Beating all these buildings to a pulp has been a real education for us.
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Demolitions
And now that the former Art Institute of Houston at 1900 Yorktown and Inwood has been smashed to pieces, the Finger Companies can get going on these new apartments. Accurately, if not creatively named 1900 Yorktown, the complex will comprise 262 units spread out among 8 floors, whose shape seems to welcome a cat’s cradle of laundry lines hung above its U-shaped courtyard. In Uptown, this is just a few blocks north of the Westheimer bank building where Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse is relocating from Richmond Ave.
A source at Hilcorp says that the company has revealed what it’s planning to build in place of the soon-to-be-demolished Downtown Macy’s, vacant since closing in early March: And will the new HQ look anything like that mostly glass box from Munoz + Albin that appeared online a few months ago?
“Nope, nothing like it,” says the source. It’ll be “a regular looking office building tower over 20 stories high.” Though it doesn’t appear to take up the whole block: “I’m assuming there are going to be purdy trees and green stuff around it.” Employees were shown a rendering of the tower at a recent meeting, says the source, but it was quickly removed from the company’s online newsletter: “I guess because they didn’t want it out there.”
Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
Can’t we all just . . . move along?
It would seem that McDonald’s has resolved the steely staring contest between these 2 signs from 2 different eras, having gone ahead and ushered out the old restaurant here on Elgin and Cullen near the U of H campus to put up a brand-new one, a regional rep from the company confirms. No renderings of the next generation are available yet, but the rep says that it should be open in time for the fall semester.
- Previously on Swamplot: Daily Demolition Report: Gone Underground, Growing Up With McDonald’s
Photo: Allyn West
MOM’S LETTER LEADS CITY TO RAZE DERELICT FIFTH WARD HOUSING 
Yesterday, this Komatsu finished the job that Hurricane Ike started, taking out 63 damaged units of the Houston Housing Authority’s Kelly Village Apartments at 1119 Grove St. in the Fifth Ward — and at least one of the residents is happy to see ’em go: “Lacrecha St. Jules,” who wrote a letter to the Housing Authority requesting that something be done, reports the Houston Chronicle, “spent plenty of sleepless nights worrying about her four children as drug dealers and thugs made themselves at home in [the] vacant buildings. . . . ‘It was dark, and there were rapes back there . . . It was a bunch of negatives, and I just wanted to turn it into a positive.'” North of I-10 and east of U.S. 59, the apartments, which showed up in yesterday’s Daily Demolition Report, date to 1930; the city says it plans to build an $800,000, 3-acre park in their place, with room for a jogging trail and garden. [Houston Chronicle; previously on Swamplot] Photo: KHOU via Facebook
The unkempt homes that used to obscure that towering yellow pole on the Gulf Fwy. feeder were undone last month, after 2108 and 2110 Sunnyland St. showed up in the Daily Demolition Report in late April; architect Tim Cisneros, whose firm is named on the variance request, says a 2,000-sq.-ft. law office will be built to replace them. In the East End, the lot faces the feeder between Telephone and Wayside, near where the 2nd inside-the-Loop Walmart is under construction.
Responding to last Friday’s video and story showing Cherry Demolition crews knocking a brick wall of the Maryland Manor apartments onto the backyard fence of Ashby Highrise neighbor (and videographer) Scott Reamer the previous Wednesday, apartment tower developer Matthew Morgan of Buckhead Investment Partners offers a few clarifications. In the video, which was posted on Swamplot and Culturemap, Reamer doesn’t come across as particularly happy about the way demolition is proceeding. “You got it! Good job! Now what about my dog?,” he shouts as the bricks fall, just a few feet from the back of his home.
According to a statement issued by Morgan, however, the 55-second video doesn’t tell the whole story:
Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
School’s out. And these are going too:
