COMMENT OF THE DAY: BORDERTOWN “Don’t tell the people who live in NoMO or River Oaks Terrace that they don’t actually live in River Oaks. They get mad. I call it Montrose, except for when I lived there a few years back. Then I called it River Oaks — but I meant it ironically, of course.” [Mel, commenting on Comment of the Day: Report From That Neighborhood South of the River Oaks Shopping Center That Nobody Knows What To Call]
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Real Estate Marketing
Photos of a 2-story brick home in the Easton Commons area of Copperfield featured on Swamplot last Friday have since found their way onto 2 national real-estate websites. 14818 Chetland Place Dr.’s moment in the media spotlight is surely a testament either to a nascent farm and star-making infrastructure for breakout local real-estate listings — or to the sheer attention-getting power of bizarre listing photos.
COMMENT OF THE DAY: HE-MAN, YOU HAVE THE POWER TO SAVE THESE TURRETS! “This house will more than likely be torn down. It’s a shame, really, because it’s one of the most unique structures in town, but the list of people who, a) could afford the $300K price tag, and b) would want to live in a house that looks like Castle Grayskull, is probably pretty short.” [Stormy Blanco, commenting on Wichita St. Mystery House Goes on the Market Today: Your First Peek Inside]
After the Orange Show, the Beer Can House, and the Third Ward home of the Flower Man, probably no Houston home has accumulated more outsider-art street cred than Charles Fondow’s decades-long transformation of a former Riverside Terrace daycare center into a bubbling stew of half-timbered gables, turrets, and towering rooftop decks. The ongoing Wichita St. skyward expansion project had an air of mystery, too. In Jennifer Mathieu’s 2001 Houston Press profile, Fondow comes across as shy and self-effacing, though he had by then spent $300,000 and countless hours of hard work on his grand, mostly-DIY creation, inspired by visions he had collected from visits to exotic far-away lands like Russia and Green Bay, Wisconsin.
Fondow, who loved to travel, passed away in March after falling ill on a Caribbean cruise. His gotta-keep-adding home-improvement project had lasted 31 years. And earlier today, a for-sale sign went up on the property. The listing features a first public viewing of what everybody wants to see: the building’s innards. Could this place be just as weird and wonderful inside as what Fondow carefully assembled outside and on top?
ELEMENTARY SCHOOL DEMOLISHINGS AND CLOSINGS 
HISD plans to begin demolishing the old Bastian Elementary School on Calhoun Rd. just south of the South Loop within the next few weeks, in an effort to make the 6-acre property more appealing to possible buyers. The South Park campus has been vacant since 2007, when a new Bastian Elementary was built a mile south on Bellfort. At one point, Lynn Walsh reports, “the property was listed for sale for $825,000, according to an online multiple listings service search, or slightly more than a third of the county’s appraised value for it.” Meanwhile, the HISD board voted this evening to close Grimes, Rhoads, McDade, and Stevenson elementary schools. Some students from Stevenson Elementary will begin classes next year at Love Elementary in the Heights, which had previously been threatened with closure. [Texas Watchdog] Photo of Bastian Elementary: Dikombi Gite
“I guess I am behind the times on marketing strategies,” admits real estate agent Robert Searcy after snapping these pics of the latest offer posted on Bellfort St. near Broadway, just a mile north of Hobby Airport.
Photos: Robert Searcy
COMMENT OF THE DAY: THE $1 MILLION PROBLEM WITH RIVER OAKS MID-CENTURY MODERNS “River Oaks MCMs *always* go for lot value and get torn down. Sentimental owners think they should get a premium for the good architecture but it never happens. If they really care about the building they should price it at 900k and put a no teardown easement on it. Instead, they will lower the price by 100k every 3 months and 3 years from now it will be a Tuscan villa. (As a point of comparison, 59 Tiel Way, a Kamrath beauty which had a much larger, insanely off the hook lot, bigger, nicer, renovated house, was similarly priced – for 3 years he lowered the price slowly, and eventually was offering it on Ebay for 950 minus commission. No one bit and now, sadly, it is a clay lot that will likely sell in the mid 800s). Another comparitor is the MCM on North BLvd, also priced like this, slowly reduced for 3 years, now at 899k until the listing expired again. People like to admire MCM architecture but they don’t like to pay $1M for it. In Houston, at least.” [CAHBF, commenting on 1960 Preserved: River Oaks Mod Box Jumps into the Market]
See that map up there, showing all the stations on Metro’s planned light-rail lines? Metro is asking the public for help naming those stations. But not the stations that don’t have any names indicated next to them — the transit agency isn’t quite yet ready to get to those. No, Metro wants your help choosing names for the stations that are already marked with names. Like, the “Burnett Transit Center.” What should that station be named? Anyone? Anyone? And how about the one marked “Boundary”? Any suggestions? Spicoli?
This is, of course, the best kind of call for submissions. If you can do better than what they’ve already got, go ahead! If you can’t beat what’s there already, why bother? And you can get an idea what the fallback is gonna be, if all the suggestions suck. Just think what we might have ended up calling East Downtown if that naming “contest” had been pitched like this: Yeah, we’re threatening to name this area EaDo — unless you stop us, with something better. How well would that have worked?
You can get a sense of where the stations are planned for the new North, East End, and Southeast Lines from these maps:
Upset at New York Senator Chuck Schumer’s oh-so-cruel insinuation that Houston isn’t much of a tourist town, local talk-show host Michael Berry has responded with an ad on this billboard, carefully situated at the scenic crotch between the Southwest Freeway feeder road and the Westpark Tollway near Chimney Rock, surrounded by a number of fine automotive repair establishments. It’s been 13 days since your outrageous insult, Senator. Apologize now or it’s just going to get worse. Sure hope it doesn’t have to come to that, but don’t think we won’t resort to putting a bunch of those inflatable gorillas on top of the Downtown Aquarium to get our point across — if we have to. [Previously on Swamplot] Photo: Swamplot inbox
- 12454 Woodthorpe Ln. [HAR]
- 1506 Wichman St. [HAR]
- Previously on Swamplot: Olivewood Cemetery’s Grave Situation: Not Washed Down to the Bayou Yet
