Fifth Ward

Featured Posts
03/06/19 2:00pm

East River’s Western North Shore Launch: Multiplex, Waterfront Museum, Plaza, Lots of Ground Floor Retail You Can Drive To

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Fifth Ward, Mixed Use, Proposed Developments
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A leasing brochure just released by Midway reveals a detailed site plan for the first phase of the company’s planned development on a 150-acre former industrial site lining the north bank of Buffalo Bayou — here upgraded to riverine status. East River‘s drive-up urban conquest of the former KBR (previously, Brown & Root) campus begins on the far western edge of the Fifth Ward site, fronting Jensen Dr. and lining Clinton Dr. Portrayed in the plans and renderings: a 9-plus-screen multiplex movie theater, a new waterside home for the Houston Maritime Museum, a central plaza with a coffee pavilion (pictured), and almost 100,000 sq. ft. of retail and restaurant space, spread among the ground floors of 8 separate structures (including one enormous parking garage). Three of the structures are multi-story office buildings.

Here are some overall site plans of the development:

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Fifth Ward Incoming
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Featured Posts
01/02/19 2:00pm

Saint Arnold’s New Bike Lane Is Now Open for Designated Drivers

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Fifth Ward, Streets
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And people say Houston’s bike lanes don’t get any use! The next time someone gives you that line, there’s no need to bicker. Instead, just invite them out for a beer at Saint Arnold’s new-ish brewing cathedral off I-10. On the way there, you’ll spot the new bike lanes running adjacent to the brewery on both sides of Lyons Ave. And if the conditions in the one on the eastbound side of the street are anything like those shown in the photo above, then congratulations: It should be clear who’s right.

If, however, parked car traffic appears sparse on the day you stop by, there’s only one possible reason why: New signs must have been installed, prohibiting parking in the bike lane. As long as no ordinance exists to ban bike lane parking outright, such signage is the city’s only recourse to outlaw it.

Further east along Lyons, work to add new 6-ft. bike lanes to both sides of the street is underway and — at Jensen Dr. — has already been completed:

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Free Parking in the Fifth Ward
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Demolitions
10/17/18 11:30am

Last KBR Warehouses Getting Out of East River’s Way with the Help of Teardown Crews

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Fifth Ward, Redevelopment
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A couple of drive-by shots from Clinton Dr. show the state of demolition at the former Kellogg, Brown and Root campus, part of the effort to transform it into the new shopping, eating, working, and living complex that developer Midway has dubbed East River. Since beginning Friday, the teardown work has targeted the pair of warehouse buildings at the west end of the site, where their truck-docking holes front Jensen Dr. The 2 structures are the sole remnants of a much larger warehouse complex that once sat within the bounds of the 136-acre bayou-side site. Most of those industrial buildings were demolished between 2011 and 2012, leaving a swath of open space in the middle of the property — between the complex of office buildings that borders Hirsch Rd. to the east and the warehouses that now look to be goners.

In between those 2 bookends, a new black tarp has been added to portions of the construction fence along Clinton Dr., reports a reader. That’s where a multi-block colony of townhomes is planned; they’re shown in yellow on the map Midway put out over the summer:

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Fifth Ward
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Featured Posts
08/22/18 9:45am

Harris County Democrats Are Turning Part of Parra Design Group’s New HQ Blue

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Fifth Ward, Office Buildings
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The Harris County Democratic Party office has been in the building at 4619 Lyons Ave. since earlier this summer, but officials still haven’t gotten entirely situated there yet. A building permit filed yesterday now paves the way for a few more office additions to get them fully moved in after abandoning their previous headquarters on the North Loop near I-45.

Keeping them company in the building is Para Design Group, the Houston architecture firm that put the finishing touches on the place earlier this year and now has its own office on the second floor.

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Fifth Ward Foothold
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Adaptive Reuse
07/11/18 12:30pm

Your Best Look Yet at East River’s 136-Acre Bayou-Side Complex for the Fifth Ward

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Fifth Ward, Mixed Use, Proposed Developments
22 Comments

A fresh batch of renderings released by Midway paints the clearest picture yet of what’s planned for the 136-acre former KBR campus that stretches along Buffalo Bayou, between Hirsch Rd. and Jensen Dr. Cobbled together from a mixture of glass and other materials, the tallest structure shown in the image at top spikes up behind a lower-slung retail building that fronts a junction of walking paths intersecting in a central park. You can see a further-away view of the airy column, foregrounded by street-level retailers in the view above.

A confection-colored map put out by the developer last month included a long strip of green along Buffalo Bayou’s north bank reserved for park space.

It’s now reappearing in the view below from up above the waterway:

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Great Glass Spike
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Bars and Clubs
07/06/18 10:00am

How Saint Arnold’s Beer Cathedral Complex Is Shaping Up Across the Street from Its Brewery

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Fifth Ward, New Construction
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Despite the bare-bones look, construction on Saint Arnold’s drinking and entertainment complex across Semmes St. from its existing brewery is nearly complete. Renderings put out earlier by the brewery called for the steel beams supporting the roof over its back patio to extend beyond the covering, leaving the southernmost portion of the seating area unshaded. New landscaping now adds to the decor below it all.

But the big thing still missing is the lettering that’s planned to spell out the brewery’s name along the extended cupola, as shown at the top of the rendering below:

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Fifth Ward
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Featured Posts
06/06/18 3:00pm

How Fifth Ward CRC Plans To Fit 110 Housing Units into the Shuttered Elizabeth Hospital on Lyons St.

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Fifth Ward, Hospitals, Redevelopment, Renovations
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Current and proposed views from high above Lyons Ave. show what the St. Elizabeth Hospital would look like repurposed as a 110-unit housing complex, as the Fifth Ward CRC proposes. The biggest change architect Van Meter Williams Pollack has in store for the place is a teardown of the central wing that runs back behind the 3-story north face — pictured above — to make room for a new parking courtyard.

Behind that lot, a newly-constructed, 3-story building would front Chisum St.:

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St. Elizabeth Place
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Featured Posts
06/04/18 4:30pm

Your Guide to East River Candyland

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Fifth Ward, Maps, Mixed Use, Proposed Developments
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The map above — taken from this week’s city planning agenda — provides a candy-colored indication of how Midway plans to divvy up the 136-acre former KBR site along Buffalo Bayou, east of downtown, that it’s redeveloping into an office, retail, and residential neighborhood dubbed East River. Among the more colorful land uses revealed for the site: a park-fronting hotel slated for the semi-circular red parcel to the east, as well as a nameless museum — shown in grape — that’s planned along Buffalo Bayou near the neighborhood’s western edge.

Sprinkled along the water is an extension of the existing trail that runs along Buffalo Bayou’s north bank. It would traverse the entire development, from its western edge to the boat dock planned at its eastern boundary. Along the way, “Pedestrian bridges are being discussed with Buffalo Bayou Partnership to connect the two sides of the bayou,” according to the plans Midway submitted to the city.

Those 7 consecutive yellow blocks at the north end of the site along Clinton St. represent the citadel of townhomes that’ll look out onto the surrounding Fifth Ward. It’s bookended by 3 blocks of retail to the east along Hirsch Rd. and one to the west on Jensen Dr.

As heralded by the sign — pictured below — now hanging the site’s construction fencing, Houston’s city planning commission will take up the special exemption request that Midway submitted for the development later this week:

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Sweet Deal
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Featured Posts
03/06/18 1:15pm

10-Story Cell Tower Wants To Spike Up Along Fifth Ward Railroad Tracks

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Fifth Ward, Proposed Developments, Quicklink
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10-STORY CELL TOWER WANTS TO SPIKE UP ALONG FIFTH WARD RAILROAD TRACKS A new cell tower is proposed behind a warehouse on Schweikhardt St., just north of where the road ends at Clinton Dr. Vertical Bridge Development, an entity that manages towers for telecom companies, filed an application with the city’s Tower Commission for permission to build the 100-ft. tall structure just north of the train tracks that cross Schweikhardt late last year. The tracks are more or less the dividing line between the industrial zone that spreads out along Buffalo Bayou between Hirsch Rd. and Route 90, and the residential portion of the Fifth Ward that extends south of I-10. City rules require a waiver for towers to be built in residential neighborhoods, and in order to get one, the owner of the 1.5-acre lot where the tower is proposed argues that the parcel is deep enough for the antenna to hang back far from the road. Still, however, the nearest residential property would be just over 200 ft. away from the new sky wire. [Houston Tower Commission Agenda] Photo of signage at proposed tower site: Swamplot inbox

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Featured Posts
12/20/17 3:00pm

Say Hello to the Newest Building on Lyons Ave.

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Fifth Ward, Houston Architects, New Construction, Office Space
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Architect and townhome builder Parra Design Group is showing off its almost-complete new headquarters building at 4619 Lyons Ave. in the Fifth Ward. The 7,815-sq.-ft. office-warehouse complex sits on the corner of Lyons and Schweikhardt St. The firm’s offices are on the 1,500-sq.-ft. second floor. (That’s Camilo Parra doing his scale-figure impression on the balcony in the photo above.)

No other tenants are in the building yet. A statement from the firm, which moved its offices from Rice Military, indicates that the building’s double-height atrium space will be made available to the new building’s neighbors for “meetings and other activities.”

A 2-story brick section fronts Lyons Ave. A view from the Schweikhardt side shows the back portion of the building, a larger single-story warehouse-style space that Parra will use as a work area and to store building materials and supplies:

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Fifth Ward
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Featured Posts
11/28/17 5:00pm

Saint Arnold’s Fifth Ward Beer Cathedral Now Taking Shape on I-10

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Fifth Ward, New Construction
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The steel is up for the cathedral-like beer-entertainment complex that Saint Arnold is building across Semmes St. from its Lyons Ave. brewery. The view at top shows what you’ll see now if you look southeast from the corner of Semmes and Lyons. Bocce courts and a multi-purpose lawn will sprout in the foreground. An extended cupola will have lettering that spells out the brewery’s name.

The complex’s restaurant, shown in the recent rendering above, will include stained-glass images of holy figures and murals featuring brewing iconography:

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Beer Gardening
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Featured Posts
10/24/17 4:00pm

Former Brown & Root Building 3 Moving on from Amazon Lure to World Series Contention

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Fifth Ward, Office Buildings, Real Estate Marketing, Signs
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The lights have been changed again in the vacant office building at the center of Midway’s newly renamed East River site on Buffalo Bayou in the Fifth Ward. The 12-story former Building 3 on the KBR campus the development firm bought last year has progressed from referencing Amazon minus a couple of vowels to spelling out our city’s well-accomplished hometown baseball team minus its initial A. The view above was captured by a Swamplot reader from Clinton Dr. last night

The AMZN lettering lives on, though, at the end of a promo video Midway produced to rep Houston — and its mostly vacant 150-acre former industrial site:

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’Stros in Lights
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Featured Posts
10/09/17 4:30pm

The Fifth Ward Building with Amazon’s Wall Street Name and Jeff Bezos’s Fast-Action Concept in Lights

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Fifth Ward, Industrial Properties, Real Estate Marketing, Signs
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Here’s the backside of the 12-story former KBR office building that Midway has for the last week lit up with a new message in hopes of signaling to Amazon and avian passers-by that it buys into the concept underlying many of Jeff Bezos’s business decisions. Also: That the surrounding 150-acre property on the north side of Buffalo Bayou east of Downtown Houston that the company has renamed East River would make a fine second headquarters campus for the online and offline retailer. Day 1 is the name assigned successively to 3 different Amazon buildings in Seattle, the latest a new 37-story downtown tower that itself features a lit-up sign on its lower floors that reads HELLO WORLD. Day 1 is also a common catchphrase in the company, a reminder to itself, among other things, to focus on outcomes rather than process and to make decisions quickly, even if you have less information available than you’d like.

Day 1 for this Houston sign was October 2nd. As a reader reported last week, since then the vacant building has been sporting the company’s NASDAQ ticker symbol on the opposite side to match:

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Day 1 on Clinton Dr.
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Featured Posts
10/06/17 1:00pm

A Sign of Amazon Interest in Houston’s ‘East River’

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Fifth Ward, Industrial Properties, Real Estate Marketing, Signs
30 Comments

The tallest of the 5 vacant structures remaining in the 136-acre former KBR campus fronting Buffalo Bayou east of Downtown that new owner Midway has dubbed East River has been sporting a new night-time look as of this week. The lights in the photo above, taken last night by a reader, spell out the NASDAQ ticker symbol of Amazon — which has announced a nationwide search for a second headquarters campus.

Previously, the lights in the 12-story office building at 4100 Clinton Dr. in the Fifth Ward had been tuned to HTX:

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Hey Lookie Here!
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Featured Posts
09/08/17 1:15pm

The New Concrete-Block Homes on a Fifth Ward Block by the Tracks

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Fifth Ward, New Construction, Townhomes
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Going up along Rawley St. just east of Gregg St. in the Fifth Ward: A row of five 3-story freestanding concrete-block townhomes from a company called Castro Novum. The photos were taken earlier this week — after Harvey storms had cleared out of the area. The homes are 2 blocks north of Lyons Ave. and back up to Union Pacific’s Terminal Subdivision freight-rail line. This one is furthest along:

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5 in a Row
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