Nightlife

Leasing
12/17/10 3:43pm

Will Late Nite Pie Rise Again?

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Midtown, Nightlife, Openings and Closings
16 Comments

Update, 12/22: Late Nite Pie has reopened!

It looks like there’s been another shut-down at Late Nite Pie in Midtown. As first noted by the Houston Press late yesterday, the entrance to the pizza joint has been boarded up, with a stern-sounding note warning off trespassers and indicating the locks have been changed. The person listed as a contact on the note (presumably from the property’s landlord) would not comment on the situation. It may be a bit early to count Late Night out, though: Bell’s restaurant was able to start up again after a similar shuttering last year. The restaurant moved to its current location at 302 Tuam (on the corner of Baldwin) in 2008.

Photo: Aaron Carpenter

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Houston Heights
12/17/10 1:45pm

The Rush to White Oak: Is the Corkscrew Next?

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Nightlife, Openings and Closings, Washington Ave
12 Comments

“You wouldn’t believe the amount of hate mail that I have received since I closed it,” owner Andrew Adams says about the Corkscrew, the wine bar he and his brother Doyle opened way back in 2006 — the early days of the new Washington Ave — but shut down last year. But Adams has been paying attention. He tells the HBJ‘s Allison Wollam he’s planning to reopen the Corkscrew in the Heights in February, as well as a second location elsewhere, which he plans to call Little Corkscrew. Where in the Heights? Adams won’t say, “because he’s still negotiating leases,” but he says he’s “considering” a building on White Oak.

If the Corkscrew does make the move to White Oak, it’ll be joining several new restaurant neighbors: Christian’s Tailgate, Tacos A Go-Go, and D’Amico’s Italian Market Cafe.

The Adams brothers recently gave up on the Corkscrew’s successor, an organic-style cocktail bar they eventually called Sugarcane, after all of 5 months. They’ll be leasing out their space at 1919 Washington to club owners who plan to open a “trendy, upscale bar, complete with bottle service,” he tells Wollam:

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Downtown
12/02/10 1:45pm

Successor to Scott Gertner’s Skybar Coming to Houston Pavilions

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Leasing, Nightlife, Openings and Closings
7 Comments

Skybar owner Scott Gertner has found a new space for his jazz club. It’ll be on the 3rd floor of Houston Pavilions — one block west of the House of Blues and Lucky Strike, and directly across the open-air mall from “swing space” originally planned for retail but now being leased as office space by an energy company. Scott Gertner’s Skybar, on the 10th floor of the office building at 3400 Montrose, closed over the summer, after Gertner tired of dealing with building maintenance issues left unaddressed by a new owner.

Houston Pavilions’ 3rd floor is pretty high up there, but Gertner says the new venue will drop the SkyBar name for the multi-level space (it’ll just be called Scott Gertner’s). At 13,000 sq. ft. (and a capacity of 700), it’ll be slightly larger than the old club too. He tells Chronicle reporter Joey Guerra the new interior, designed by Uptown Sushi architect Isaac Preminger, will feature 3 outdoor patios, an “arena-style” stage, and a full kitchen. Directly downstairs from the club, at the corner of Dallas and Fannin: BCBGMaxAzria and McCormick & Schmick’s, shown above.

Photo: Flickr user sabotai

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First Ward
11/29/10 11:36am

What Counts for Rehab: Houston Ave Bar, Reloaded

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Nightlife, Openings and Closings, Renovations
8 Comments

A reader who’s been tracking the progress of a new drinking establishment opening in the building that used to house the Houston Ave Bar on the corner of Spring St. in the First Ward sent Swamplot these photos just before the holiday. And over the weekend, the place opened — in “soft launch mode.” The name: Re:HAB. Get it? There’s a big grassy parking lot next door, and the new hike and bike trail goes by just across the street. Which means if you fall off your bike or wagon you can always stumble in here to recuperate.

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Montrose
11/19/10 3:14pm

“Thanks for the Mammaries”: Chances Bar Closing, Restaurant Moving In

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Nightlife, Openings and Closings, Restaurants
15 Comments

A “high-end” restaurant, led by a yet-to-be-identified “superstar chef,” will be taking over the space known for the last 16 years as Chances Bar, an owner of the property tells Houston Press reporter Craig Hlavaty. “It’s going to blow Montrose out,” Nick Vastakis tells him. “It’s going to be great.” Chances will shut down for good after a goodbye party on Saturday. Vastakis says his family, which has owned the property since the 1970s, will be getting out of the lesbian-bar management business and into property development.

What prompted the change? One of those spear-more-times-with-my-family moments, he tells Hlavaty:

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Neighborhood Disputes
11/12/10 2:23pm

The Next Neighbor in Line for 2520 Robinhood Won’t Mind Getting Wet

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Nightlife, Proposed Developments, Quicklink, Rice Village
7 Comments

THE NEXT NEIGHBOR IN LINE FOR 2520 ROBINHOOD WON’T MIND GETTING WET Hudson Lounge owner Adam Kleibert is hoping his new bar directly to the east of the 2520 Robinhood at Kirby condo tower will get better treatment from his neighbors than the drenching and projectile greetings Hans’ Bier Haus directly to the west received last year. And he tells the HBJ‘s Allison Wollam that he and his brothers have some plans for the rest of the property they own directly adjacent to the tower. Once the lending market turns around, he says, they’d like to build a 33-room boutique hotel with a rooftop pool on the site. Kleibert says the Hudson Lounge is already planning a reception expressly for condo residents. [Houston Business Journal; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Candace Garcia

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Condos
11/04/10 3:59pm

Now Open: The Bar on the Other Side of the 2520 Robinhood Condos

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Nightlife, Openings and Closings, Rice Village
24 Comments

Residents of the east-facing condos in the 2520 Robinhood at Kirby tower jealous of all the fun their neighbors in the west-facing units have been having with late night partiers at Hans’ Bier Haus next door now have their very own partly open-air next-door bar to mess with: Hudson Lounge opened earlier this week, at 2506 Robinhood. And hey: on this side of the tower, there’s no pesky parking garage to get in the way of any nightclub-condo interaction.

Brothers Adam, Alexander, and Andre Klieber carved the new straight-Mod space out of the former office HQ of Adam and Alexander’s other business, Southampton Homes — after business there slowed down. New swiveling steel doors on the front and back of the 1950 building open to a patio and separate bar pavilion in back.

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Nightlife
11/04/10 12:36pm

“We Got Hosed”: Gallant Knight Closing Again, at the End of the Year

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Openings and Closings, University Place
3 Comments

“It was an unfortunate leasing issue and nothing else,” say the owners of the Gallant Knight. And so the bar will be closing December 31st “at least for now.” Will there be an everyone-out-before-midnight New Year’s Eve party? The landlord of the bar’s new location at 2511 Bissonnet just east of Kirby didn’t renew the lease, an email from the bar explains: “We have just 60 days to empty our liquor cabinet.” An investor group led by Cushman & Wakefield director Stephen Schneidau bought the name and contents of the 34-year-old neighborhood bar at the corner of Holcombe and Morningside shortly after it closed in 2006, then reopened on Bissonnet almost a year and a half ago. Now sitting on the site of the bar’s original location at 2337 W. Holcombe: a branch of Comerica Bank.

Photo: Eating Our Words

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Fires
11/01/10 11:49am

Agora and Antique Warehaus on Westheimer: Burnt to a Crisp for Halloween

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Montrose, Nightlife, Retail
4 Comments

Swamplot’s Candace Garcia sends in these pix of the scene on the north side of Westheimer between Park St. and Dunlavy, the morning after a Halloween inferno destroyed an antique store and the Agora cafe next door. There’s not much left to shop for at Gordon Greenleaf’s Antique Warehaus at 1714 Westheimer, a woodframe residence pressed into used-furniture service more than 50 years ago. That’s where the fire started shortly after midnight Sunday morning. Agora’s brick structure appears to have fared better, and may be rebuilt. Everyone in the 2-story cafe was able to get out safely, but 2 firefighters were later treated for heat exhaustion. “Thanks to the Halloween holiday it was one of the most well-documented fires in recent Houston history,” writes the Houston Press’s Craig Hlavaty, who watched the flames from across the street, dressed in drag, along with a small crowd of participants in the Montrose Costume Crawl — none of them dressed as firefighters.

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Johnson Space Center
10/20/10 7:18pm

The Outpost Tavern Fire: What’s the Inside Story?

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Leasing, Nightlife, Webster
3 Comments

Already removed from the Outpost Tavern near the corner of Nasa Parkway and Egret Bay Blvd. by the time it burned to a wet crisp last Friday: all the signed astronaut photos and NASA memorabilia that used to line its walls — plus electrical and gas service to the building. That the fire occurred despite the absence of those last two items “automatically makes the fire suspicious,” Webster fire chief Patrick Shipp told the Bay Area Citizen earlier this week. But when did all those items make their exits?

Late last year, proprietor Stephanie Foster announced the storied longtime JSC hangout — it was known as the U-Joint back in the moon-mission days — would be closing in January because new landowners wanted to build “something else” on the site. But a few weeks’ worth of farewell bashes had to be canceled after Foster and her husband found themselves locked out of the building on January 16th. Foster’s landlord, Walter Wright, told Houston Chronicle beer blogger Ronnie Crocker at the time that he and his brothers owned the building, the business, and its contents, and that they planned to move the former army barracks building to a strip of land they owned 100 feet of way — and reopen it as a family restaurant. Wright said he felt he needed to shutter the building immediately because of concerns that valuable NASA memorabilia were already being removed:

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Avondale
09/20/10 11:29pm

Swamplot Street Sleuths: Giving 59 a Light Twist

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Montrose, Nightlife, North Montrose, Proposed Developments
11 Comments

Got a question about something going on in your neighborhood you’d like Swamplot to answer? Sorry, we can’t help you. But if you ask real nice and include a photo or 2 with your request, maybe the Swamplot Street Sleuths can! Who are they? Other readers, just like you, ready to demonstrate their mad skillz in hunting down stuff like this:

Answers — of a sort — to your questions-about-town:

  • Southwest Freeway: More than a week after our source noted the problem, that dangling loop of fiber-optic lighting gone dim is still taped to a cable (see photos above) on the Dunlavy St. bridge. TxDOT, the agency in charge of the lights, has swooped in to fix problems with the lights sporadically since at least 2004. But the situation has apparently accelerated to the late-drooping stage. What’s next? Are they just gonna leave us hanging?
  • North Montrose: Pat Wente finds the source of the Regent-Square area jackhammering: demolition of a slab leftover from the Allen House demo on West Dallas (see photo below). And hears Bernard’s somewhat blunt though unofficial assessment of the prognosis for construction on the giant mixed-use project:

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Lower Westheimer
09/17/10 1:56pm

Who Wants Numbers Now?

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Montrose, Nightlife, Quicklink, Restaurants
21 Comments

WHO WANTS NUMBERS NOW? The Press‘s Katharine Shilcutt passes on the latest: “And in perhaps the strangest news this year, rumblings are coming from reliable sources that Numbers (314 Westheimer) — recently put up for lease — is being eyed by the Pappas family. Yes, that Pappas family. But wait — it gets weirder. The rumors also indicate that they plan to open either a chicken and rice or shrimp and rice joint in the spot where so many … unsavory … activities have taken place over the years. If the rumors prove to be true, would you eat at Numbers’ Chicken & Rice?” [Eating Our Words; previously on Swamplot]

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Comments
09/16/10 6:50pm

Comment of the Day: Shhhhh! Montrose Is Cheaper Next to the Clubs

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Montrose, Nightlife, Quicklink
6 Comments

COMMENT OF THE DAY: SHHHHH! MONTROSE IS CHEAPER NEXT TO THE CLUBS “Economics? You get the benefits of the Montrose in general at a pretty big discount relative to a few blocks in almost any direction. For us the annoyances just aren’t that big a deal. (Obviously they are for lots of people…thus the discount.)” [jt, commenting on Swamplot Street Sleuths: The Dunlavy Dangle]

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Avondale
09/15/10 12:51pm

Swamplot Street Sleuths: The Dunlavy Dangle

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Montrose, Nightlife, North Montrose, Proposed Developments
26 Comments

Got an answer to one of these reader questions? Or just want to be a sleuth for Swamplot? Here’s your chance! Add your report in a comment, or send a note to our tipline.

  • Southwest Freeway: Driving over the Dunlavy Bridge, a reader spots a loop of fiber-optic lighting cable hanging off the southern end of the structure. Later the same afternoon, the reader snaps these photos, showing that someone had taped the loose strand to one of the bridge cables: “When the bridges over this part of 59 opened a few years back, the lighting was pretty cool, but I don’t think it has worked for a while. Friends and I have wondered who is supposed to be responsible for keeping this up — think one of your readers might know?”
  • North Montrose: Jackhammers have been thrumming for the last couple mornings on West Dallas, reader Pat Wente reports. And she wonders if it might have something to do with Regent Square: “Anybody know of any official new start dates or plans on this long-delayed project?”

And then there’s this little item:

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Leasing
09/14/10 1:38pm

Is Numbers’ Number Up? “Former Nightclub” Available for Lease

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Lower Westheimer, Montrose, Nightlife
59 Comments

“Montrosians are freaking out,” writes SL, one of several readers lighting up Swamplot’s tip line with reports that the building housing Numbers has been listed for lease. A flyer making the rounds from Davis Commercial, identifying the property at 314 Westheimer as the “Former ‘Numbers’ Nightclub,” says the 9,000-sq.-ft. building, which comes with its very own 23,088-sq.-ft. “parking field,” is available at a rate of $18 per gross sq. ft. The flyer shows photos of the DJ booth and main dance floor, but doesn’t mention any allowance for buildout.

But uh . . . Numbers hasn’t announced it’s shutting down. Even the ever-polite Nancy Sarnoff is unable to parse the apparent paradox:

the operator of the 32-year-old iconic music venue says it’s not closing. And the property owner says Numbers isn’t being kicked out. . . .

Davis Commercial’s Mark Davis, the broker hired to market the space, says the owner would like to “retenant” the building if he can find the right operator.

SL notes: “They have a several upcoming shows and events still on the calendar so it might be a case of staying open til the very last minute.”

Photo: Swamplot inbox

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