- 10127 Olga Ln. [HAR]
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Neighborhood
A show-stopping announcement posted on the Walter’s Downtown Facebook page yesterday brings sad news for thrashers, metal-heads, punks, and indie fans: the 18-year-old live music venue on the corner of Naylor and Vine streets plans to close down on February 4. Walter’s moved to its current location — the former classic car showroom, video production studio, car parts distribution center, and cabinet warehouse pictured above — in 2011. Before that, the club was located on Washington Ave, in a building just east of Thompson St. that’s since been transformed into the office of Carnegie Custom Homes.
The photo below views the venue from its north side on Naylor back in 2014:
The Last Set
- 1401 Post Office St. [HAR]
The newly built shopping center on the corner of W. Alabama and Mandell St. is of the business in the front, parking in the back variety — and will soon be even more so when 2 restaurants and a dentist’s office open in its ground floor. BuffBurger, new Vietnamese restaurant Lúa Viet Kitchen, and Lovett Dental are all slated to debut in the gray box with what look like wooden slats on its forehead, under construction since last January opposite the Menil’s territory in Montrose. TABC signage now up in BuffBurger’s window near the corner shows that the store — on its way to Mandell Place from its original location on Wirt Rd. — is seeking beverage permits ahead of its first business day.
A view from the sidewalk shows where the ground floor beef joint will fit in a 2,500-sq.-ft. space below the strip’s lettered-up corner tower:
New Fillings
The lights are off and the gas station signs have come down from the 4,400-sq.-ft. building formerly home to Doc’s Motorworks Bar & Grill on the corner of Westheimer and Graustark St. The nighttime photo above shows the auto-themed Montrose restaurant before it closed down at the end of last year.
Underneath the restaurant’s sign on Westheimer, the rusted flatbed truck has also hit the road from its long-term parking spot:
A Montrose Goodbye
- 10011 Orangevale Dr. [HAR]
Pictured above during its final stand on Slowpokes cafe’s patio last Saturday as workers took it down limb by limb: one of a pair of oak trees the landlord had long threatened to remove. The 2 trees — now fully chopped — stood on a lawn where Slowpokes patrons hung out between the strip mall that houses the cafe and Gardendale Dr., which runs to its south. The leafier photo shows the same tree alive in the coffee shop’s backyard last year.
A view from the corner of Alba St. and Gardendale looks west to show that tree about to be chopped and the other one already stumped:
Shade Away
A Swamplot reader sends photos of the now see-through drive-thru signage on the north side of Burger King’s former building at 1002 Westheimer, across the street from the Westmont Shopping Center home to Spec’s, Half Price Books, and a Mattress Firm. The restaurant abdicated earlier this week. Yesterday morning, surveyors showed up to look around the property, leaving behind the wooden marker shown at the bottom of the image at top.
Another shot from the fast food lane adjacent to Blacksmith looks toward the restaurant’s parking lot on California St.:
Whopper
- 16643 Bahama Wy. [HAR]
Harris County’s Institute of Forensic Sciences has now officially determined that the bones found in a holdout house on Allston St. now wrapped by an apartment complex whose developer came knocking but was unable to acquire the property belong to the homeowner who protested the development. Mary Cerruti spent time documenting construction on the Alexan Yale St. Yale at 6th apartments (formerly called Alexan Heights) starting in 2013 as they went up behind and around her bungalow at 610 Allston. Squinting behind red drugstore eyeglasses at a planning commission meeting on Valentines Day that year, the 61-year-old testified that “Literally, this project is going to be in my backyard. I’m surrounded.” Two years later, she disappeared.
Cerruti’s former home has been available for sale since March of last year. (“Amazing opportunity in the Houston Heights. New construction all around and the house is surrounded by the new Alexan Heights Luxury Apartments,†reads the listing.) Last November, the asking price for the 2-bedroom, 1-bath property was jacked up to $475,000. The only other property on the block left out of the apartment development is the vacant lot next door.
The county medical examiner’s new findings confirm what investigators had long suspected but had previously been unable to prove. Last June, an autopsy on the skeleton (which had been significantly chewed-up by rodents while it lay undiscovered inside the bungalow) showed that one of its legs was healing from a break — perhaps caused when its owner fell through a hole in the attic floorboards, into the spot high in the bungalow’s walls where her remains were later found.
Crime experts walked back their speculations 2 weeks ago, however, after DNA comparisons between one of the skeleton’s teeth and samples submitted by Cerruti’s relatives showed no exact match. But examiners were able to make their identification after comparing the skull’s jawbones to a photo of Cerruti and the video of her appearance before the planning commission, reports the Chronicle‘s Emily Foxhall.
Trammell Crow started work on the 5-story Alexan complex in 2013 behind and around Cerruti’s then-yellow bungalow:
The Plot Thickens
- 3263 Avalon Pl. [HAR]
The H-shaped, 1961 structure at 5956 Bayou Glen Rd. now listed at $2.8 million sits right on the elbow of street, where the mostly east-west road turns south before ending 2 houses down, a couple blocks north of Woodway Dr. A set of double doors — shown open in the photo above — fronts the brick courtyard outside the entrance to the 4,732-sq.-ft house. Then a glassy hallway runs sideways when you walk in:
Center Court
GANG-RUN BROTHEL NO LONGER IN BUSINESS AT THE CARRIAGE WAY APARTMENTS IN GULFTON 
Residents in the strip of apartments a block north of Bellaire between Mullins and Rampart don’t seem too rattled — reports Gabrielle Banks — after a criminal operation was shut down in their complex late last year. “But in an adjoining courtyard evidence remained of the recent FBI raid at an upstairs apartment: a cracked window pane and a boarded up door plastered with an eviction notice. The scheme, officials say, involved tenants who rented 10 of about 70 residential units in the complex. Several neighbors at the complex said they saw a team of FBI agents combing through units at the two-story complex during the first week in November. Before the raid, they said, they claimed to know nothing about a busy brothel where up to seven women provided services to customers from 10 a.m. to 2 a.m. The building manager at the apartment complex declined to speak with a reporter about the protracted criminal enterprise alleged by police. A Houston attorney who represented the building owner in a 2012 nuisance lawsuit – involving complaints at another residential property – did not return calls for comment.” [Houston Chronicle] Photo of Carriage Way Apartments: Apartments.com
Note: Story updated below.
There’s a new sign on a curved portion of H-E-B’s facade at 5895 San Felipe, marking a replacement for the former Table 57 in-store restaurant, which closed quietly sometime shortly before the new year. The supermarket’s new curbside service area is taking over the restaurant’s old space along the northwest corner of store.
Table 57 opened along with the rest of the H-E-B on the corner of San Felipe and Fountain View back in 2015. At the time, it was Houston’s first sit-down dining destination inside an H-E-B store. (The supermarket had already debuted similar venues in Austin and San Antonio.) The photo above shows the restaurant’s automatic entryway and patio frontage extending west towards Fountain View.
Here’s what the doorway to the former restaurant looks like now, stripped of its overhead signage:
Cleanup on Table 57
