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Thursday, January 17, 2008

Downtown Demo Party: Montagu Hotel Implosion This Weekend

January 17, 2008 – 8:34 am

The Former Hotel Montagu, Downtown Houston

Update: Photos and videos of the implosion are here.

Another Houston hotel implosion? So soon?

This one will be downtown, and everyone’s hoping it doesn’t make national news. But that doesn’t mean this weekend’s big bang won’t be another early-morning citywide block party. And so much to talk about since the last one!

Cherry Demolition crews have been chipping away at buildings on the block bounded by Main, Fannin, Rusk, and Walker since October, to make room for a 46-story pipe wrench. And everything is set for Dykon’s implosion of the 11-story Montagu Hotel (originally the Hotel Cotton, built in 1913) at the corner of Main and Rusk at 7 a.m. on Sunday, January 20th.

Streets will be shut down at least a block in each direction. But with the Crowne Plaza final-mystery-guest hullabaloo fresh in everyone’s memory, maybe this time there won’t be so much jockeying for the same “best” camera and video angles. Everyone spread out in a big circle, and send us your unique photos and videos. First person to spot anything fishy on the scene wins a special report on Inside Edition!

Photo of Hotel Montagu: Jeremey Barrett

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8:34 am | Read more about Attractions, Demolitions, Hotels, Neighborhoods: Downtown
Thursday, January 10, 2008

The East Downtown Sports and Convention Complex

January 10, 2008 – 4:24 pm

Reliant Parking

Chronicle reporters say they know where the new Dynamo Stadium is going . . . and it’s on land the city itself will buy:

Earlier this week, city officials signed letters of intent to buy parcels of land just east of U.S. 59 and the downtown business district . . . City officials declined to identify the location, but a person with knowledge of the situation confirmed reports that the parcels are in a six-block area between Texas and Walker avenues and Hutchins and Dowling streets, just southeast of Minute Maid Park near the northbound side of U.S. 59.

This all sounds vaguely familiar, doesn’t it? Within a few acres, there’ll be stadiums for three big-league sports teams, a convention center, a hotel, and a freeway overpass. Once the Dynamo stadium gets built, if this new growing complex really wants to be able to compete with Reliant Park, all they’ll have to do is wrap the whole neighborhood with a wide ribbon of surface parking lots!

Photo of Reliant Park parking lots: Flickr user scalpelorsword

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4:24 pm | Read more about Attractions, Neighborhoods: Downtown, Neighborhoods: Reliant Park
Thursday, December 6, 2007

Stanford Lofts: Your Parking Lot Is Safe from the Dynamo

December 6, 2007 – 10:54 am

Balcony of Stanford Lofts Unit 409

A resident of the Stanford Lofts just east of Downtown writes in to make sure everyone knows, after all, that the building’s view of Minute Maid Park is not going to be obstructed by . . . a view of a new soccer stadium for the Houston Dynamo directly across the street.

No, no official deal’s been announced. But this tidbit from a Chronicle story has allowed condo owners to breathe a sigh of relief:

The Dynamo first set sights on land owned by the Harris County-Houston Sports Authority just east of Minute Maid Park and U.S. 59, but have since decided against the property, which the Astros lease for stadium parking.

“We know for a fact (the property) is no longer being considered,” said Sports Authority head Kenny Friedman, who added that the Sports Authority is not actively involved in the negotiations.

The team might be looking to purchase private land near the same general area as the county-owned property, although Luck declined to confirm or deny it, saying only that a downtown venue is still planned.

So where will the Dynamo stadium go? Keep reading below the fold:

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10:54 am | Read more about Condos, Lofts, Neighborhoods: Downtown, Parking, Proposed Developments
Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Hearsay: Market Square Gastropub Rehab . . . and More

December 4, 2007 – 11:04 am

Former Twelve Spot Bar on Travis Street, Downtown Houston

Former Ibiza and Catalan investor Rhea Wheeler and two partners have bought the shuttered Twelve Spot bar on Travis St. — just around the corner from Market Square downtown — and will be turning it into a gastropub called Hearsay.

218 Travis is Houston’s second-oldest building, and originally served as a Confederate Army munitions depot. It’s a dramatic space inside: There are three stories, but the upper floors have been removed and a mezzanine placed in the back.

Wheeler told Jennifer Dawson of the Houston Business Journal he’ll open the new restaurant in the first half of next year.

After the jump: More Wheeler restaurant plans! In actual old buildings!

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11:04 am | Read more about Historic Preservation, Neighborhoods: Downtown, Neighborhoods: Midtown, Renovations, Restaurants
Thursday, October 11, 2007

Downtown’s New Tower of Parking

October 11, 2007 – 11:28 am

Heritage Plaza, Downtown Houston, TexasA new multistory parking structure is about to go up at the northeast edge of downtown, across the street from Heritage Plaza. A building permit for the parking garage at 1200 Bagby, which is classified as a “high rise” itself, was approved by the city yesterday.

“We’re going to offer suburban parking ratios in downtown Houston,” Russell F. Read, a principal at Goddard Investment Group, told the CoStar group two years ago. “That will be hard to beat.”

Photo: flickr user Corrine Martin

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11:28 am | Read more about Highrises, Neighborhoods: Downtown, New Construction, Office Buildings, Parking
Monday, August 27, 2007

Houston Pavilions: Woulda Coulda Shoulda

August 27, 2007 – 8:34 am

Houston Pavilions Aerial View, Downtown Houston

If you’re curious why the developers of Houston Pavilions, the $70 million mixed-use development under construction downtown, decided not to mix anything other than office space with their 360,000 square feet of retail and “entertainment” space, you’ll be interested to read the comments L.A. developer Bill Denton made to the CoStar Group:

[Entertainment Development Group] put the site under contract in January 2004, then three surface parking lots and a multi-level parking garage sitting on just over 4 acres, and the project has evolved ever since. “We originally planned for a hotel/condo component, but at the time, the city was just finishing off convention center hotels and hotel occupancy was only 52%; now its difficult to find a hotel room in Downtown Houston. So, we changed the plan into two residential towers, which stuck until 12 months ago. Demand on the residential was tremendous, but because of the mixed-use and density, we would have had to do subterranean parking, which blew the economics of the residences out of the water. So now its 200,000 square feet of office space, and based on demand for that so far, I wish we could do 400,000 square feet.”

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8:34 am | Read more about Commercial Real Estate, Condos, Development Strategy, Mixed Use, Neighborhoods: Downtown, New Construction, Nightlife, Office Buildings, Parking, Proposed Developments, Retail, Shopping Centers
Friday, August 24, 2007

MainPlace: Hines’s 46-Story Green Pipe-Wrench Dream

August 24, 2007 – 7:43 pm

View of MainPlace, Hines’s Proposed 46-Story LEED Silver Office Building on Main Street in Downtown HoustonIt rises dramatically from the center of Downtown to face the morning sun. And the renderings sure make it look like a sleek, giant pipe wrench, the business end looking out over Houston’s industrial east side. Yep, there’s nothing the head office won’t be able to fix!

It’s MainPlace, a 46-story, one-million-square-foot green spec office tower, planned for most of the block surrounded by Fannin, Rusk, and Walker, at 811 Main.

The developer is the Hines CalPERS Green Fund, established by Hines and the California retirement fund to develop “sustainable” office buildings around the country. The core and shell, they promise, will be given a LEED-Silver rating by the USGBC. Don’t worry too much about all that, though: tenants will presumably be free to decorate their interiors with the usual endangered rainforest hardwoods and petroleum-based finishes.

That’s a five-story atrium up there on the 39th floor, facing a “sky garden.” Enjoy those trees in the rendering while you can; eventually, the engineers will start to think long and hard about hurricanes. More details and lots more zoomy pics, including closeups of that pipe-wrench jaw sky garden, after the jump.

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7:43 pm | Read more about Demolitions, Green Design and Development, Highrises, Neighborhoods: Downtown, Office Buildings, Proposed Developments
Wednesday, August 22, 2007

How the Downtown Tunnel System Was Born

August 22, 2007 – 10:00 am

Houston Underground

Near the end of a short New York Times feature on Houston’s downtown tunnel system is this historical nugget:

[“Tunnel Lady” Sandra] Lord, a writer and Houston historian, traced the origins of the tunnels to Ross Sterling, an oilman and governor during the Depression, who, inspired by Rockefeller Center, linked two of his downtown buildings underground in the early 1930s. Soon after, an entertainment entrepreneur, Will Horwitz, connected three of his vaudeville and movie theaters to save on air-conditioning.

And they say geothermal cooling is something new for Houston.

Photo: Flickr user The Rocketeer

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10:00 am | Read more about Alternative Energy, Houston History, Neighborhoods: Downtown
Monday, August 6, 2007

Downtown Rents: Going Up

August 6, 2007 – 10:39 am

5 Houston CenterLeasing rates at Five Houston Center downtown have reached $30 a square foot triple net, reports Globe St. That’s quite a jump from the building’s $18 rate a year ago. Other Class A buildings are not far behind.

Will prices stay high after all those new downtown buildings get built?

[Transwestern senior vice president David] Lee points out that when newer product comes on line, older buildings will work to catch up by making rates competitive. But with new buildings still 18 months to two years from completion in the CBD, current owners have an interesting advantage, he adds. “The guys that got their stuff in the ground a year and a half to two years ago and before are in great shape now,” he says. “In a two-year period, rates have essentially doubled Downtown.”

Photo of 5 Houston Center: HKS

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10:39 am | Read more about Commercial Real Estate, Leasing, Neighborhoods: Downtown, New Construction, Office Buildings
Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Eye-Opening Parking Garage Design

July 31, 2007 – 12:03 pm

Hines Parking Garage at Walker and Main downtown

Hines’s new parking garage at the corner of Walker and Main downtown features an innovative lighting design that delivers benefits to neighbors. The problem: drivers parking at night in the unscreened 14-story garage might shine their headlights across the street, directly into residences in the Commerce Towers building across the street. The solution: flood the garage with so much light that cars won’t need to use their headlights at all.

Unfortunately, Commerce Towers residents don’t seem to appreciate all that attention to detail:

it is an extravagant eyesore that expands from Travis to Main (ironically, grossly overshadowing the light rail) and right on Walker. There is no skin on it, and so sits a concrete skeletal nightmare.

Not only is this grotesque structure visually nauseating, it also is a seizure-inducing brightly-lit nightmare! The structure is fleshed out with intensely BRIGHT floodlights on each of its 14 floors, including the roof, that release their ungodly glow (24/7) without obstruction into the living and bedroom units of the Commerce Towers Condominiums!

Hines vice president Clark Davis told the Chronicle two years ago that the garage, which sits on land cleared by demolishing the San Jacinto building, would be “architecturally significant.” Hines developed the garage for the company they sold the property to, Sunbelt Management of Florida.

Photo: HAIF user sevfiv

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12:03 pm | Read more about Lofts, Neighborhood Disputes, Neighborhoods: Downtown, New Construction, Parking
Thursday, July 26, 2007

The Beatles Slept Here

July 26, 2007 – 8:05 pm

Sheraton-Lincoln Hotel

And so, apparently, did Jack Ruby. The 28-story former Sheraton-Lincoln Hotel at 711 Polk downtown, vacant for more than 20 years and asbestos-free for almost nine, has a new suitor, reports the Houston Business Journal:

Omni [Hotels Corp.] said it and Atlanta-based Songy will transform the Houston hotel, near the George R. Brown Convention Center and what will be the new Houston Pavilions project, into an all-suites hotel featuring more than 400 suites, 30,000 square feet of meeting space and multiple culinary venues.

Other amenities will include a 13,000-square-foot wellness center with outside accessibility for nearby office workers, a fitness area with a Mokara Salon & Spa and personal trainers and nutritionists on staff to assist with creating customized wellness and fitness regimens.

After the jump, swank pix from the Sheraton-Lincoln’s sixties heyday.

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8:05 pm | Read more about Commercial Real Estate, Hotels, Neighborhoods: Downtown, Proposed Developments, Renovations
Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Downtown Skatepark: Build It and Maybe They Will Go Away

June 20, 2007 – 12:01 pm

Downtown Houston Skatepark

“If your city doesn’t have a skatepark, then your city is a skatepark,” reads a headline on a Skaters for Public Skateparks website. And really: Houston has so many better uses for its concrete surfaces—like channeling floodwaters.

In the words of one proponent, speaking in a Public Use Skateparks for Houston (PUSH) video:

If you want to get the kids off the streets, get them to quit tearing up your ledges and your rails, and put them some place where they can actually have some fun and stay out of trouble, a place where families can come hang out — there’s a real need for it in a city this big.

It’s the flypaper theory of city planning: Build it, and maybe those annoying skaters will go there and leave your property alone.

You might have expected building owners bothered by scrapes and skate wax to have been bigger proponents of the newly announced downtown Skatepark. Instead, it took a $1.5 million donation from Joe Jamail for the Houston Parks Board to meet its fundraising goals.

The park will be 35,000 square feet of sculpted concrete on the west side of Sabine St. at Memorial Dr., just under the Sabine Bridge over Buffalo Bayou. There better be some drains in those bowls.

PUSH spokesman Barry Blumenthal told city council to expect 200 skaters and hundreds of onlookers at the park on a typical Saturday.

After the jump, more views of the new skatepark.

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12:01 pm | Read more about Neighborhoods: Downtown, Neighborhoods: Old Sixth Ward, New Construction, Parks
Friday, June 15, 2007

What’s So Frustrating About the Downtown Tunnels

June 15, 2007 – 10:42 am

Downtown Houston Tunnel and Frustrating Shopper

The mysterious Tunnel Mole, posting on Houstoned, provides a succinct list of shopping features missing from the not-so-glamorous Downtown daytime underground scene:

It’s got infinite ways to get annoying chores done, except it’s devoid of the most annoying ones that you want to do while you’re on the clock, like upgrading your cell phone. And here’s what else you don’t have in the tunnel:

*Music
*Movies
*Television
*Sex (not that we’ve noticed, anyway)
*Liquor
*Dreams of a Houston team snaring the pennant/Super Bowl

In short, anything that could sweep you up from the realities of life. The tunnel’s very grounded, because duh, it is in the ground.

Photo: “In space no one can hear you scream,” by Flickr user Matthew Wedgwood

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10:42 am | Read more about Neighborhoods: Downtown, Shopping Centers
Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Stanford Lofts: Luxury Boxes at Midfield

May 15, 2007 – 10:21 am

The Stanford Lofts

Note: See below for an update.

The new stadium for the Houston Dynamo soccer team will likely be built downtown, on some surface parking lots across the highway from Minute Maid park. Negotiations between the city and the team focusing on that site are set to take place very soon. That’s big news for residents of the Stanford Lofts, until now a lonely building set a few blocks away from downtown’s hubbub. Miya Shay explains:

This is good news for sports fans, bad news for people who paid a premium for the Stanford Lofts. When those guys bought the high priced condos, they were told the parking lot in front of the lofts will NEVER be built on. Oh well, such is progress. Now, a portion of the parking lot will be used for the Dynamo stadium. No more unobstructed views of downtown!

Well, just wait until the new stadium plans are unveiled, okay? Maybe there’ll be a nice gap in the stands right at midfield, and the folks looking out their windows from the Stanford Lofts will have great views of all the games, for free. No lines at the restrooms, either.

After the jump, some unobstructed views.

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10:21 am | Read more about Condos, Lofts, Neighborhoods: Downtown, Proposed Developments