HERITAGE PLAZA SELLS HIGH 
That vaguely Mayan-looking tower at the northwestern edge of Downtown sporting the popular no-neck stone-top-sinking-into-a-glass-base look will soon have a new owner. Brookfield Office Properties has agreed to buy the 53-story Heritage Plaza for an almost-local-record $325 million — thanks in part to a little 12-year $200 million loan from MetLife negotiated by the seller, Atlanta’s Goddard Investment. Goddard paid $121 million for the building a little more than 5 years ago; the company added a new 1,058-car parking garage catty-corner to the property in 2008. [Real Estate Alert; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Jeff Balke
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Office Buildings
SOME PLANS IN THEIR WRENCH 
And who thought a building shaped like a pipe wrench wouldn’t attract a natural-gas firm as its lead tenant? Hines announced yesterday that UK-based BG Group will move its Houston offices from the Panhandle Energy Tower where Westheimer hits Alabama in the Galleria to MainPlace, the Pickard Chilton-designed spec building still under construction at 811 Main St. Downtown. The company will take over floors 29 through 34 in the 46-story tower, but may fill up more later. And it’s changing the building’s name — no, not to Pez Tower — but to BG Group Place. KPMG put dibs on the building’s top 4 floors more than 2 years ago. [Houston Chronicle; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Skyscraper Page user Johnme
Early renderings are out for the next round of construction — promised for 2011 — at CityCentre, Midway Companies’ mixed-use assortment on the former site of the Town and Country Mall. The 3rd and 4th office buildings in the complex will together be called CityCentre 3, and they’ll go on the leftover patch of grass just west of the Hotel Sorella, sidling up to Beltway 8. Like the others, the two new 6-story buildings will feature retail space on their ground floors: more than 33,000 sq. ft. out of a total 250,000. The feeder-road view:
Brookfield Office Properties announced giddily yesterday that the real-estate company has bought the 28-story long-vacant former Sheraton-Lincoln Hotel at 711 Polk St. Downtown — just so it can tear the property down. The once-swank hotel achieved a small measure of fame as the Beatles’ Houston crashpad . . . and was also apparently graced with an overnight stay by Kennedy avenger Jack Ruby. But the building has sat vacant for the last 24 years. Brookfield owns the 35-story office building directly to the northeast (at 1201 Louisiana), which has long offered tenants closeup views of the decaying structure. But it looks like only the building’s underground features will remain:
“Our tenants in Total Plaza will experience views of downtown that they never had before,” announced Brookfield’s Paul Layne, “and access to three levels of below-grade parking.” The company says it has no particular plans for further development of the site once the building is demolished.
In 2007, Omni Hotels and an Atlanta company called Songy Partners announced plans to create an all-suites hotel in the structure, which had been cleared of asbestos in the late nineties. The development was meant to include meeting space, restaurants, and a wellness and fitness center. But the project stalled. More recently, the property was put on the market for more than $8 million.
A few scenes from the hotel’s earlier days:
The big rock hanging out on the Main St. sidewalk in front of the former Weldon Cafeteria building next to the Lawndale Art Center has vanished! The Houston office of architecture firm BNIM had placed the thing there this summer — in consultation with a Feng Shui master — to combat the negative energy lumbering down Wichita St. and pointed straight at the company’s first-floor studio space. Its lease up at the end of August, BNIM jumped ship to new offices in that sorta leafy mid-seventies office park at 4200 Westheimer between Highland Village and BoConcept — all under cover of the protective services provided by that real-as-life crag the company got from San Jacinto Stone:
BACK IN THE CHASE 
Things are pretty much back to normal on the lower floors of the JPMorgan Chase building at 712 Main St. Downtown, reports former Houstonist editor Jim Parsons, who’s been settling back into the ground-floor offices of the Greater Houston Preservation Alliance after last week’s fire on the 27th floor. “We went to the part of the basement where our storage is located and there was no evidence of water [there], which was a relief. The most noticeable things post-fire are that the marble floors in the building lobby are covered with Eucaboard and that giant fans are blowing air freshener all around the ground floor.” Parsons says the Chase banking hall is open for business, but doesn’t have any updated info about the smoked-out upper floors. Houston’s fire department began an arson investigation last week. [Previously on Swamplot]
THE BLACK FOREST MIX How do you follow your recent purchase of the FBI-invaded office building at 5050 Westheimer — you know, the former Galleria headquarters of that charmingly creative Stanford Financial Group? Black Forest Ventures — a Woodlands-based venture capital firm started by a member of the family behind the Bruker biomedical empire — has the answer: Go out west near Katy and buy Mustang Engineering’s 175,000 sq.-ft. office building in the Park Ten office park off I-10. Just add both to Black Forest’s growing potpourri of properties. Other holdings gathered by the company: Woodlands gourmet grocers Hubbell & Hudson; 3 Black Walnut Cafes in the The Woodlands, Sugarland, the Rice Village; a few Woodlands office buildings; numerous rental homes; and a 15,000-sq.-ft. hangar at David Wayne Hooks Airport in Spring. [Houston Business Journal]
The art-gallery building at 4411 Montrose, just north of the bridge over the Southwest Freeway, stands only a few feet back from the front sidewalk. But just one block south, the Midway Companies is planning to plant its new 13-story office tower (which, like 4411 Montrose, will feature a restaurant space on the ground floor and gallery spaces upstairs) a full 25 feet back from the Montrose Blvd. property line. But that’s not because Midway is shy about getting any variances necessary to get around mandated city setbacks.
No, Midway director Shon Link tells Swamplot the M Fifty-Nine building must stand clear of the bright yellow Clear Channel billboard that pokes out from the southwest corner of the property. Restrictions require the billboard to have a clear view of oncoming traffic driving south on Montrose. Currently peeking out from the bottom part of the billboard: The Nesquick Bunny.
Behind Montrose, M Fifty-Nine won’t be so shy with the streets:
COMMENT OF THE DAY: SECRETS OF THE METRONATIONAL DEATH STAR — REVEALED! 
“Could this be an air traffic control tower for getting the Chemtrail plane patterns accurately placed in skies… for desired weather pattern chemical fallouts… aluminum oxide, barium oxide and ethylene dibromide… very harmful to us.
No one is allowed to go to these top five floors all owned by MetroNational Bank (who own the whole building plus more). The rest of the floors 28 and under are doctors offices and hospital. I thought that was a bit odd.
It just looks so much like an air traffic control tower… but with no airport near-by… then one must ask…â€what in the air.. are they controlling… if not planes landing?†Possibly Chemtrials floating?
I invite any comments. Please research Chemtrails first. I am not a conspiracy theory person nor do I believe in UFO’s, ghosts, or [Morgellons] disease.” [CLD, commenting on There Will Be No Tours of the Death Star, and Other Details About the Hospital in the Belly of the Memorial Hermann Tower] Photo: Tony Sava
That rock hanging out on the sidewalk in front of the offices of architecture firm BNIM in the old Weldon Cafeteria building on Main St. is “most definitely real,†Norhill Realty leasing agent Vincent Biondillo tells Swamplot. It came from San Jacinto Stone. What’s it for? Well, Wichita St. ends across the street, shooting all sorts of negative T-junction Feng Shui energy straight at the building. And the availability of large stocks of chi-fortifying Red Bull and Chester Fried Chicken at the Chevron food mart on the corner probably doesn’t help. Biondillo, who’s still trying to lease a few vacant spaces in the building at 4916 Main, explains the rock was placed recently by a Feng Shui Master hired by BNIM to solve the problem.
A chi POV shot and closeups of the Museum District’s fiercest Sha Chi assassin:
HELPING CEOS WITH THAT VISION THING 
The head of the giant monkey wrench is still under construction Downtown, but already Hines has lowered rents and begun looking for smaller-scale tenants at MainPlace, Nancy Sarnoff reports. And now . . . they’re staging it!
“Hines has built out mock offices on three floors so prospective tenants can get a better idea of what their offices may look like.
Depending on the audience, the models can make an impression.
‘If you bring over a CEO, it registers with them a little more,’ said Chrissy Wilson, vice president of leasing for Hines.” [Houston Chronicle; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Skyscraper Page user Johnme
COMMENT OF THE DAY: HOLDING DOWN THE FORT AT 3400 MONTROSE “The building has not been shut down, I am still renting there. They have not communicated any plans. It would make an excellent art studio building, and there is money in that- take Winter Street Studios as an example. Would also make great living spaces, but would require tremendous remodel. If you hear any clues about plans of owners, please post!” [Stoney, commenting on Scott Gertner’s Skybar Closing, May Take the Whole Building with It]
Armed with your suggestions, roving Swamplot photographer Candace Garcia set out to document the smallest freestanding commercial buildings in Houston she could find. And here are the results! Above, “The Spot” hair salon at 1207 Westheimer in Montrose, at the corner of Commonwealth.
More tiny:
COMMENT OF THE DAY: A 3400 MONTROSE BLVD. INSPECTION REPORT “I did due diligence on this building a few years ago for the prior owners (The Ali Brothers). It was in pretty bad shape back then. The chilled water system was byzantine and the egress (especially from the Skybar) was not anywhere near complying with code. The garage needed work and had headroom problems on the ramps. For re-purposing, 3400 Montrose actually laid out well into residential or a hotel. I thought that given the limited parking situtation that they should give the Skybar the boot and convert the building to rental apartments. The structural bay depths and the continuous glazing on each floor laid out nicely, and the garage was almost the perfect size for this. Of course the entire building would have to be gutted in the process to accomplish any major update to the building. I swore I would never go into the Skybar again when I saw how unsafe the egress would be in a fire.” [mt, commenting on Why Scott Gertner’s Skybar Is Leaving the Montrose Sky]
Note: Story updated below.
News comes from a reader that Scott Gertner’s Skybar, on the top floor of 3400 Montrose, will be closing for good this Saturday — “due to the building closing its doors.” We don’t have further information about why the entire 10-story office building across Hawthorne from the Montrose Kroger might be shutting down, but a Twitter-fed rumor is that it’s for “safety concerns.”
Scott Gertner’s Sports Bar, safely ensconced on the ground- (and only) floor of a parking-lot site on Fountainview just north of Richmond, is apparently in no danger of collapse, and will remain open. The complete message passed onto us from Gertner after the jump:
