “It is believed that the conditions outside (with increased humidity) combined with the fact that there was no A/C in the building factored into the rapid growth of the mold spores.” [Fort Bend ISD] Photo: Fort Bend ISD

08/03/17 12:30pm

The current state of the Lockwood Business Park, just inside the northeast corner of Beltway 8, is made evident in the photo above, which was just tweeted out this morning by McCord Development. The Lockwood in the name comes from Lockwood Rd. (not to be confused with another north-south street with industrial cred, Lockwood Dr., which is further to the south and west), visible in the background of the photo. The complex on the other side of that road is the TechnicFMC campus.

Four big buildings are planned for the site at 13300 Lockwood Rd., which was previously covered by trees and other foliage. Three will line Lockwood Rd. and one will sit behind: a 143,500-sq.-ft. warehouse, shop, and office structure that’s already been leased to gasket-and-hose-maker GHX Industrial. Two of the tilt-up structures fronting Lockwood will be flex-warehouse space, and the third (labeled Building C in the illustration below) is intended to be an office building. An expanse of concrete for truck turnarounds will link the other 3 buildings, according to drawings McCord is showing of the site:

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Unlocking Lockwood
08/02/17 3:45pm

Here’s a view from late last week of the back of former Exxon Upstream Research facility at 3120 Buffalo Spdwy., as crews continue their demolition magic. Transwestern Development and Spear Street Capital purchased the 16.9-acre site from the oil giant in March, and shortly thereafter began removing structures from the property, including the 550,000-sq.-ft. 1962 building by MacKie and Kamrath Architects — shown here in half-gone mode — and its attached auditorium, which was added in 2003. The eastern wall of the attached parking garage is still visible in the photo.

And here’s a view from yesterday, as demolition advances toward the structure’s Buffalo Spdwy. façade:

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Slice by Slice
08/02/17 2:15pm

RICHMOND MANNEQUIN MANSION NOW HAS A FAN PAGE, REGULAR DRIVE-BYS, AND LOOKY-LOOS, BUT NO BUYER YET More than 3 million people have now viewed the listing for the 5-bedroom gated home at 4302 Colony West Dr. — a bit of an uptick from the 200 or so per week its real estate agent, Diana Power, says typically look up one of her less unusual home offerings. But this 2-acre property on Jones Creek has a bit more going on in its photos. Sandy Walsh, the Richmond jewelry and clothing designer and artist behind the tchochke-, mannequin-, and set-piece-stunt-filled 5-bedroom home, has now done 3 teevee interviews to show off her handiwork and stand up to viewer insults (“Don’t just hate it and think it’s creepy . . . take a second look.”); she’s also started a Facebook fan page for the property, which she regularly populates with jarring closeups of its done-up mannequin residents. Law enforcement officers, writes Chronicle reporter Emily Foxhall, have been alerted to “the issue of curious people driving past” the home. “It requires time to take everything in,” Foxhall notes. “Some potential buyers have wanted the mannequins included,” Powers tells her, “but Walsh does not plan to part with them all.” The asking price remains at $1,275,000. [Houston Chronicle ($); previously on Swamplot] Photo of 4302 Colony West Dr.: HAR

08/01/17 12:00pm

From the skies above Montrose Blvd. just north of Bissonnet, here’s a view from late last week of progress on the Museum of Fine Arts Houston’s new Glassell School of Art. The new building, designed by Steven Holl Architects, is under construction across the street from the Glassell Junior School building (in the foreground, with the curved roof) — and on the same site where the original Glassell School, designed by Houston architect S.I. Morris, was demolished in 2015. Morris’s Glassell School featured exterior walls of glass block; the primary exterior materials of Holl’s replacement building are sandblasted panels of precast concrete, assembled to shape an inclined plane along the long edge of the building’s L shape.

If that part of the building is starting to look like it’ll form a giant ramp, it’s because it will: Models of the structure show an outdoor amphitheater at the ramp’s base; a rooftop public path will ascend beyond it to a sculpture garden on the roof of the building’s northern leg. An addition to the existing sculpture garden to the south will extend into the courtyard shaped by the building’s two wings, fronting Montrose Blvd. The space designated for the garden is filled with construction materials in the center of the photo above; it’s pictured in a more completed state in this rendering by the architect:

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A View from Above
07/31/17 4:45pm

The landscaping promised for the courtyard area that doubles as a driveway in back of the newly expanded and renovated home at 707 Euclid St. in Woodland Heights is now installed. We know this because a Swamplot reader was kind enough to send in the above photo of the scene. It provides an update to the photos in the listing (below), which show only unplanted planting beds in the driveway, before the most recent additions:

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Garage Front
07/31/17 1:30pm

“We will not have a kitchen ourselves,” writes the proprietor of Cobble & Spoke, the new craft beer bar planned for space H, almost to the corner of the 1900 Blalock strip center at the northeast corner of Blalock St. and Campbell Rd., in response to a reader query earlier today on Facebook. “However there is a restaurant on site that you will be able to order with right at the bar & have the food delivered right to your table!” That restaurant is Simply Greek, just 6 storefronts down the L, past Precisions Research, a couple of vacant spaces, Ideal Furniture, Creatures of Yoga, and Senpai’s Cards.

At the opposite end of the center is the Stop n’ In convenience store paired with the pair of gas pumps that front the parking lot. Cobble & Spoke promises a selection of wines and craft ciders as well. Neighborhood riders who want to lock up their bicycles will be accommodated too, the bar’s owner notes: “We will have a bike rack out front & even some dedicated space inside.”

Photo: Silvestri Investments

Craft Beer and Imported Food
07/31/17 11:15am

A FISHING GUIDE TO CONCRETE-LINED BRAYS BAYOU What kind of fish can an enterprising angler find in the wilds of inner-loop Brays Bayou? Episcopal priest and urban fly-fishing evangelist Mark Marmon tells the Chronicle‘s Shannon Tompkins he’s caught 18 different species in Brays Bayou alone, including largemouth bass, crappie, catfish, sunfish, Rio Grande perch, longnose gar, spotted gar, and white bass. But that’s just counting the natives. The biggest draws — and what you’re most likely to find — are the alien invaders, which include mullet, the aquarium-fugitive armored catfish known as plecostomus, tilapia, and grass carp, aka “Bellaire bonefish.” But you’ve got to know where to look for them: “They, like most fish in the bayou, tend to cluster around the mouth of ‘feeder’ creeks,” Tompkins reports. “They also like structure anomalies that create accelerated current or breaks in the current; in Brays Bayou, these are created by breaks or buckles in the otherwise smooth concrete lining of the bayou or maybe an abandoned shopping cart that has found its way into the bayou. (Anglers call those shopping carts ‘Brays Bayou mangroves.’)” [Houston Chronicle] Photo: Payton Moore

07/28/17 3:45pm

All construction work appears to have stopped, a reader notes, on the transformation of the former Pilgrim Cleaners and (later) Shriners Hospital clothing donation drop-off building at 4005 N. Braeswood into a second location of the Bacco wine bar. (The building, at the corner of Stella Link, backs up to Brays Bayou.) A red tag from city’s floodplain management office sticky-noted to the window beside the front door and dated July 3 gives a hint as to why: “Remodeling without floodplain permit in the floodplain,” it reads. On the next line, it adds another bit of advice: “Need electrical, plumbing, and structural permits as well.”

Photo: Swamplot inbox

When It Pours