01/25/12 12:24pm

The new restaurant opening in the space left behind by the shuttered 11th St. Cafe, also known for a time last year as the Ruggles 11th St. Cafe? Ruggles Green. No, seriously. But apparently it’s not the same Ruggles the restaurant started with.

For about 5 months last summer, the 11th St. Cafe at 748 E. 11th St. took on a new name: Ruggles 11th St. Cafe — after Ruggles Grill owner Bruce Molzan agreed to operate the restaurant. But Molzan later pulled out of the arrangement because “he considered the quality of the food there poor,” he told Chronicle reporter Purva Patel last month. A trademark-infringement lawsuit Molzan then filed against the cafe prompted owner Archie Patterson to remove the Ruggles name from the restaurant in early December; he closed it entirely — after 35 years of operation — at the end of the year, announcing that a new tenant for the space would be named in late January.

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01/06/12 11:57am

Another reason for checking Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Reports on a regular basis: You might find your home listed on it. Two years ago today, the city’s neighborhood protection department took out demo permits on the houses at 1315 and 1317 Shepherd Dr. at the southeastern tip of Cottage Grove, listing them as dangerous buildings; they showed up on Swamplot the next day. But in a lawsuit filed this week, Bellaire Bead Shop owner Katie Koenig claims she was never informed about the impending demolition of her 2 houses, where she stored her bead inventory. Koenig says she only discovered the houses had been torn down when she tried to visit them sometime around January 8th, 2010; she also claims she was injured on the property after tripping over fencepost stumps left after city crews came back later and partially removed a 6-ft. privacy fence she had had built surrounding the houses.

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11/21/11 2:29pm

A Houston attorney says the site plan for the Ashby Highrise “substantially” copies the one a Dallas-based architecture firm created for the same developers 5 years ago. Patrick Zummo, who is representing Humphreys and Partners Architects in a lawsuit filed last week against Buckhead Investment Partners, tells the West U Examiner‘s Charlotte Aguilar that the plan for the Ashby Highrise site at the corner of Bissonnet and Ashby — which Buckhead attributes to the firm it hired later, EDI Architecture — is “extremely close, if not identical to” both a plan Humphreys drew up for the same site while under contract to Buckhead in 2006 and the site plan the architecture firm produced a few years earlier for the Grant Park Condominium tower in the Elliot Park neighborhood of Minneapolis (above).

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11/21/11 12:11pm

An architecture firm headquartered in Dallas has filed suit against the developers of the Ashby Highrise, alleging that Buckhead Investment Partners made “copies and derivatives” of the firm’s design for the 27-story Grant Park Condominiums tower in Minneapolis. Humphreys and Partners Architects designed that complex (pictured above) in 2003. The lawsuit is also directed at EDI Architecture, the firm Buckhead hired to produce drawings for the proposed highrise at the corner of Bissonnet and Ashby near Southampton.

The lawsuit claims that Buckhead infringed on Humphreys’ copyright by submitting plans for a proposed 23-story tower at 1717 Bissonnet to the city of Houston. Those plans have already received permits. The lawsuit seeks an injunction to prevent Buckhead from constructing the building, because doing so would “necessarily create additional copies and derivatives” of Humphreys’ intellectual property.

How closely does Houston’s proposed tower follow Grant Park’s design?

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11/02/11 11:12am

A decade-long scheme of systemic fraud by Houston-based Allied Home Mortgage Capital Corp. cost taxpayers $834 million in insurance claims on defaulted loans and forced thousands of the company’s customers to lose their homes through mortgages that were “doomed to fail,” according to a lawsuit filed by a former branch manager of the company and which the U.S. government officially joined yesterday. Allied Home, which is based in offices at 6110 Pinemont Dr. (above) off the Northwest Fwy. not far from Houston’s new FBI HQ, claims to be the largest privately held mortgage company in the country (99 percent of the company is owned by founder Jim Hodge), with 200 branches, down from a high of 600. Separately, the company has now been suspended from issuing any FHA-backed loans or GNMA-backed mortgage securities.

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10/19/11 10:50am

NEW LAWSUIT SEEKS TO BLOCK WASHINGTON HEIGHTS WALMART TAX DEAL A nonprofit group formed to fight the proposed Washington Heights Walmart in the West End filed a lawsuit in district court yesterday, claiming that the tax reimbursement deal between the city and the project’s developer, Ainbinder Heights LLC, violates state law. Responsible Urban Development for Houston calls the $6 million agreement, in which the city promises to pay the developer back for infrastructure improvements, an “unconstitutional gratuitous transfer” that doesn’t meet state standards. The lawsuit also seeks to shut down all similar agreements established by the city, for “failing to provide sufficient controls to ensure that 380 agreements are not abused as either an end run around bond finance procedures or as political favors returned to well connected developers.” City Council is scheduled to vote on a similar agreement, for a new Kroger on Studemont just south of I-10, today. [Houston Politics; lawsuit; West End Walmart coverage]

10/04/11 1:25pm

BABY DOLLS STRIP CLUB OWNED BY ACTUAL BABY According to documents presented in a lawsuit filed last week, the now-shuttered strip club Baby Dolls at 6340 Westheimer Rd. past Fountainview was owned between 2005 and 2006 by the estate of its former owner, Aris Mylonas — whose heir was an infant born shortly after the father’s death. From there, the story gets even stranger: The baby’s mother claims in the lawsuit that she sold the baby’s interest in Baby Dolls to a business entity partly controlled by James Cabella, a/k/a Vincent Cabella, whom she later learned was also a/k/a Vincent Palermo and a/k/a Vinny Ocean. He’s the former New Jersey mob boss whose testimony helped take down the DeCavalcante crime family, and who was later resettled in Houston under the federal witness protection program. (He’s also rumored to have been one of the models for TV character Tony Soprano; plus he’s the still-proud owner of this Memorial Drive mansion.) Lisa Hansegard is suing Cabella, his wife, and son to get back the close to $1.3 million she says they still owe her and her child for the sale. [Houston Chronicle; more details]

09/28/11 5:06pm

The development company behind a proposed 23-story residential tower at 1717 Bissonnet near Southampton known as the Ashby Highrise submitted its plans to the city again today, after taking a 2-year break. Buckhead Investment partner Matthew Morgan tells the West U Examiner‘s Michael Reed that the plans sent in today are mostly identical to those submitted in August 2009. Those plans, which the city ultimately approved, were for a version of the tower that axed some of the buildings’ commercial features, including retail and office space and a pedestrian plaza in front of the building. The lawsuit Buckhead filed against the city early last year, challenging the repeated rejection of its earlier plans for the building, is still pending in U.S. District Court.

There is one notable difference in the new plans: The units will be rented, not sold, Morgan says.

Rendering: Buckhead Investment Partners

09/14/11 5:58pm

HOW THE KUBOSH BROTHERS PUT THE KIBOSH ON HOUSTON’S RED LIGHT CAMERAS Mandy Oaklander doesn’t include too many interviews with ardent red-light camera supporters in her cover story, but she does provide an engaging, from-the-top account of how the city got to its current situation: cameras turned off, lawsuits a-brewing. Tasty excerpt: “‘I agree with the Mayor,’ Feldman told city council in his low, measured voice. ‘We are in a Catch-22. No matter what we do, there is somebody out there who is going to sue us.’ Feldman cracked a rare, thin-lipped smile. ‘That’s why I became city attorney.'” [Houston Press] Photo: West U Examiner

09/12/11 12:55pm

ST. AGNES PICKS UP DROPPED SUIT The lawsuit the Academy of St. Agnes filed and then dropped last month against the city, the TABC, and the owners of a nightclub planning to open in the former Finger Furniture space at PlazAmericas is back on again, Purva Patel reports. The suit is an attempt to prevent the planned club, El Corral, from receiving a liquor license. A year ago, the private girls school bought the 18.7-acre former Gillman auto dealership at the corner of Bellaire Blvd. and Fondren, across the street from the former Sharpstown Mall, with plans to turn the property into an athletic campus. [Prime Property; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Candace Garcia

09/06/11 2:12pm

PICKING UP CASH FOR THE CHEMICAL SPEW How did Harris County government swing half a million dollars in cash from Shell Chemical? The company is turning over that amount as part of a settlement covering 5 unreported chemical releases between April 2008 and March 2010 at the company’s Deer Park plant on Hwy. 225 just east of Beltway 8. According to Harris County’s lawyer on the case, Shell Chemical also made an “important concession,” which will likely result in more advance warning of similar future windfalls headed our way: Shell says it’ll now alert the county’s local pollution control office, and not just state officials, of “pollution events.” [Pasadena Citizen]

08/31/11 12:20pm

“Veterinary experts” are now “standing by to testify” in the lawsuit filed yesterday against a Spring HOA on behalf of Houston’s best-known potbellied pig, declares the lawyer hired by the pig’s owners, Missy and Alex Sardo. What’ll those experts say? That Wilbur Sardo, the 60-lb. pet with close to 5,000 Facebook friends — and now a live webcam showdoesn’t count as livestock, and therefore isn’t prohibited from living with his owners by the deed restrictions of the Thicket at Cypresswood neighborhood.

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08/26/11 12:20pm

In what appears to be a last-ditch effort to block construction of Segment E, the straight-throught-the-Katy-Prairie section of the Grand Parkway scheduled to begin construction this month, the Sierra Club has filed a new suit against the Army Corps of Engineers, the DOT, the FHA, the Texas Transportation Commission, and several public officials. But the lawsuit also focuses attention on the health of the Addicks and Barker Dams on Buffalo Bayou, which control waterflow through west and Downtown Houston. According to a July 2010 document unearthed by the environmental group this past March through an information request, the Army Corps has rated the status of both dams as “urgent and compelling” since September 2009; that rating indicates the Corps considers them to be 2 of the 6 most dangerous dams in North America.

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08/25/11 8:22am

Just how far down the road does the Texas Dept. of Transportation want to take its court battle with a Houston romance novelist, her publisher, and a bookstore? Yesterday a federal judge in Austin denied TxDOT’s request for a restraining order that would have required all 35,000 copies of a new book to be recalled from distributors and destroyed — and be given a new title. Christie Craig’s shirtless-hunk-filled novel, Don’t Mess with Texas, was released on Tuesday. TxDOT complained that the book used the agency’s trademarked slogan for a statewide anti-littering campaign as its title without permission. But under questioning, TxDOT’s attorneys had conceded that none of the trademark registrations for the phrase “Don’t Mess with Texas” specifically covers books. In his decision, Judge Sam Sparks found that point significant, and noted that the costs of recalling the book would likely be very high.

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