COMMENT OF THE DAY: NOT HOLDING UP SO WELL WITHOUT YOU “Missing columns are nothing to snicker about. Have you ever spent sleepless nights wondering if your loved column will return? Have you experienced the pain of seeing your column with a Spanish Colonial from the other side of town? Well, you might think she supports you completely, but you’ll be the one left bearing the load. Mark my words you insensitive clods.” [kilray, commenting on Houston Home Listing Photo of the Day: Dramatic Entry]
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Construction Problems
Note: Linbeck has posted a response, which we’ve now included at the bottom of this story.
If everything goes well, the giant ranch-scene mural by artist Peter Hurd that’s stood in the lobby of the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center’s Houston Main Building at 1100 Holcombe in the Medical Center since the structure was built as a Prudential Life Insurance HQ in 1952 will likely qualify as the largest fresco painting ever moved successfully to a new location. A donor is paying more than half a million dollars for the curved 16-by-46-ft. wall painting, appraised for more than $4 million, to be dismantled, preserved, and transferred eventually to a new home in a public library in Artesia, New Mexico, where the artist once had a studio. But at this point it’s not entirely clear that the move will go well, because Linbeck, the contractor hired by the Texas Medical Center institution to manage the enterprise, has fired the mural-conservation consultant who’s been working on the job for more than a year, only days before a looming deadline: the handing over of the famous 18-story building the painting occupies to a demolition contractor.
To move the mural, in January 2010 Linbeck hired Nathan Zakheim Associates, an art conservation firm from California, to develop a complex multi-stage process that included painting the back of the structure with resin and fiberglass and attaching it to massive trusses. Last month, the building’s entrance canopy was demolished to allow enough room for the painting’s exit. The mural was originally scheduled to be out the door before February 11th of this year. But efforts to meet that deadline were stymied by an almost two-and-half-month delay — which one source blames on the engineering firm hired by Linbeck — in the fabrication of the two 9,000-lb. curved steel trusses required for the job. After the trusses were finally delivered on January 10th, the conservator submitted a revised proposal that pushed the move-out date into the first week of March. Linbeck fired Zakheim from the job on January 20th.
“When you fire your conservator and bump up the schedule, it doesn’t mean it’s because you want to do the job right,” a source complains to Swamplot, expressing fears Linbeck will meet its original deadline for getting the mural out of the building — and damage or destroy it in the process. Linbeck would have had to pay additional fees to the conservator in order to keep him on, according to the source, and Linbeck’s contract with M.D. Anderson stipulates financial penalties for construction delays. “They re-read the contract, and the contract does not prohibit them from taking the mural out in crumbled pieces,” explains the source.
The mural was painted to illustrate Prudential Life Insurance’s motto at the time: “The Future Belongs to Those Who Prepare For It.” Linbeck has reportedly expressed confidence to M.D. Anderson and the donor that the company can manage the move successfully without the assistance of the conservator. But to do that, the company will have to overcome a couple of significant obstacles:
COMMENT OF THE DAY: CLEAR PROOF THAT THEY WERE ONTO SOMETHING BIG, BEFORE IT ALL CAME CRASHING DOWN “well it would appear there’s lots of wind up there for harvesting!” [movocelot, commenting on Pieces of Wind Turbine Fall Onto Street from Top of Hess Tower Downtown; Blades on “Lockdownâ€]
It took several tries and a bit of a scare to take down the second building from the former Imperial Sugar factory and refinery off Highway 90A in Sugar Land Sunday. As shown in more than a dozen YouTube videos, the metal bin building collapsed after the first blasts of dynamite shortly after 7 am, as planned. But the metal furnace house, directly adjacent to the brick char house, didn’t budge; getting it out of there turned out to be a little trickier. A second series of blasts (shown in the video above), set around 7:45, produced . . . well, not much. Then, maybe 40 minutes later, after most of the crowds had left and workers had gone inside the building to try to figure out what was wrong, and when the remaining onlookers least expected it, there was this frightening scene:
Workers are dismantling the two half-built-and-holding townhomes at the corner of Jackson Hill and Washington Ave., says the reader who sends us these photos of the activity at the well-known and well-weathered properties. Demolition permits for 915 and 917 Jackson Hill showed up on Swamplot earlier this week. “No bulldozers or anything, looks like they’re disassembling them from the top down,” explains our tipster. Could this be the dawn of . . . a brand-new parking lot for Washington?
Is the Houston Extreme Makeover: Home Edition home all those volunteers built for the Johnson family on Goodhope St. at last complete? Swamplot hasn’t been able to get an update: HHN Homes’ website has been out of commission for a couple of days, and the company’s email service may be down too. (Maybe that’s the best way for everyone there to get some much-needed rest after the double-overtime build?) Over the weekend, Swamplot photog Candace Garcia took a little stroll around the now-very-quiet construction site and came back with some interesting pictures, a few to-do items, and one burning question:
COMMENT OF THE DAY: THE KINDS OF CRAP DEVELOPERS DON’T WANT TO DEAL WITH “It is in the developers best interests to retain historic structures whenever possible. They know that if you remove them all, you lose the sales value of the area. They aren’t stupid. They are just realistic about what people are going to live in and what is structural worth saving. Would you live in a home that’s had a hundred different animals [defecating] on the walls and floors for years? It looks structurally sound, but would you live there, where the pee has soaked into everything including the shiplap?” [Heights Weirdo, commenting on Proposed Historic District Changes: No Will Mean No, 67 Percent Will Mean Yes]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: SAVES YOU MONEY!! “Harness/Lanyard runs about 400 dollars total. They must be replaced too. In addition there is significant overhead for training. Including time to train, and productivity losses. These Productivity losses amount to regulations that call for your tie off point be able to withstand a load of 5 kips (5000 lbs). So In the image where the dude is standing on a wood beam, laborers would have to construct a system for him to be tied off to. How do laborers know what can take 5000 lbs? well Scaffold builders do that a lot… how do scaffold builders do that? With an engineer who designs the scaffold? And all the time, and money trickles down to the homeowner. Finally, in the housing industry there is a large illegal immigrant workforce. They are working at lower wages [than] US citizens. If they get injured the cost vs productivity/exploitation of that illegal still falls in the companies[’] advantage.” [Enginerd, commenting on Comment of the Day: Extreme Homebuilding Makeover, Oil and Gas Edition]
The Johnson family may not want to come directly from the airport to their new home when they return tomorrow from their weeklong surprise vacation in Paris. “Organizers are frantic they may not be able to finish,” reports abc13’s Cynthia Cisneros, who adds that the project was still 21 hours behind schedule as of this afternoon (that’s marked down from about 30 yesterday). Meanwhile, the folks at HHN Homes have updated the company’s website for the project with a screaming headline: “Extreme Help Needed!!” and a list of specific trades they’re hoping to attract for shifts beginning 8 pm tonight and Saturday.
“Every radio station and tv station is soliciting the public for volunteers,” notes Swamplot photographer Candace Garcia, who visited the site this afternoon. And she noted evidence of more problems:
COMMENT OF THE DAY: WHY THE BANK WON’T FINISH BUILDING THOSE TOWNHOUSES “. . . the bank would rather take the loss than become builders. The law in Texas puts certain long term responsibilities on the builder and the banks don’t want to get into it. I’ve talked to a few banks about finishing, or at least drying in, some of them and for them it’s cheaper to let them rot and write them off than to prolong the process and get financially deeper into a project that will probably never turn a profit. That money is making them +5.5% profit now if they invest it elsewhere, which over a very short amount of time, more than makes up for the loss. Bankers care about money not urban blight.” [SCD, commenting on Swamplot Price Adjuster: Some Unfinished EaDo Business]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: WHERE THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS BAD PUBLICITY “Only in Houston would someone use a blog post about a building’s code violations to advertise FOR the building.” [JCoy, commenting on The Somewhat Public To-Do List Posted at 230 West Alabama]
“Apparently ‘Houston’s newest chic address‘ has some code violations on its hands,” writes the reader who found a well-worn code enforcement tag at 230 West Alabama, the Midtown-ish apartment tower formerly known as Executive House:
I stopped by on Sunday, July 4, to see if the leasing office was open and found this notice on the door. The violation from the City of Houston Code Enforcement Department says: OBTAIN ELECTRICAL PERMIT AND REPAIR UNSAFE ELECTRICAL IMMEDIATELY…OBTAIN PLUMBING PERMIT AND REPAIR UNSAFE PLUMBING IMMEDIATELY…REPAIR UNSAFE STRUCTURAL IMMEDIATELY…SEE REPORT FOR DETAILS…SUBJECT TO CITATIONS DAILY FOR NON-COMPLIANCE. The date in the bottom right hand corner appears to be 04-04-10. I think I’ll keep searching for that apartment elsewhere.
The tag:
A CONDO OWNERS FAN SITE FOR SHAYA BOYMELGREEN Still waiting for the developer of the twin-tower condo development proposed for San Felipe near the end of Woodway to provide an update on the project? Some New Yorkers would like a word with him too. The residents of the Newswalk Condominium in Brooklyn have created a website called Shame on Shaya, documenting in Russian, Hebrew, and English the “extraordinary number of construction defects” in developer Shaya Boymelgreen’s first high-profile development, constructed in 2002: “The building is now undergoing a two-year, $7 million construction remediation project. Newswalk residents are currently in legal action against Boymelgreen with a suit seeking no less than $10 million in damages.” Spokesman Michael Rogers explains: “Many of us got to know Shaya in the early days of Newswalk, and found him friendly and likeable. He may not fully understand what the residents of Newswalk are suffering, and this campaign is a way to bring him up-to-date.†[Previously on Swamplot]
First it was up, then it sat unfinished for a good long time, then it was down, and now it’s been . . . resurrected! Viula from the Heights Life blog sends in the latest photo of the corner townhouse unit in the former Waterhill Homes development at 8th St. and Nicholson in the Heights (where 8th Avenue Elementary School used to be):
Remember the one they were breaking down on the end? Well, they built it back up again. My husband thinks the ground floor (garage) is the same but I disagree.
Real progress doesn’t always follow a straight-line path, no? Last time we studied this well-weathered unit, you’ll remember, it was indeed on its way down:
So what was the cause of all the hullabaloo over at Fire Station 16 at the corner of Richmond and Dunlavy that caused fire department officials to close it down for a few days earlier this month? A source told Swamplot on April 2nd that the building likely had foundation problems and was close to collapsing. Here’s what firefighters spotted:
