- 113 Canal Dr. [HAR]
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Neighborhood
With the former Shelor Motor Company building at 1621 Milam St. all but doomed to meet the wrecking ball, historian Stephen Fox digs through some old Chronicle clips to remind us that there’s still a few other old car dealerships lurking down south in Midtown. Sure, they may not be as pedigreed as the ill-fated building to the north, but get this: One of them still sells cars! It’s Midtown Cadillac at the corner of Main and McGowen streets, shown at top. Architect Harvin C. Moore — the brains behind more than 84 homes in River Oaks, as well as Rice University’s chapel — designed it for Sam White Oldsmobile (pictured above), which opened inside in the early 1950s, according to Fox. Sam White and its successor Rice-Menger occupied the building until 1985. It’s been a Cadillac dealership since Don Massey took it over in 1999, followed by Stewart and then Central in 2012.
Catty corner to it, Midtown seafood spot REEF was originally a dealership, too. Built in 1952, the building opened as Smith Chevrolet Co.:
Inner-Loop Auto Lore
In early 2004, a heavy FedEx envelope showed up 1753 North Blvd. for Meyer Minchen, the 81-year-old vet who’d lived there since the house was built. He busted it open. Inside was the Distinguished Flying Cross, along with 2 other medals the Air Force had decided to pin on Minchen 6 decades after the fact. When the Chronicle‘s Thom Marshall came knocking later that year to get the story, Minchen told him he already had 3 air medals in his collection but decided to request a review of his service records because why not. “Equipped with powerful searchlights,” the planes Minchen piloted “flew a mere 500 feet above the water looking for signs of enemy subs,” wrote Marshall.
The house has won some medals, too:
Yours For $2.2M
- 111 Stablewood Ct. [HAR]
A Swamplot reader sends a photo of the crane that’s gone vertical at the corner of Welch and Revere streets just outside River Oaks where Pelican Builders plans to put its 9-story Revere at River Oaks condo midrise. The ’50s-mod condo complex its replacing was torn down last year, leaving an empty patch running lengthwise along Welch St., adjacent to the homes and townhomes that make up the rest of the block. They’re all overlooked by the 34-floor Huntingdon condo tower a few blocks west, shown looming large in the photo at top.
- Previously on Swamplot: Southern Portion of Revere at River Oaks’ 16-Ft. Canopy Now Awaiting Approval To Front Condo’s Entrance on Welch St.; Be-Triangled Fifties Mod Condos on Revere St. Get Bent Into All Kinds of Exciting New Angles By Visiting Excavator; Daily Demolition Report: Lowly Revered;Â Fifties Mod Condos Slated for Midrise Swapout on Revere St.
Photo: Swamplox inbox. Rendering: Kirksey Architecture
Spiking the Lot
- 4123 Howcher St. [HAR]
Go ahead, name a few of Houston’s most heavily-Instagrammed hotspots. The Waterwall, North and South boulevards, maybe the “We Love Houston” sign that — until recently — sat along I-10. But who ever wanted to go pose next to the Katy Fwy. just to pick up a few new followers? If only there was a location where the photogenic offerings sat under a roof — preferably in one of those hip Houston retail-and-restaurant strips where the food might merit a few pics as well.
Enter Flower Vault, the budding brick-and-mortar Instagram destination shown at top that’s taken over half of Joybird Furniture‘s storefront at 1735 Westheimer, 2 blocks west of Dunlavy. For $20 per person (and $10 per pet), you can spend an hour taking pictures inside the studio’s blossoming interior spaces. The admissions fee won’t preclude other patrons from visiting at the same time, so you may have to take turns in front of the backdrops. But check out the results so far; it appears everyone’s been happy to share.
Not Your Father’s Florist
  
Following “four or five 3-month lease extensions,” the landlord of 2318 Waugh Dr. dropped by Corazon last Friday to give the business its 30-days notice, reports store owner Chris Murphy. Its exit date is now set for November 20, a Tuesday, so final sales will take place the weekend before. Murphy says he’d been working to track down a new location for the store since learning it’d have to leave more than a year ago — but hasn’t had any luck. Barring any last-minute workable option, “we’ll reluctantly have to liquidate fixtures and retreat to various online platforms,” he says, in order to keep dealing guayaberas, Luca Libre masks, and other imports like the store has been doing since 1998. It’s shown around that year in the across-the-street photo above, which also gives a view of the landmark red dot on the building’s south side. (The taller building behind it occupies the same piece of land but was torn down in 2016.)
Next up for the 6,250-sq.-ft. parcel: a trio of townhomes. The landowner’s plan, says Murphy, “is to demolish the building immediately once we vacate,” and plant the new residences in a line like this along Fairview St.:
Towhomes Imminent
- 2214 Canterbury Ct. [HAR]
Renovations to turn the former Parsley Studios building at 1504 Yale St. into Blue Line Bike Lab‘s new Heights location are now nearly finished, and the most dramatic change is the new coat of light blue paint the structure’s 15th-St. side, pictured above. During the 75 years it housed the family photo business and functioned as a portrait studio for mayors and celebrities like Roy Rogers and Loretta Lynn — according to The Leader — the building underwent its fair share of paint jobs; the last big one washed out a checkerboard pattern along its Yale-St. side, leaving the structure mostly brown.
Last September, a liquidation sale emptied the place of “a quarter of a century’s worth of photo equipment, furniture, frames and photos,” reported the Chronicle‘s Jaimy Jones. By that time, most of the owners’ work focused on photo restoration, so brick-and-mortar amenities like formal seating — “and even a small dressing room with bright, round bulbs that frame a mirror atop an old-fashioned dressing table,” wrote Jones — were no longer necessary. The building sold to a group that’s linked to Blue Line, which has its nearest shop on the corner of White Oak Dr. and Columbia St. That existing location (which predates the shop’s other spot on Telephone Rd.) is now set to close, but not until a fleet of new bikes arrives the Yale St. building.
It’s shown empty in the photo below, although a newly-hung sign along Yale makes clear what will fill it:
1504 Yale St.
A SATURDAY NIGHT SWAN SONG AT SPRUCE GOOSE: SOCIAL FLYERS CLUB 
This past weekend was the last one ever for the concert venue known as Spruce Goose: Social Flyers Club on the second floor of 809 Congress, across from Market Square Park and directly above Henke and Pillot. The 100- to 300-person club only opened up earlier this year, but managed to stay booked through the summer and all the way up until its finale on Saturday, which featured — among others — self-described “Punkish?” band Branagan, shown sending things off in the photo above. [Spruce Goose: Social Flyers Club] Photo: Branagan
GOLDMAN SACHS FOLLOWING BARGAIN SALE OF BILL KALLOP’S YACHT BY MARKING DOWN HIS RIVER OAKS HOUSE, TOO 
Having already cashed out on the retired offshore oil and gas billionaire’s 217-ft. yacht Natalia Natita after he defaulted on a loan that it backed, Goldman Sachs is now attempting to sell Bill Kallop’s 5-bedroom mansion at 1708 River Oaks Blvd. Some of the highlights inside: a glass-domed living room and colonnaded natatorium with a sky ceiling mural above it. The property was previously listed for sale earlier this year at $15.9M but shortly after, Kallop filed for Chapter 11 (through his punnily-named business entity R.O. Mance 1708 LLC) and the home fell into foreclosure. The new asking price is a bargain: $9.75M. But it’s still nowhere near the markdown the bank took on the boat last year, which it sold to a Maltese buyer for $27.5M after originally asking $60M, according to the Wall Street Journal’s Liz Hoffman. At that time, Kallop’s other properties totaled “at least eight residences, including a Peruvian mansion, two homes in the Dominican Republic and a working cattle ranch in Texas,” reported Hoffman. [Wall Street Journal; walkthrough] Photo: HAR
Note: This story has been updated
Late last week, associates of Capital Retail Partners filed a building permit to get started on the pair of back-to-back gabled buildings it’s had planned for Durham and 18th St. in place of 2 side-by-side houses torn down there earlier this year. It’s the second spot where Capital will begin replacing a pair of old Heights houses with 2 new house-like retail buildings, having already begun work 4 blocks north between Durham and Shepherd on its planned Bungalows on 22nd St. a few months ago. Despite the decidedly less bungalow-like design proposed for 18th St., the firm’s going with the same nomenclature for the duo (shown at top), dubbing it the Bungalows on 18th St.
Pictured but unconfirmed plans of the Bungalows show its half-as-large north building taken up by some sort of restaurant fronted by a patio and corner landscaping including street-address topiary. A main parking lot sits west of the building and its encircling new sidewalks and crosswalks. You can see a few angled parking spaces peeking out in the aerial rendering below:
The Bungalows on 18th St.
- 6 Azalea Trail Ln. [HAR]
The map above shows the land (in red) that Rice is confirmed to have grabbed around the Midtown Sears (orange) it bought out last October, including 2 new parcels (green) it snatched up through holding companies within the last few months. In an email sent out to university staff on Monday, Rice U. President David Leebron said the school “will ultimately redevelop approximately 14 acres of Rice-owned property,” near the Sears building into what it’s calling the Midtown Innovation District. So what are the latest spots it’s gotten its hands on? The first, catty-corner to the Sears building itself at the corner of Wheeler and San Jacinto, is Jack in the Box‘s nearly half-acre lot; Rice bought it in August.
More recently, the school pushed east by picking up 4201 Caroline St., the brick office building shown below that occupies a quarter-acre directly next to Fiesta:
Sears and Friends
