Houston’s first-ever highrise apartment building will be demolished next Friday, September 25th, a spokesman for the Houston Police Department announced today. Neighborhood Protection inspectors have determined that structural problems with the vacant-and-crumbling 1906 Savoy Apartments building (later the Savoy Hotel) require it to be taken down as quickly as possible. The Houston Press’s Craig Malisow reports:
[HPD's Mark Curran] said the police have had difficulty contacting the owner, who is currently in Lebanon. (Curran didn’t remember his name off-hand, but a 2007 Press story identified him as Michael Nassif). The owner has 10 days to file an appeal, Curran said.
The nearby Metro line will need to be closed during the demolition – hopefully not longer than Friday-Sunday, Curran said.
Curran also said that the building would be guarded continuously until it is torn down.
The original Savoy Houston’s first public building to have electricity. Not included in the demolition order: the building next door with the big Savoy Houston sign on top. After that portion was built in 1961, the entire complex was operated as the Savoy-Field Hotel.
That 1916 house on Teas Nursery property at 4400 Bellaire Blvd. — now home to the company’s landscaping business — was his birthplace. He died yesterday. “His grandfather, Edward ‘Papa’ Teas, Sr., whose family had been in the nursery business since 1843 starting in Indiana, moved his family to Bellaire from Missouri in 1910 to grow and sell produce, but turned to landscaping when a freeze in 1913 wiped out his business. He was responsible for introducing azaleas and crepe myrtle to the area, so legend goes, and for planting some of Houston’s enduring natural beauty, including Rice University’s oaks. John Teas helped plant the oaks along the Rice campus on Fannin Street as a boy. The family’s nursery businesses extended from Fort Bend County through Conroe, but the roots were sunk the deepest in Bellaire, where the nursery and landscaping business continue to this day.” [Bellaire Examiner]
A reader sends in this photo from the corner of Union and Henderson Sts. in the Old Sixth Ward, one block off Washington Ave. And comments:
Anyone in the market for a FREE house? This caught my eye on my way home [yesterday] and made me laugh out loud. I knew it was a rough sellers market but wow - FREE?
Sorry about the ghost images in the picture - I got so excited about a FREE house that I forgot to roll down the car window before snapping the shot!
The home dates to 1890, and was sold in October of last year. This past April, the city historical commission denied the owner’s request for a “certificate of appropriateness” to tear it down.
“Also, over the past 50 years, high-impact building and roadway development have reduced the amount of permeable surface to accept stormwater, increasing flooding and pollution. Stream flow speeds in Houston, for example, have increased from under 5,000 cu ft per second in 1930 to about 27,500 cfs in 2000, says the U.S. Geological Survey. With stream-flow increases come a greater potential for flooding. The actual stream flow from 2001’s Tropical Storm Allison in Houston’s Brays Bayou peaked sharply at about 34,000 cfs, 20 hours from the start of runoff. This compares to a more gradual stream flow in 1915, before development. . . . Allison, which caused $5 billion of damage in Houston, would have been a nonevent even 50 years ago because the natural landscape would have absorbed the water, say sources.” [GreenSource]
“I’d love to see any examples you can provide of [lovely architecture] being replaced by a poorly built McMansion. For every one you might find, I can show you a thousand where a tiny, usless, worn out, obsolete, shack was town down and replaced with one or more new, modern, luxurious, atractive homes. Are they all perfect? Certainly not. But I think the transformation that has occurred in the Inner Loop over the past 25 years is nothing short of amazing. I only hope [it] can continue for another 25 years. Better homes inside the Loop. Better apartments inside the Loop. More people inside the Loop. More money inside the Loop. More shopping inside the Loop. More restaurants inside the Loop. More jobs inside the Loop. More density. More energy. More everything.” [Bernard, commenting on Comment of the Day: What Happens To Those Small, Stylin’ Inner-Loop Homes?]
John Nova Lomax reminisces: “This was Oil Bust Houston, and it looked then like Montrose might become a full-on slum. There were no condos along ‘Theimer (as it was often called by the mullet set) and few fancy restaurants. From Montrose Boulevard all the way to what is now called Midtown, Westheimer was lined with little more than one “modeling studio” after another, and it seems like there were even more tattoo shops than there are now. The denizens and visitors to these businesses (not to mention the street hustlers, drag queens, punks and Guardian Angels that still lurk in the area) provided plenty for the hordes of suburbanites – getting their first taste of freedom and big city life – to gawk at from the safety of their Blazers and Cutlasses. . . . on weekend nights, Westheimer would be bumper-to-bumper from Bagby to well past Buffalo Speedway, and sometimes all the way out to the Galleria, a phantasmagoria of teenage hormones and sound-collisions: car-horns, engines revving, and squealing girls, the hiss-and-almost-subsonic bass rumble of ‘Paul Revere’ booming from a Jeep Cherokee interlocking with a Honda CRX chirping out that inane ‘Two of Hearts’ pop ditty or the root canal Teutonic skronk of that ‘Warm Leatherette’ monstrosity.” [Hair Balls]
So tell me, whatever happened to . . . those Wilshire Village Apartments? Houston photographer Sarah Lipscomb stumbled across a couple of classic interior shots of the then-new apartment complex while poking through old photos a few months ago with her aunt, Johnna Lee Muller.
Writes Lipscomb:
They didn’t have internet in those days but they got to smoke, read magazines and look at globes.
Another view of home entertainment in the early 1940s, Wilshire Village-style:
Diehard Modernist architect Charles Gwathmey, dubbed one of the “New York Five” (along with Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Richard Meier, and John Hejduk) in the early 1970s, passed away yesterday in Manhattan of esophageal cancer. Gwathmey, who was 71, was probably most famous for his addition to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum, which his firm, Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects, completed in 1992.
Gwathmey-Siegel was no stranger to Houston. In the late seventies and early eighties, the firm designed a series of 4 spec office buildings that line the south side of this city’s North Belt, just southeast of the Greenspoint Mall.
To think, only a quarter-century ago here, wild Animals roamed the empty Downtown streets at night, and upstanding citizens settled their disputes with a joust.
“Before developers established the heights and its various neighboring subdivisions, a massive filling project took placed. It was pretty much a landfill for the City of Houston. . . . Developer clear cut the existing pine forest (the oaks pretty much only existed near the bayous and tribs) and filled in the uneven landscape. A big example is in Woodland Heights. A 60-inch storm sewer line runs in an old trib to White Oak Bayou. The line is 20-ft below the current natural ground in the area. After the line was built, the natural channel was filled in and streets placed on top. The line currently goes under many people properties and houses and many don’t know it exists. . . . Outside of that, several ox bows and other trib were filled in. A couple were not though. There is one just east of TC jester where it cross White Oak Bayou south of 11th. It has water in it. There is another just west of Yale that is dry. I’ve seen historic photos showing people jumping off the banks of the the natural streams in the bayous in the Clark Pines area (14th street west of Durham). A current development is actually being build on an undeveloped piece of land that was a site of the landfill in this oxbow. The houses are being placed on piles driven deep into the ground to avoid them from sinking or collapsing. I doubt they are telling the home buyers this. Long time residents know about it though.” [kjb434, commenting on Wet and Wild: Strip Redo on White Oak]
“Correction- The tearing down of old homes to build new was pioneered by Sterling Victorian Homes in the mid-late 1980s. It began on the 400 block of 22nd Street. These homes look very modest by today’s standards. It is likely true that Allegro pioneered the building of Disney-fied Hummer homes with cheese closets…” [Sheila, commenting on Scaling Back the Upscale: Allegro Builders, Downtempo]
Ken Hoffman returns from Italy with a little perspective: “The Colosseum was originally called Amphitheatrum Flavium, and it was built by the powerful emperors Vespasian, Titus and Domitian. The Astrodome was originally called the Harris County Domed Stadium, and it was governed by former Houston Mayor and Harris County Judge Roy Hofheinz. He just thought he was an emperor. The Colosseum, after several expansions (mostly to honor a new emperor), had a seating capacity of about 65,000. It had 80 entrances and could completely fill and empty in less than five minutes. The Astrodome, after several expansions (mostly to stop Houston Oilers owner Bud Adams’ whining), had a seating capacity of 62,000 for football. It would take an hour to get out of the parking lot because of a lack of exits. Parking was cheaper in ancient times, too.” [Houston Chronicle; previously in Swamplot]
This 1946 Dmitri Kessel photo of some not-long-vacant Houston property is just one of a half-million images from the Life magazine photo archives that are now only a Google search away. Google is announcing that the entire collection of photos taken for Life magazine — about 10 million in all — will be available within the next few months. About 97 percent of these images have never been seen by the general public.
The images are available from a simple Google image search. You can single out the Life images by adding “source:life” to your search or by starting at this gateway.
Houston photophile Robert Kimberly, who’s been poring through the collection, says
There are loads of Houston pictures, but add “TX” or Texas” to narrow a search to the city.Otherwise you’ll be seeing lots of “Whitney.”
The last remaining building associated with Houston’s 1950s-era glam-magnet Shamrock Hotel is slated to be torn down, reports Cynthia Lescalleet in the West U. Examiner. The Shamrock’s former ballroom facility at 2151 W. Holcombe became the Edwin Hornberger Conference Center in 1996, nine years after the Shamrock itself was famously axed.
The Texas Medical Center has more building plans for the site:
TMC will build 250,000 square feet of office space in three floors to be added atop the Bell building, which also houses the existing parking garage, said TMC’s John Kajander. The added space is to support TMC institutions, he said.
The building housing the Hornberger’s foyer and ballroom “is nearing the end of its useful life,” he said, and will be taken down.
Swamplot covers real estate, home design and renovation, architecture, and the landscape of Houston, Texas. Swamplot did not flood during Allison — or Ike! Honest! Read more
Comment of the Day: Grading the Replacements
“I’d love to see any examples you can provide of [lovely architecture] being replaced by a poorly built McMansion. For every one you might find, I can show you a thousand where a tiny, usless, worn out, obsolete, shack was town down and replaced with one or more new, modern, luxurious, atractive homes. Are they all perfect? Certainly not. But I think the transformation that has occurred in the Inner Loop over the past 25 years is nothing short of amazing. I only hope [it] can continue for another 25 years. Better homes inside the Loop. Better apartments inside the Loop. More people inside the Loop. More money inside the Loop. More shopping inside the Loop. More restaurants inside the Loop. More jobs inside the Loop. More density. More energy. More everything.” [Bernard, commenting on Comment of the Day: What Happens To Those Small, Stylin’ Inner-Loop Homes?]