Last Wednesday, a new paintjob completely erased the blue and gold artwork on Reeve’s Antiques’ Taft-St. side. The whitewashing, Reeves owner Matt Reeves tells Swamplot, has created a blank canvas upon which a rotating series of new murals will appear over the next few months before a final, more permanent work takes their place.
He didn’t comment on the flying fish now levitating above it all:
The building that the Texas Junk Company left in 2016 is now home not only to a brand-new Verizon 5G broadband connection, but a whole array of gadgets designed to show off the service that the carrier launched in Houston a few months ago. Pictured above is the mock living room where for the next week, anyone can make themselves comfortable in front of a 4K resolution TV and a host of other mobile devices while they stream video through the telecom company’s new, purportedly higher-speed lines.
For a more immersive experience, try the virtual reality basketball range shown below off to the right:
The building on the corner of Montrose Blvd. and Bomar St. is showing signs of rebranding as Les Ba’get’s owners prepare to open a new, more pho-friendly joint in its place — dubbed Les Noo’dle. February 2 was closing day for the original Vietnamese restaurant; it’s now getting situated in a new Oak Forest shopping center on Ella Blvd. where it will double its space.
Sure, the Texas Junk Company has decamped from its longtime spot at 215 Welch St. — and the building has been put up for lease. But even with a whitewashing the building still shows its recent provenance. Well — somewhat. The corner-hugging brick structure’s new coat of white paint, which appeared over the weekend, now covers over some of the painted signage, artwork, and uh, beauty marks that once festooned its façades. But not all. Carefully avoided by the painters and still visible on the structure are the Texas Junk Company sign and its accompanying snake mascot facing Welch St. (pictured above) and the cactus-and-mesa tableau on the Taft St. side:
The latest of Gensler’s renderings of that midrise parking garage planned atop the recently evacuated location of nightclub and drag venue Meteor shows the structure rocking a swath of greenery in place of the decorative bicycles pictured across the facade in earlier drafts. Cara Smith reports in the Houston Business Journal this week that the garage is one of the projects that Gensler is “future proofing” — that is, designing with an eye to an eventual decline in Houston parking garage needs, whether spurred by the rise of self-driving cars or other shifts in transportation patterns. The firm was featured by Web Urbanist last month in an article discussing some of its other current garage projects, some of which are being outfitted with conversion-minded utility hookup spacing, as well as ceiling heights suited to something other than car stacking; modular features like easy-to-tack-on facades and removable ramps are also in the mix.
There appear to be 6 retail spots in the foot of the garage that will be ready for tenants before such time as the rest of the garage might hypothetically be repurposed (along with a slew of other spaces in the development, per Edge Realty’s leasing flier):
More knocking down and dragging out has been going on around the handful of blocks between Genesee and Taft streets now being prepped for the area’s Fairview District redo. The 1930s-ish apartment building at the corner of Genesee and Fargo St. (next to previously-shattered Meteor Lounge) is as of yesterday mostly out of the picture (as, uh . . . pictured above), freeing up the lot for the 5-story parking garage planned on the east end of the block. A reader snapped a few final looks at and into the structure last Thursday, following the issuance of the building’s Inauguration day demo permits:
The renderings in Edge Realty’s marketing material for the mixed-use office and retail redevelopment planned for the area around Fairview and Mason streets now include signage for another outpost each of New York-based Shake Shack and Alabama-based Steel City Pops. The eccentric popsicle shop is shown inhabiting that freestanding dessert island planned in the parking lot east of Max’s Wine Dive; Shack Shack is depicted in a corner unit in the multi-story building planned across Mason St., next to the empty former site of Meteor Lounge (and catty-corner across Fairview from Meteor’s current crumbly resting place). A reader tells Swamplot that Shake Shack was also mentioned as a future Fairview District tenant at last week’s meeting of the East Montrose Civic Association, though possibly placed in a different spot in the development.
Also showing up in the latest images is Houston-based yoga and bike-in-place fitness outlet Revolution Studio; other names dropped on the flier include Austin-based barber shop Finley’s, California-based and -flavored fast-casual restaurant lemonade, haberdashery chain Goorin Bro.’s,  shoe-polish-brand-turned-upscale-watch-retailer Shinola, and — down on the Genesee St. corner — enthusiastic burger joint Eureka!:
The deconstruction crew that brought Meteor Lounge to the ground at Fairview and Genesee streets last week got in a last round of crushing digs at the fallen structure over the weekend, a reader reports: “They piled up all the bricks and ran over them with the huge excavator, crushing them. They then moved the debris and spread it over the dirt in the ‘parking’ lot across the street from Max’s Wine Dive.” The obliterated former club’s corner property is planned as the location of a proposed 5-story parking garage for the Fairview District redevelopment; here’s the view from Fairview of the rearranged structure itself, facing southeast toward the CenterPoint electrical substation on Genesee:
Above is an updated view of plans for the stretch of Fairview St. between Taft and Genesee being redeveloped by the owner of the redeveloped restaurant strip containing Cuchara and Max’s Wine Dive — a CBRE marketer announced that the project will be branded as the Fairview District, and will include 4 buildings of the mixed-office-retail-restaurant variety. In the center of the rendering above is a sleeker view of the 5-story bike-encrusted parking garage previously drawn up for the former site of Meteor Lounge (which sent its drag show over South Beach and shut off the showers for the last time over the summer). It’s unclear from this vantage whether the garage’s bicycle decor is still part of the plan for the area, but some bike lanes appear to be. The glassy structure on the far left looks to be the standalone structure planned for the parking lot next to Max’s Wine Dive (previously tagged as a dessert shop): CONTINUE READING THIS STORY
For just $2 less than $1 million, you can now get your hands on this back-on-the-market bungalow-plus at 212 Fargo St., built in 1930 and added onto in 2000. The house sits in the East-Montrose-Fourth-Ward transition zone immediately north of those blocks being family-friendlified by means of Max’s Wine Dive developer Fred Sharifi. Records show the house went on the market asking for a much juicier $6.9 million back in 2007; the 2-unit home was relisted several times in 2014 and 2015  (starting at a more modest $1.375 million and falling) before going rental for a few months this spring.
Check out 5,179 sq. ft. of house squeezed into the 5,000-sq.-ft. lot:Â
The last of the footwear kicking around at the Texas Junk Company’s curiosity-filled warehouse at 215 Welch St. could be packed up and shipped out as soon as September 30. Per owner Bob Novotney’s telling on social media, the company was told last week to be out of the space by the end of the next month, though he’s hoping to get that deadline pushed back to April; Novotney has already started moving goods to a new space planned at 121 N. Main St. in Moulton, TX (halfway between Shiner and Flatonia). The 1930s building that’s been hosting Texas Junk sits immediately north of the field of townhomes rising on the former site of Ecclesia’s since-reincarnated church-plus-coffee-shop.
Photos: Texas Junk Company
So You Think You Can Drag hit the stage at  South Beach last night — a permanent move for the event in the wake of  Wednesday‘s permanent closure of Meteor Lounge at 2306 Genesee St. The bar and semi-aquatic drag and dance venue had been renting its space back temporarily while developer Fred Sharifi worked on designs and permits for the redevelopment of the East Montrose neighborhood around Fairview Ave. and Mason St.; Adolfo Pesquera noted in early April that the project (under the name Fairview + Mason) had been granted a variance request.
The application for that request included the drawing above of the 6-story parking garage that’s planned to replace Meteor; the exterior, perhaps following Rice University’s lead on parking garage modesty coverings, appears to be artfully encrusted with bicycles, with the words MONT and ROSE emblazoned beneath.
The variance request asked the city for permission to cross some building setback lines and to add some canopies along 2 different blocks on Fairview — the site plan below points them out, catty-cornered between the block holding the Mason St. electrical substation and the block holding Max’s Wine Dive, Cuchara, and Flow:
The agent who put the 16-year-old house at 2203 Crocker St. on the market this week wants to make sure you know exactly what you’re buying. The listing for the property (which describes the home as “Needs work! Never updated. Never remodeled. Located within 241 feet from nuisance bar.”) digs deep into gritty details great and small — from photos focused on the missing caulk between the kitchen tiles, to a 2-page disclosure document listing assaults, intoxication calls, and other incidents ostensibly reported to the police from in and around the property’s catty-corner neighbor, bearaoke hotspot Crocker Bar.
The listing’s photo captions highlight additional details of the property’s physical defects and history — sometimes using the bright red text above, and other times employing fragments of narration that raise questions even as they answer them. Here’s the shot from the listing labeled only as Bird Got Trapped in Wall:
Here’s the current scene along the north side of Drew St., where the acre-plus of emptied land previously planned for development as the Pearl on Helena now hosts a Morgan Group for sale sign. The block bounded by Helena, Drew, Albany, and Dennis streets was marked a few years back as another addition to Morgan’s string of Pearl midrises; the Helena site’s application went dark during the variance request process in mid-20014, but the land was cleared of its former hospital and mansion occupants near the end of that year.
Morgan Group currently has a Pearl in Greenway Plaza, with another getting polished up on Washington Ave near T.C. Jester; a planned Pearl on Smith (at the site of the former Social Security office right across Smith St. from the Pearl on Midtown) appeared to have been removed from the company’s immediate focus in 2014, only to resurface in renderings the following year as part of an apartment-midrise-grocery-store complex containing a Whole Foods.
