BP MOVING ONSHORE HQ OUT OF HOUSTON, WAY FURTHER ONSHORE 
BP announced today that it plans to move the main office for its onshore oil and gas branch to Denver at the start of 2018, starting with about 200 employees (compared to about 450 currently in the Houston office). The company announced late this summer that it was pulling its employees out of the WestLake 4 tower (about 7 years before that lease would’ve been up); that news was followed up a few days later with an announcement that BP would also sell off its LEED-platinum Helios Plaza building (pictured above), which it built in 2010 as a trading office. The plan at the time was to lease back space in Helios from the new owner; the rest of the company’s Energy Corridor employees will stay in the WestLake 1 office tower, which BP also owns. [BP Media Affairs via Houston Chronicle; previously on Swamplot] Photo of Helios Plaza at 201 Helios Way: BP
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Neighborhood
The Long Sing Supermarket building is now up for grabs, per a fresh leasing listing that appeared last week. The 8,260-sf.-ft. retail space and its internal lunch counter sit across Walker St. from physicist-mascotted Neil’s Bahr, and next to Little Woodrow’s EaDo (visible in yellow to the right, with its face toward the corner with St. Emanuel St. where Warehouse Live hangs out). The pagoda-topped grocery store was listed for sale a few times since 2014 — back before the glassy Marriott Marquis highrise started photobombing the building’s listing shots from across 59, as it does in the photo below:
Market To Market
- 4445 Rusk St. [HAR}
The latest sketchup of the site plan for Ancorian’s East Village project in East Downtown shows what may be a second distillery nestled into the 2 blocks of warehouses now in various states of conversion between Polk and Lamar streets along St. Emanuel and Hutchins. Meanwhile, a group of rum distillers going by the name Revolution Rum has laid claim to an address next to the development (in a warehouse just north of 8th Wonder Brewery’s, across Hutchins from the planned Houston location of chain craft vodka distillery Our/Vodka). It’s not clear whether the spot marked on the leasing flier is a separate project, or if one of the 2 potential liquor operations might have a satellite storefront in the complex, facing St. Emanuel St.
Other additions to the siteplan include the name of Agricole Hospitality, now on the map at the corner of Dallas and St. Emanuel (and embellished with the logos for the group’s existing Heights trifecta of Revival Market, Coltivare, and Eight Row Flint). Fort Worth-rooted beer and burger joint Rodeo Goat and Dallas-based trailer-bar Truck Yard have territories staked out as well, next to a thin slice of retail space labeled Poku. The architects at mÄk have also released another few renderings up of design ideas for various parts of the 2 block complex, including a shiny restaurant mockup depicted along Polk St. near the now-silver-skinned Secret Group comedy club:
Spirits of EaDo
SCENES FROM A PUBLIC-ISH MEETING OF THE MONTROSE MANAGEMENT DISTRICT 
Yesterday’s mid-day Montrose Management District monthly meeting involved a good deal of waiting around, Nancy Sarnoff reports, as more than a dozen of the Montrose property owners who signed the most recent petition to dissolve the district showed up to chat publicly with the organization’s board members. Some of the owners who had planned to speak reportedly left before doing so, however, as the board started the meeting with a closed executive session that the group’s past agendas and meeting minutes imply usually happens near the end of the monthly sessions. Sarnoff writes that once the board opened the meeting back up for public comments, “many of those who spoke made a similar plea: ‘Accept my petition or drop me from the assessment rolls.‘” A rep from the district says the recent court findings that some of the district’s founding documentation is invalid won’t cause any changes in the organization’s immediate plans (nor cause them to return any of that collected $6.6 million) until any upcoming appeals are finalized; while a final judgment document has been signed in the current case in the 333rd District court, the proceedings are still technically ongoing, as the MMD filed a document last week asking the judge to please change his mind. [Houston Chronicle; previously on Swamplot] Photo of bike rack in Montrose: Montrose Management District
- 5468 Holly Springs Dr. [HAR]
Atop the retail-harboring ground floor of this 1878 building now for sale in Galveston is a living space — or several, the listing suggests, if you’re willing to get creative. The 2-story mixed-use RF Martin & Company building at the southeast corner of 25th and Market streets (a few blocks south of the Strand, and of the Galveston Ship Channel cruise terminals) went up for sale early last week. The asking price is currently set at $1.4 million — though the listing says that can be offset by income from the street-level tenants (currently including eclectic cafe Eatcetera and stationary station Betsy by Design), or a potential conversion of the space into condos or a boutique hotel.
Here’s the view from Market St.:
Market St. Market
A 3-block jaunt from the proposed site of the recently reincarnated Ivy Lofts development will land you at 2619 Polk St., where do-it-yourself sports bar Sports Creek is setting up. The developers look to be planting a series of sand volleyball courts and blue-turfed soccer fields on the long-paved-over block bounded by Polk, Live Oak, Nagle, and Dallas streets (catty-corner from the former Kings warehouse building slated for a wholesale-to-retail makeover).
One of the involved developers recently told Maggie Gordon that the new place should open in January, and that there will be 3 volleyball courts; the above rendering shows the latest published update to the bar’s planned layout of the space (though it appears to show 4 courts instead). It’s also not totally clear which side of the development that drawing is meant to show, as none of the site’s depicted neighbors appear to quite match up with the array of townhomes, warehouses, and electrical substation that ring the block.
Older renderings released earlier this year showed the business with only 1 and 2 fields and courts respectively, on a much skinnier piece of land:
Courting Polk St.
ALAMO DRAFTHOUSE SAYS IT’LL OPEN 4 MORE HOUSTON SPOTS NOW THAT VINTAGE PARK IS OFF ITS HANDS 
Alamo Drafthouse followed up this week’s confirmation that its Vintage Park theater is becoming a Star Cinema Grill by announcing that it plans to open 4 more Houston area locations. Details on where and when are still murky (other than a reiteration that plans for the Imperial Market spot in Sugar Land are still on), but a rep told Kyle Hagerty earlier this week that the company has already signed 3 leases. That may or may not include the 10-year lease signed back in 2013 for a spot in the long-stalled Regent Square development — which did get some permits this fall, as somebody at Morris Architects previously claimed would happen. [Previously on Swamplot] Rendering of proposed Alamo Drafthouse in Sugar Land: Imperial Market
Where exactly, these days, does Fourth Ward end and Midtown begin? That may be a little bit clearer before long (depending on how you define the 2) — a reader notes that someone looks to be getting ready to stake a visible claim for Midtown on the narrow strip of land at the crotch of Webster and W. Gray streets, just west of Matthews St. and the latest add-on to the Post Midtown Square development. (The yellow signage of that recently scorched Fuzzy’s is visible on the left.)
The silt fencing rimming the median segment as of late comes with a construction sign calling the spot “Midtown Entry Portal — Site 3.” That grassy sliver does sit at the end of a short but pointy finger of land jutting out of the northwestern boundary of the area’s tax increment reinvestment zone, which as of 2009 is shaped about like this:
TIRZspotting
- 2383 W. Bayshore Rd. [HAR]
The section of bayou-hugging greenway trail running between Durham St. and Stude Park is getting the official OK tomorrow morning from Harris County Flood Control District and the Houston Parks Board. The photo above is of the pedestrian bridge across White Oak near Durham St. that previously supplanted the area’s “Bridge of Death” route; the segment opening tomorrow runs from that same bridge east along the bayou to the Studemont St. non-pedestrian bridge. The organizers are hoping would-be trail fans will use some means other than car to get to the ceremony location (off Studemont just north of I-10); if you have to drive, however, the invitation says you might be able to get a parking space across the freeway north of  Target.
Further east along the White Oak trail, here’s an updated view of how that link into Near Northside by the Leonel Castillo Community Center is coming along (taken in mid-November, once again from the same spot as that glitzed-up flood photo that made an appearance in Air New Zealand’s recent in-flight feature on Texas):
Greenways Growth Spurts
Beacon Island (née Lighthouse Island, in its more pedestrian days) is up for sale once again, Brandon de Hoyos writes this week. The eponymous prison-striped beacon at the northern tip of the property has been in place since at least the late 1980s — by which time the 35-acre piece of land had also completed its transformation from Clear Creek shoreline to peninsula to full island, as channels were carved into the southern edge of Clear Lake to expand waterfront access. The land also currently hosts the roadways and underground infrastructure installed by woulda-been joint developers The Verandah Cos. and Crow Holdings, right before the housing market collapse and 2008 recession.
Current owner Isola Ventura previously had previously planned for a mixture of residential structures on the island, from townhome to highrise. The island has already been divvied up and okayed for those various  purposes by League City’s planning department, roughly as labeled below in the current leasing materials:
League City Layouts
