Ah, Friday: Why not take a stroll down Binz St. in the Museum District and have a look at what’s going on? Let’s head east from here: the corner of La Branch and Binz, near the Children’s Museum.
Our guide, Swamplot reader David Hollas, provides the photos and the observations:
Yesterday, city council approved an agreement that will allow Southwest Airlines to go ahead with plans to expand Hobby Airport for international flights. The short-pants airline will foot the $150 million bill to add up to 280,000 sq. ft. to the terminal, including a new concourse and ticket counter, six security lanes, five gates, and a customs inspection hub. The plan, pictured above, also includes restructured roadways and a new parking garage with 2,500 spaces, mutating one of the wings of an airport designed as though it might be itself ready for takeoff:
Thieves made off with copper wiring from UH’s University Center late Saturday night, a UH public safety department bulletin reports: A contractor noticed early Sunday morning that the wiring had gone missing; a reader tells Swamplot that this knocked out the building’s power and is delaying renovations. The Barnes & Noble and Cougar Byte stores inside the UC have been scrambling to set up temporary locations elsewhere on campus.
One more of each, thank you: Creekside Park Village Center, rendered above, will be the Woodlands’ 7th and will be anchored by its 4th H-E-B, the master-planned community says. The shopping center will serve Creekside Park, a 100-acre community planned to go in up there west of Lake Paloma. It appears that the center will herd its shoppers inward toward a 4,300-sq.-ft. glass-walled restaurant, which you can see in the rendering. And there’s gonna be a fire pit in that park-like median-thing. (And a water feature on the other end. You know. Just in case.) In all, 80,000 sq. ft. of retail and office space are proposed for the site on Kuykendahl.
The driving force of a project that Uptown Houston District has proposed to the city to transform Post Oak Blvd.? Big beautiful buses. With both residential and commercial developments like Skanska’s 20-story office building popping up along the major transit corridor and METRO’s Uptown/Gold Line nowhere in sight, the District has developed a $177-million project featuring light rail-like BRT to update Post Oak — a street “that has long outlived its original use,” says John Breeding, the District’s president.
Pelicans are symbols of self-sacrifice, said to pierce their own breast with their own beak to feed their young their blood. But the birds also have real big gullets — fitting, then, as the name of this 4,000-sq.-ft. restaurant under construction at 7819 Broadway in Galveston.
But the restaurant is just one part of the Pelican Rest Marina project developed by Harry Schulz. Across Offatts Bayou from Moody Gardens, the marina’s already operating as a fuel dock and weigh station. And construction is expected to begin soon on seaside condos:
Note: Story updated below.
This mud pit on Rustic St. is not long for the world; eventually there will be a 3-level parking garage here at very congested HCC Southeast. The East End campus is pressed up against the back of a strip center that faces the I-45 feeder road between Woodridge and Wayside. To make room for the garage, appearing to allow students and faculty to enter from both Rustic and Garland, the 100-seat Carlos Garcia Theater and some inadequate surface parking had to go. This is an otherwise expanding campus: last summer saw the opening of a brand-new Workforce Building (shown here), a 3-story, 60,000-sq.-ft. Brave Praxis Brave Architecture job where many of the campus’s vocational programs — including HVAC, cosmetology, massage therapy, and accounting — are now based.
Photos: Brave Praxis (academic building);Â Allyn West (site)
Stoked by the success of the Lee and Joe Jamail Skate Park on Sabine St., the City of Houston earlier this week broke ground that’ll soon be smoothed over by 72,000 sq. ft. of concrete; the 10-acre Spring Recreational Area in Greenspoint will feature what’s being billed as the largest skate park in the U.S.
Something like the rendering above is planned for the site on Kuykendahl, just west of I-45 and north of Beltway 8. It’s projected to cost $5.5 million. That cost includes the construction of “speed hips” and “flow bowls” and “a couple of backyard-style pools,” the Greenspoint District says — things any park worth its vert ramps needs to attract national competitions.
Skateboarders will share the acreage with Dylan’s Park, a “Park Without Limits” that will include equipment and implements designed for children with disabilities. Greenspoint District says the designs are done; the whole thing’s going to be ready in Spring 2014.
Rendering: Greenspoint District
ONE FINAL FIESTA FIESTA 
It’s adios for the 60-year-old Heights market — Bridgewood Properties is building a 4-story senior-living complex in its place — but there will be one more flicker before the lights go out: Bridgewood President Jim Gray tells the Leader he pushed back the start of construction “so that the Houston Heights Association could hold its annual Candlelight Dinner & Auction … the Heights’ premier social function.” Gray adds: “It seemed like the right thing to do.” [The Leader; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Swamplot inbox
If you look closely at these new renderings of Robertson Stadium’s replacement that UH released a couple of weeks ago, you can see the Downtown skyline. UH, a member of the Big East starting in 2013, says that this 40,000-seat, $105-million stadium — whose naming rights are still being shopped around — will be built with a new east-west orientation, at least in part because that’ll make the skyline look real nice on teevee.
More details and even more renderings:
These renderings of the Marriott Marquis show the shapes of things coming — by 2016, according to current plans — to Downtown. Planned for the corner of Walker St. and Avenidas de las Americas, the hotel will stand facade-to-facade across Discovery Green with its older brother, the Hilton-Americas, doubling the number of rooms that serve the George R. Brown Convention Center.
Morris Architects, teamed up with Rida Development, is responsible for the design of this 30-story tower, which will have more than 1,000 guest rooms and exactly one 40,000-sq.-ft. grand ballroom. On the deck atop that ballroom appears to be some fully realized Texas mythology: the state as an island, surrounded by a chlorinated “lazy river.” Guests will tube around it, enjoying what’s more typically considered a Hill Country pastime.
And this is what the hotel is supposed to look like around dusk:
Here’s the lot in the 1100 block of West Cavalcade, a few hundred feet east of the intersection of Main, Studewood, and 20th St. in the Heights, where a new microbrewery calling itself Town in City Brewing Co. (after a previous name, Yard Sale Brewery, got nixed) plans to build a beer campus from kit parts. The kit arrived on a flatbed truck a week or 2 ago: a collection of steel parts from Houston’s Rigid Global Buildings, selected with help from Rigid’s catalog by the Town in City brewers:
A ground-floor restaurant spot in the almost-complete 6-story brick condo building at 1111 Studewood St. will be taken by the third location of the Union Kitchen, the Leader‘s Charlotte Aguilar reports. A sign in a window facing north onto E. 11th 1/2 St. indicates a TABC application for that space is currently under review. A broker from Personette Properties says a model unit for one of the building’s 20 residences should be ready for visits by December 1st — and move-ins by the first of the year. 1111 Studewood Place is also working to sign up a fitness facility and a medical office for the building’s office space, the broker says. The building has its own garage; all the condo units are on the top 3 floors.
Photos: Candace Garcia
There’s a crack team of construction professionals readying this brand-new single-story on Prince St. in Timbergrove Manor for some lucky new owner. And looky here, out of the closet: Workers are bending over . . . uh, forwards to make sure the hardwood floorboards are aligned perfectly, deep in a pantry corner recess. It’s a view of the “Open Entertainers Floor Plan” touted in the listing. Maybe this space has been transformed into a kitchen by now, but isn’t it a whole lot more fun to see an action shot of the transformation in process?
