Near Northside

Featured Posts
05/11/16 5:15pm

This Weekend’s Blade-On-Branch Action Upstream from White Oak Music Hall

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Near Northside
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Glen Park resident and periodic White Oak Music Hall critic Beth Lousteau sends along this Tuesday retelling of a Mother’s Day encounter with a work crew apparently having a go at some vegetation along Little White Oak Bayou near 210 Glen Park St. The property, including the warehouse across an unpaved road, was bought last spring by White Oak W2 Investments, an entity controlled by the White Oak Music Hall developers. Lousteau says that workers on the site told her they’d been tasked with clearing a nicer view to the water, but that the boundary between the purchased property and the county-owned floodway land wasn’t marked.

Here’s a brief glimpse of the scene reportedly taken that Sunday, when Lousteau encountered the work crew mid-whir:

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Glen Park
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Bars and Clubs
05/09/16 12:30pm

Raven Tower’s Tower Temporarily Closed, But The Shows Will Go On

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Near Northside, Quicklink, Restaurants
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RAVEN TOWER’S TOWER TEMPORARILY CLOSED, BUT THE SHOWS WILL GO ON Raven Tower Bar, 301 North St., Northside, Houston, 77009The blue bar-on-a-stick at the northwest corner of the White Oak Music Hall complex temporarily shut down last week so W2 Development Partners can add more railings and make the space more physically accessible. The elevated 1970s former bachelor pad reopened as a bar and rooftop patio in January, 3 months before the first show on the semi-temporary main stage next door; a set of concrete stairs wrap around the elevator shaft leading up to the main space.  The non-tower sections of the Raven Tower venue, including the downstairs bar and the outdoor patio and performance space, are scheduled to stay open and host concerts as planned. Across the parking lot, White Oak Music Hall has another lawn concert scheduled for tomorrow night. [Houston Chronicle; previously on Swamplot] Photo of Raven Tower: Swamplot inbox

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Aldine
04/25/16 12:30pm

Red Sun Rises on Cavalcade Utilities Box

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Near Northside, Public Art
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Fulton at Cavalcade streets, Northside, Houston ,77009

Stare directly into the snapshot above from the corner of Fulton and Cavalcade streets, which now bears a sun-saluting mural echoing a loteria card. The painting is part of the mini mural series that began appearing on utility boxes across the southwest side of town last summer, at which time only 31 of the boxes were slated for colorful fates. The current count is closer to 60 murals (per the photo-laden interactive map available here); additional artists were recruited last fall.

While the majority of the completed projects are still concentrated between 59 and 288 inside Beltway 8, more than a dozen are now scattered north and east throughout the rest of the Inner Loop — with a few further north around Greenspoint, 1 beyond the Beltway to the west in Westchase, and another as far southwest as Missouri City. Here’s another recent addition to the collection in Aldine, next to the Shipley’s Donuts at the southwest corner of Airline and W. Dyna drives:

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Blazing in Near Northside
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Near Northside
04/13/16 3:00pm

The Shakeup Around White Oak Music Hall’s Outdoor Stage

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Quicklink
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THE SHAKEUP AROUND WHITE OAK MUSIC HALL’S OUTDOOR STAGE Rendering of White Oak Music Hall, 2915 N. Main, Houston, 77009The permanent outdoor concert stage suggested by renderings of N. Main St.’s newest music venue, Erin Mulvaney writes this week, wasn’t included in the building permits approved for the venue; for now, it appears that the blue-roofed temporary stage used for the music hall’s first concert this past weekend will be covering the outdoor gig indefinitely. Meanwhile, Houston police documented at least 17 noise complaint calls from the immediate area on Saturday night, and 1 during the leadup week; multiple residents near the spot tell Mulvaney that their homes were vibrating to the music of French electronica group M83. Area resident Kerry Whitehead remarks to Swamplot on her observations from her home nearby: “I recently read a quote in a 1983 Texas Monthly article about our stretch of Main Street . . .  seeing I-45 in proximity to Hollywood Cemetery (an ‘old, lush place’ then, as it is now), the author remarked that he imagined ‘the bones of the nineteenth-century dead rattling in resonance with the vibrations from the freeway.’ Well, if those bones resting in peace hadn’t been rattled yet, they were rattled on Saturday night — as was I.” [Houston Chronicle; previously on Swamplot] Rendering of White Oak Music Hall complex: White Oak Music Hall

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Featured Posts
04/04/16 10:00am

Hardy Yards Letters Get Roughed Up Again Under the Red Line Overpass

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Near Northside
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Hardy Yards sign, Burnett at Main St., Near Northside, Houston, 77026

The recent restoration of the Hardy Yards district sign’s upright stature and youthful good looks appears to have been short-lived — Christopher Andrews found the H sprawled flat on its back over the weekend, with a few of the other letters also looking less than fully vertical in the late-night shot above (peering east down Burnett St. from the corner with N. Main under the light-rail overpass). Metro says it’s on the case, again.

Photo of Hardy Yards signage: Christopher Andrews

N. Main at Burnett
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Featured Posts
03/30/16 4:30pm

A Look at the Hardy Yards Site Plan Now That All Those Sign Letters Are Back In Place

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Near Northside
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Hardy Yards sign, Burnett at Main St., Near Northside, Houston, 77026

Hardy Yards sign, Burnett at Main St., Near Northside, Houston, 77026

The second A, R, and D of the signage at the intersection of Burnett St. and N. Main are now back in action (up top) beneath the Red Line light-rail overpass. The letters have been patched up and sent back to their assigned places above a freshly-repaired concrete planter, following an unfriendly run-in (or -into) near the end of January (pictured second, with the A dramatically sprawled backward onto the mulch).

The sign, marking the intended redevelopment of the former Hardy Rail Yards into a mixed-use complex in Near Northside, was added as part of the street and infrastructure work that’s been going on at the 43-acre brownfield site. Some of that work is visible in the site plan for the property posted by landscape architecture and planning firm Design Workshop: 

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Near Northside
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Featured Posts
07/15/15 1:45pm

Sprucing Up a Small Office Building by the Rail on North Main

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Near Northside, Office Buildings, Renovations
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2223 N. Main St., Near Northside, Houston

2223 N. Main St., Near Northside, Houston

Hop on or off the Red Line train at Quitman and you’ll find this 1940 red-brick structure a-renovating at the northwest corner of N. Main St. What’s being fixed up? Here are a couple of before-and-during shots showing the transformation of the 11,850-sq.-ft. office building at 2223 N. Main St. so far:

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Storefronts
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Featured Posts
07/14/15 2:30pm

Street Fattening, Intersection Birthing Going on Now by the Hardy Yards North of Downtown

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Near Northside, Streets, Transportation
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Burnett St., Near Northside, Houston

With a row of Downtown towers looking on from the south, 2 lanes are being added to Burnett St., along the northern boundary of the 50-acre site formerly known as the Hardy Rail Yards. The thickening runs between N. Main St. and Hardy St. At the western end of that stretch, next to the Burnett Transit Center stop on the Red Line’s northern extension, a new baby intersection has been born at Freeman St. just in front of the rail overpass, just up a ways from the N. Main tunnel:

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Grid Growth
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Critters
07/02/15 11:45am

Glen Park Coyote Comes Out for an Evening Stroll Near the Corner of North Main St. and New Music

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Glen Park, Near Northside
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glen-park-coyote-driveway

Coyote at Glen Park and Hyacinth St., Glen Park, HoustonHere’s a coyote who stepped out in the early evening hours yesterday for a little daylight walkabout in Glen Park — not far from its normal howling grounds in and around the nearby Hollywood Cemetery, Little White Oak Bayou, and Moody Park. These pics were taken at the corner of Glen Park St. and Hyacinth, just one block north of North Main St. and the future site of the White Oak Music Hall.

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Wildlife in the Near Northside
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Featured Posts
05/27/15 3:15pm

That Place on I-45 North of Downtown Where the Cars Always Seem To Hang Out After It Floods

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Flooding, Freeways and Toll Roads, Hazards, Near Northside
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Flooded Cars on I-45 North at Patton St., Near Northside, Houston, May 26, 2015

If you’re compiling a list of best photo spots for during or after another one of Houston’s every-dozen-years-or-so never-seen-anything-like-it flooding events, you’ll probably want to make room on it for the stretch of I-45 North between the N. Main St. and Patton St. exits. Back in 2001, images of cars and trucks floating along an insta-lake in this same spot made national news. And yesterday, pix of the automotive flotilla pictured above found their way to Facebook feeds and front pages around the globe.

But the low spot just north of Downtown wedged between Brooke Smith and the Near Northside was also a tough place to be when the water started rising, reports the Chronicle‘s Dane Schiller. Drivers found an early morning traffic jam in the rain changed nature quickly: “A surge was coming at them, squeezed by high barrier walls into the confines of the interstate. In less than 15 minutes, there was nothing to do but abandon ship.”

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Demolitions
04/07/15 1:30pm

Don’t Need That Old Building on Fulton St. Anymore, Except The Part That’s Keeping the Tower Behind It from Falling Over

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Industrial Properties, Near Northside
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Guy Wires, 4101 Fulton St., Silverdale, Houston

All that’s left of a 1956 steel-frame industrial building on the campus of ALG Truck & Trailer Repair at 4101 Fulton St. just south of Patton is these old cast-in-place concrete supports. The building, which lines the west side of the North Line light-rail extension in the Near Northside, was torn down over the last 2 weeks. Why are just these portions left standing?

It’s not entirely clear, but it might have something to do with the guy wires that are holding down a radio antenna tower adjacent to a service bay behind the Love’s Truck Stop directly to the west, which is accessed from nearby Patton St. It’s visible at the far left of the above photo — and in this marked-up view from Google, showing how it looked when the building was still intact:

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Hang Tight
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Apartments
12/23/14 3:15pm

Five of Old Hardy Rail Yard’s 50 Acres To Become a Mostly Affordable Near Northside Apartment Complex

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Fifth Ward, Near Northside
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hardy-yards-residences-panorama

A teaser website is now up and more work is underway on the Residences at Hardy Yards, touted as a component of the Near Northside’s very first mixed-use development. The apartments — “part of a comprehensive, mixed-use redevelopment of the Hardy Rail Yard site,” per city documents — are going in on 5 acres of the long-neglected former Southern Pacific and Union Pacific rail yard near the corner of N. Main St. and Burnett St., 2 blocks north of I-10, hard by the new MetroRail line, and just east of UH-Downtown. 

Earlier this month City Council approved a performance-based loan of $14,500,000 in federal hurricane relief money to the Houston and Financing Corporation-created entity HY FS LLC to build a 350-residential unit development on part of the 49-acre recently guerrilla-gardened property.

One condition of the loan: that 179 of the total of 350 one- and 2-bedroom units be affordable:

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Tracks To Flats
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Featured Posts
09/30/14 12:00pm

Lindale Park Teotihuacán Moving to the Nearer North Side

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Lindale Park, Near Northside, Openings and Closings, Renovations, Restaurants
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Former Kuko's Taqueria, Future Teotihuacan Mexican Cafe, 3707 Irvington Blvd., Near Northside, Houston

Former Kuko's Taqueria, Future Teotihuacan Mexican Cafe, 3707 Irvington Blvd., Near Northside, HoustonThe Teotihuacán Mexican Café at the corner of Irvington and Cavalcade (now helpfully labeled “Festively adorned Tex-Mex restaurant” on Zagat-powered Google Maps) will be relocating a few blocks south once renovations to a structure the 3-restaurant chain’s owners purchased in late May can be completed. Kuko’s Taqueria shut down at 3707 Irvington Blvd., between Alber St. and Collingsworth, this past June. It appears some work on the interior is already taking place, notes reader Christopher Andrews.

Photos: Christopher Andrews

Going South
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Crime
05/13/14 10:35am

The ‘Serial Defecator’ of Woodland Heights Has Been Caught Urinating in the Near Northside

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Near Northside, Woodland Heights
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Man Defecating on Sidewalk, Woodland Heights, Houston

Fiesta Mart, 1020 Quitman St., Near Northside, HoustonNote: Story updated below, with further detail.

A man suspected of pooping on the sidewalks and driveways of several homes in and around the intersection of Byrne St. and Helen in the Woodland Heights has been apprehended and taken into custody, a Houston Police Department spokesperson tells the Leader. The story of the Woodland Heights excrement attacks clogged up the internet last week, with stories of the repeated front-yard exploits reaching international and local news outlets around the globe — but only after a repeat victim went to teevee reporter Jennifer Bauer with surveillance footage from a camera hidden in a tree near her home. The captured images (above) of the man dubbed a “serial defecator” in various follow-on news reports appeared to show the perpetrator in the act.

Perhaps the most astounding aspect of the arrest: The public-pooping suspect was apprehended after he was found urinating — on a wall at the Fiesta Mart at Quitman and Fulton, according to the Leader report: “Police arrested the man, who appeared to be the same man as the one from Woodland Heights’ resident’s surveillance video, and charged him with public urination.”

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Huge Relief
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Development Restrictions
05/07/14 1:15pm

The Very Near Northside’s Battle of the Minimum Lot Size Signs

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Near Northside, Neighborhood Disputes, Signage
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Yard Signs in Near Northside, Houston

Yard Signs in Near Northside, HoustonA couple of weeks after a flyer was distributed to residents near a lower section of the Near Northside north of Hogan St. and west of Main suggesting they oppose an application for minimum-lot-size restrictions in the area, a bunch of properties there have begun sporting signs that announce their residents’ support for the initiative, a reader who goes by the name Triton informs Swamplot.

And Triton sends along this on-the-street report:

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Vote Yes or No
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