Neighborhood

Featured Posts
06/29/16 3:45pm

Mecom Fountain, 1883 German Newspaper Editor’s House Now Safe(r) from Future Off-Era Restoration Attempts

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First Ward, Hermann Park, Historic Preservation, Museum District
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Mecom Fountain from COH
2120 Sabine St., First Ward, Houston, 77007This morning the city announced that it’s giving protected historic landmark status to the Mecom Fountain, in the wake of this year’s partial tuscanization of the 1960s mod landmark (and subsequent crowdfunded reversal thereof). All that bright blue primer has been cocooned over, and full de-restoration was scheduled to be finished by the end of last month.

Also getting the same protective status bump today: the 1883 house at 2120 Sabine St., formerly the First Ward home of state representative August von Haxthausen, who in the late 1800s ran Houston’s German language newspaper the Texas Deutsche Zeitung. That house got its own (more permanently) colorful restoration in 2015 — below are some close-up photos of the newly-technicolor wraparound porch from a previous listing of the property on HAR:

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Colorful Histories
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Featured Posts
06/29/16 1:00pm

Imperial Sugar Refinery Mixed-Use Redo Plans Now Crystalizing Along Hwy. 90

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Sugar Land
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Imperial Market, Sugar Land, TX 77478

Johnson Development, the company behind that sugar-company-themed master-planned community in Sugar Land, announced yesterday that it has officially handed over the land for the project’s refinery-centric Imperial Market mixed-use district to the folks who will develop it. The 26 acres freshly sold are along Oyster Creek just north of the crossing of Hwy. 90 (visible on the far left of the rendering above, which faces south). That’s Kempner St. running directly alongside the proposed development and crossing the creek as well; a pair of former railroad bridges currently upstream of Kempner are shown replaced with car and pedestrian bridges respectively.

Plans for the development incorporate structures from out-of-use former facilities of the Imperial Sugar Company. The refinery’s silos (instead of becoming an art space) are marked to host a couple of fast-casual restaurants; the 1925 char house, where huge quantities of carefully burned animal bones were once used to whiten and filter cane sugar syrup, will become a boutique hotel. Both structures are more prominently visible in the southeast-facing view below — the boxy brick char house appears to the left of the single-pour-concrete silos:

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Refining Sugar Land Master Plans
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Featured Posts
06/29/16 10:30am

New Name, Gig, Landing Strip for Hughes Hangar on Washington Ave

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Washington Ave
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Hughes Manor, 2811 Washington Ave., Houston, 77007

Hughes Manor logoThe spot formerly known as Hughes Hangar appears to be ditching the airport theme following the closure earlier this year of both the nightclub and its across-the-parking-lot companion The De Gaulle. Remodeling of the area between the 2 buildings has been underway as well — above is the ex-bar’s former back patio, now an open lawn shielded from view of Washington Ave.

The space appears to be reopening as an events venue; the new name is Hughes Manor, and the new logo (shown here) is also similar to the old:

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Return Trip
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Braeswood Place
06/28/16 5:15pm

Shots of the Quintuple Stumping Around the Valero at N. Braeswood and Stella Link

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Trees cut at 8430 Stella Link Rd., Braeswood Place, Houston, 77025

Trees cut at 8430 Stella Link Rd., Braeswood Place, Houston, 77025In other de-tree-ment news along Brays Bayou, a reader further upstream sends some photos of recently cross-hatched stumps now dotting the Valero-inhabited corner of Stella Link Rd. and N. Braeswood Dr. The top shot looks east past the gas station and the Church’s Chicken roosting within; the second shot looks south down Stella Link Rd. toward the former Pilgrim dry cleaners, which these days accepts clothing only as donations to the Shriners Hospital. A neighbor on NextDoor says that the 5 trees (mostly of just-over-15-inch diameter) appear to have been trimmed all the way down to the toes in mid June; at least 4 separate 311 complaints have been made on the matter since then.

Photos: Swamplot inbox

Green Gone
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Featured Posts
06/28/16 4:30pm

The Curious Rearrangement of the Marquis’s Trees

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Texas Medical Center, Trees
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Marquis Lofts at Hermann Park, 1 Hermann Park Ct., TMC, Houston, 77021

Marquis Lofts at Hermann Park, 1 Hermann Park Ct., TMC, Houston, 77021The commute northward along Almeda Rd. from the corner with Hermann Park Ct. is much less shady of late, reports a reader in the area who snapped these photos last week. The tipster says that some 15 trees have been cut up and shuffled around by the Marquis Lofts (the ones at the edge of the Med Center, not the ones that once hosted a James Harden rooftop photo shoot). Most of the trees appear to have been directly alongside the road, though a few of the felled were reportedly rooted on the other side of the sidewalk. (That’s the formerly bankrupt and bank-rupturing Mosaic condo highrise in the distance, north across MacGregor and Brays Bayou in the shot above.)

Below is a graphic closeup of some of the arboreal aftermath (a warning here to those uncomfortable with the sight of sap and shredded cellulose):

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Stumped on Almeda
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Featured Posts
06/28/16 11:45am

Where Cloud 10 and All Those Extra Parking Spaces Will Fit Into Heights Mercantile

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Houston Heights, Restaurants, Retail
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Rendering of Heights Mercantile Building 3, 3A

Experimental ice cream shop Cloud 10 Creamery looks to be collecting building permits for a space at 711 Heights Blvd., one of the 1920s bungalows prepping for a second career in retail (as shown above) as part of the Heights Mercantile development. The project, which straddles 7th St. and its bike trail companion between Yale St. and Heights Blvd., hit a potential snag last year when the city didn’t approve a variance request that would have lowered the number of required new parking spaces. But the updated site plan below shows the workaround — the Golden Eagle Binder & Tab Co.’s former spots at 717 and 724 Heights, which were purchased by the developers last May, are depicted as additional parking lots:

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7th at Yale
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Featured Posts
06/27/16 1:15pm

Good Dog Now Occasionally Sitting, Prepping to Stay on W. Alabama

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Montrose, Restaurants, Retail
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Good Dog, 1318 W. Alabama St., Montrose, Houston, 77006

Good Dog, 1318 W. Alabama St., Montrose, Houston, 77006The second non-mobile location of Good Dog  is now hiring, per the signage spotted by a reader at 1312 W. Alabama St. The food truck that started the chain camped out in the building’s driveway on Father’s Day, but no official opening date for the new space itself has been announced yet.

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Montrose Rollover
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Condos
06/27/16 11:30am

Sky-High Shots of Marlowe’s Spot in the Dirt by the Dirt Bar Downtown

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Condos for Sale, Downtown, Highrises, Proposed Developments
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Marlowe Condo Tower site, 1311 Polk St., Downtown, Houston, 77002

Marlowe Condo Tower site, 1311 Polk St., Downtown, Houston, 77002An elevated reader sends a snapshot this morning of an excavator rooting around by 1311 Polk St., where Randall Davis is laying the groundwork for his 20-story tower of actor-themed condominiums named Marlowe. The development’s sales center and 5-sided billboard (formerly a 713-TICKETS.com kiosk) is still in place across Caroline St. from the House-of-Blues-containing GreenStreet development (visible in the top frame, in the bottom right corner) and Dirt Bar (bottom left).

The marketing for the tower (another Davis project to seek funding from the EB-5 invest-your-way-to-citizenship program) appears to be a little less insult-forward these days than was previously the case. The tower’s website now also includes the drone footage collage and Stairway to Heaven remix below, showing off the surrounding downtown area with the would-be tower sketched into place in white lines:
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Looking Down Around Downtown
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East Montrose
06/24/16 2:00pm

An Intensive List of the Nuisances, Dangers, and Animal Infiltrations at 2203 Crocker St.

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Fairview
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2203 Crocker St., Montrose, Houston, 77006

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:

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Full Disclosure
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Featured Posts
06/24/16 11:15am

Avenue Grill Only Lightly Toasted By This Morning’s Electrical Fire

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First Ward, Restaurants
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Avenue Grill, 1017 Houston Ave., First Ward, Houston, 77007

Avenue Grill, 1017 Houston Ave., First Ward, Houston, 77007 The holdup on Houston Ave. this morning, reports a reader stuck in the resulting traffic, is the aftermath of a minor fire at the Avenue Grill on the corner with Center St. The 1940s structure (which the restaurant’s operations purportedly moved into in 1962 after 12 years of business across the street) appears unharmed by the flames, which HPD tells Dale Lezon started in the building’s electric sign. The restaurant’s property went stealthily onto the market back in August of 2014 before it was found out the following March; county records don’t appear to show a change of hands since then.

Photos of fire response at Avenue Grill at 1017 Houston Ave.: Swamplot inbox

What’s Cooking in First Ward
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Downtown
06/23/16 2:45pm

Shots from a Doomed Allen Center Skybridge of a Companion Meeting Its Fate

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Allen Center Skybridge Remodeling, 500 Dallas St., Downtown, Houston, 77002

Currently underway: the partial disassembly of 1 of the 2 skybridges connecting One and Two Allen Center at the corner of Dallas and Smith streets downtown. The bridge pictured above is expected to survive the planned 3-tower redevelopment — a permit to remodel it was issued on Monday with some other OKs on the work, which includes turning the rubble-filled space to the east into a Smith-St.-facing events lawn and concert space. Renderings previously released by Brookfield suggest that the other skybridge, from which the above photo was taken, won’t be so lucky:

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Last Days Downtown
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Featured Posts
06/23/16 11:30am

TIRZ 8 Now Studying Where the Sidewalks End Near Hobby, How to Pretty Them Up

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Glenbrook Valley, Hobby Airport
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Hobby Livable Centers May Meeting Presentation Slide

The Gulfgate-Mall-seeded TIRZ that absorbed many of the commercial corridors around Hobby Airport back in 2014 has been weighing plans for redeveloping the acquired zone, working with the Houston-Galveston Area Council through the organization’s agreeably-named Livable Centers program. A few public workshops were held last month; a reader tells Swamplot that the management district’s consultants have also been interviewing area real estate folks as they come up with ideas for new developments to suggest. The next workshop is planned for the evening of Wednesday, July 13th; the district is pushing an online survey in the meanwhile.

Presentation slides from the most recent workshop included the map below of sidewalks in the area being studied (roughly bounded by I-45, Almeda Genoa Rd., Mykawa Rd., and Dixie Dr., as shown above) — roads marked in green have new sidewalks, yellow lines highlight sidewalks rated by the district as good, red shows sidewalks rated as poor, and brown shows roads with sidewalks rated as missing:

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Making a Scene
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Downtown
06/23/16 9:15am

UH Ready for Legal Action over South Texas College of Law’s Houston Rebranding

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Lawsuits, Quicklink
31 Comments

UH READY FOR LEGAL ACTION OVER SOUTH TEXAS COLLEGE OF LAW’S HOUSTON REBRANDING University of Houston Law Center, Third Ward, Houston, 77004“It has come to the University of Houston’s attention that South Texas College of Law has announced that it is changing its name to Houston College of Law. . . . The University of Houston is concerned about the significant confusion this creates in the marketplace and will take any and all appropriate legal actions to protect the interests of our institution, our brand, and our standing in the communities we serve.” [University of Houston; previously on Swamplot] Photo of University of Houston Law Center: Douglas R.

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Downtown
06/22/16 2:30pm

Did South Texas Law Just Become Houston’s First “College”?

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Quicklink
6 Comments

DID SOUTH TEXAS LAW JUST BECOME HOUSTON’S FIRST “COLLEGE”? 1303 San Jacinto St., Downtown, Houston, 77002 Downtown’s South Texas College of Law just announced that the 93-year-old school is changing its name to Houston College of Law. A press release issued by the school this morning calls the name swap part of the institution’s ongoing effort to “distinguish itself regionally and nationally” — and indeed, the name is distinct from those of both law-school-containing University of Houston (located 2 miles southeast) and same-chancellor-separate-institution University of Houston Downtown (a mile to the north), though all 3 schools employ a red and white color scheme. Unlike other recent Houston school renamings,  today’s announced change appears to be effective immediately; the law school’s logos have already been updated, though its website address has not. [Houston College of Law] Photo of Houston College of Law at 1303 San Jacinto St.: Houston College of Law

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