Woodland Heights

Featured Posts
09/26/18 4:30pm

Car-Wash-to-Coffee Conversion Now Brewing for the Corner of Houston Ave. and Alma St.

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Proposed Developments, Renovations, Retail, Woodland Heights
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The building with a roof that’s bigger than its body at 3024 Houston Ave. is now slated to become a cafe operating under the name Uncle Bean’s Coffee Shop. The photo at top — posted to the venue’s fledgling Facebook page this morning views the structure from the west side of the road, just south of Alma St. Its most recent occupant: Mr. Details Hand Car Wash.

White paint hit the exterior sometime during the former tenant’s tenure, washing out the yellow splat marks that once graced its north and south sides:

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Woodland Heights
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Renovations
08/24/18 10:30am

Hogg Middle School Hopes To Bring Order to Its Backyard Free-for-All with Sports Field, Playground, Batting Cages

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Schools, Sports Facilities, Woodland Heights
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Without any formal backyard practice facilities, students make their own fun behind James Hogg Middle School’s Woodland Heights building. But a set of plans the school calls Outside Hogg now aims to tame things at the north end of the property along E. 11th St.

The idea is to redo it as a proper sports field, complete with a scoreboard and bleachers:

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Razorback Recess
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Featured Posts
04/11/18 12:30pm

Meet the Shops on Watson: 5,600 SF of Swanky New Strip in Store for the Corner at Usener St.

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Proposed Developments, Retail, Woodland Heights
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Here’s a southeastern view of the 5,600-sq.-ft. retail building — dubbed Shops on Watson — that Edge Realty wants to plant adjacent to the Woodland Heights welcome sign on the corner of Watson and Usener streets. The structure’s front deck looks out beyond a 22-spot parking lot at the new-ish Elan Heights apartments across Usener to the immediate south. On the east side of the building, 4 more head-in spots line a portion of Watson.

The new development is planned in place of a few warehouse buildings that currently sit on a shady, just-under-half-acre parcel at 2401 Watson St.

Rendering and site plan: Edge Realty

Woodland Heights
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Featured Posts
02/28/18 1:30pm

The Heavy Metal Taco Redo Now Taking Shape on N. Main off I-45

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Renovations, Restaurants, Woodland Heights
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Facial adjustments to the building at 3701 N. Main have left it rustier than it was when El Taquito Rico shuttered in the same space last May. The former Woodland Heights Mexican restaurant’s yellow sign has been removed, as has the standing seam mansard roof-style awning that wrapped its frontage on N. Main. In their place, a headband of corrugated metal now hugs the top of the structure — which sits on a narrow 8,375-sq.-ft. lot at the end of Pecore St., just west of I-45 (and across the street from the O’Reilly Auto Parts building that Asia Market is moving into).

Floor-to-ceiling windows that lined the restaurant’s entryway have also been truncated:

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Heights Wrap-Up
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Featured Posts
11/21/17 4:15pm

First Sign of the New Restaurant Headed for El Taquito Rico’s Spot on North Main

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Openings and Closings, Woodland Heights
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Coming soon to the 1,500-sq.-ft. building on the corner of N. Main and Pecore St. where El Taquito Rico dealt tacos until its closure in May: a new restaurant serving drinks. The building sits on a narrow triangular property at 3701 N. Main, just west of I-45. Puro Mente LLC is listed as the applicant for a variety of TABC permits, including one for late-night service, on the notice taped to the building’s front window, shown in the photo below:

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Rico Puro
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Featured Posts
07/31/17 4:45pm

At 707 Euclid, the New Driveway Courtyard Landscaping Is In

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Homes for Sale, Landscape, Real Estate Marketing, Woodland Heights
18 Comments

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
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Featured Posts
01/10/17 2:45pm

Dirt Piled Up for Lower Heights District on the Former Tarkett Industrial Site South of I-10

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Sawyer Heights, Woodland Heights
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Tarkett Site, Katyville, Houston, 77007
Tarkett Site, Katyville, Houston, 77007This afternoon a wall of orange and white barricades along the edge of the Heights hike & bike trail just south of I-10 is hemming in the construction equipment recently migrated onto Tarkett’s former Texas Tile Manufacturing warehouse site. Permits for some earthmoving on the former industrial side were issued just before the close of the year under the name Lower Heights District, and the Katyville property showed up on last week’s city planning commission agenda for some preliminary approvals and flood-potential scrutiny. No official word yet whether the site’s owner’s previous mention of stacked big box possibilities is still on the table.

Reader and tower scrutinizer Lucky Gutierrez also took a closer look at the oil derrick hanging around next to the site, on the edge of the bike trail:

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Grading Katyville Heights
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Featured Posts
08/11/16 5:15pm

Inside the Masonic Lodge Now Selling Out in the Woodland Heights

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Homes for Sale, Interiors, Woodland Heights
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114 Byrne St., Woodland Heights, Houston, 77009
A veil of mystery and enigma comes free with your purchase of this 1920s building on Byrne St., which hit the market last week. Woodlands Lodge 1157 moved out of the building in the early 1980s citing neighborhood decline, and headed north to its current locale near the I-45 split from Veterans Memorial Dr. The Byrne building is listed by Camelot Realty as having 5 bedrooms, including the 50-by-50-sq.-ft. space upstairs; asking price is $1.5 million. Step into the waiting room and look around:

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Doors Open
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Featured Posts
04/18/16 1:00pm

White Oak Dr. Bus Stop Sign Still Valiantly Flagging Down Passengers Despite Full Metro Service Halt

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Flooding, Woodland Heights
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1031 Stude St, Woodland Heights, Houston, 77007

While all bus and rail service is currently on hold due to widespread flooding, the route 66 bus stop sign on White Oak Dr. is still bravely performing its signaling duties (lower left above) as water from White Oak Bayou rushes past. A reader sends several studies of the area around Stude Park at the Taylor St. bridge at the southern edge of the Woodland Heights area; here’s a few more shots of the White Oak Bayou greenways gone brown this morning, with I-10 in the background to the south:

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Woodland Heights
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Apartments
12/28/15 10:00am

Inside the Fully Extended Elan Heights Midrise on White Oak Bayou at Taylor St.

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Interiors, New Construction, New Construction: Residential, Woodland Heights
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Elan Heights Apartments, 825 Usener, Woodland Heights, Houston, 77009

Just in time for the holiday season, the residential floors of the Elan Heights midrise apartments (officially located at 825 Usener St.) have been packaged up in a shiny new layer of building wrap. A sign outside the construction site announces an early 2016 opening for the 327-unit complex, nestled in next to Mango Beach snowcone shop and Little Buddy gas station and convenience store on White Oak Dr. (bottom left in the aerial photo below):

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Wrapping Up in Woodland Heights
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Featured Posts
06/02/15 10:45am

Woodland Heights Bus Mappers to Metro: Your New Route Plan Misses the Target

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Public Transportation, Quicklink, Shopping Centers, Woodland Heights
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WOODLAND HEIGHTS BUS MAPPERS TO METRO: YOUR NEW ROUTE PLAN MISSES THE TARGET Proposed New Bus Alignments Around Woodland Heights, HoustonMetro says it’ll be ready to go with its new bus network on August 16, but that hasn’t prevented various groups from petitioning the transit agency to make late adjustments to its route map. One group of Woodland Heights residents is trying to get the new 30 route, which late in the process was shifted east to parallel the new 44 route down Houston Ave into Downtown, shifted west to Watson, Taylor, and Sawyer streets between Pecore and Memorial Dr. before entering Downtown from the west. The current proposed alignment leaves the Sawyer Heights shopping center and its Target without a bus stop. [Not of It] Diagram: Philip Teague

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Apartments
05/26/15 1:30pm

Elan Heights Shows Off Its 4 Floors of Apartment Flooding Insurance

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Flooding, Hazards, New Construction, Woodland Heights
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Flooding During Construction of Elan Heights Apartments, 2222 White Oak Dr., Woodland Heights, Houston

Flooding During Construction of Elan Heights Apartments, 2222 White Oak Dr., Woodland Heights, Houston

Future residents of Greystar’s Elan Heights: Do not fear high water. Sure, the Skylane Central on the same White Oak Bayou-fronting site regularly had floodwaters up to its second floor after rain events like this. But Woodland Heights renters at the Elan will be perched much higher than that, and not just for the Downtown views. Floodwaters will have to rise through 4 levels of concrete-framed parking garage to get to the 7 floors of steel-stud-framed apartments above. And the concrete structure’s bottom level doesn’t even count as parking.

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Wet Toes
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