Renovations

Mangum Manor
07/25/11 9:58am

Former Steak and Ale on Mangum Rd. To Begin New Life as Strip Club

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Nightlife, Openings and Closings, Renovations
17 Comments

Whatever steak and ale was left in this building at 2425 Mangum Rd. has been taken off . . . very slowly. Only to be brought back in a new form: A reader who’s noted some heavy construction — including the covering-up of windows — at this former restaurant on the southwest side of 290 over the last month and a half says the new occupants appeared to have applied for a liquor license under the name “Mangum Steakhouse.” Actual name of the new joint: Sunset Strip, a “totally latex free” club where you’ll find “the hottest entertainers in H-Town” — once they’re hired, of course. Scheduled opening date: August 3rd. Any resemblance between Highway 290 and the actual Sunset Strip, of course, is courtesy of the ghost of Anna Nicole Smith, and the Pleasures she left behind on the other side of the freeway at 34th St.

Photo: LoopNet

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Crime
07/19/11 1:58pm

That New Black Hole Next to Pak’s

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Interiors, Leasing, Montrose, Renovations, Retail
8 Comments

Montrose all-star convenience store Pak’s has been hit by the same pair of robbers 5 times in the last 8 months. And now it’s been remodeled, with an eye on security. The cashier area is now surrounded by glass, and a new wall adjacent to it now extends from the front to the back, closing off one side of the store, Swamplot photographer Candace Garcia reports. Behind that wall is a mysterious black box, measuring maybe 500 sq. ft. that’s visible to the street. What’s going in there? An owner confirms to Garcia it’s a new lease space, though no tenant has been identified yet.

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Openings and Closings
07/05/11 2:20pm

New Quick Stop for Slow Foods in River Oaks

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Renovations, Retail, River Oaks
9 Comments

This building at 3951 San Felipe, just west of Willowick, may have started out as a gas station, but it’s also spent time as a cleaners and most recently was a bank. Since its soft opening last week, it’s been Relish Fine Foods, a small new market for the River Oaks crowd, specializing in natural and seasonal gourmet food, with shout-outs to local vendors. There’s still plenty of room to fill the wide-open 2,300-sq.-ft. interior with more merchandise, reports photographer Candace Garcia. (More than the current deli and olive bars may show up before the official opening next week.) But where better to start a little Houston grocery that supports the slow food movement than in this drive-up-friendly grab-and-go location? Parking-lot-facing sandwich munchers, there’s even a marble bar set up along the west front of the building set up just for you:

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Nightlife
07/05/11 11:40am

The Corkscrew Pops Open in Shady Acres

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Openings and Closings, Renovations, Shady Acres
9 Comments

Reopened in a new location over the weekend, after a year or so of mellowing: wine bar and former Washington Ave nightlife pioneer The Corkscrew. That mysterious Heights location turns out to be in Shady Acres, in the former strip-center Washateria at 1308 W. 20th St., where there’s now this patio out front.

Photo: Candace Garcia

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Hobby Airport
07/01/11 11:54am

New Hong Kong Market Moving in Close to Hobby

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Renovations, Retail
5 Comments

The long-rumored fifth Hong Kong Market will soon take over this former flea-market building (on the right in the photo) just southwest of the intersection of Airport Blvd. and the Gulf Freeway, a reader reports. Work is already going on inside the building, which was originally a Sam’s Club. The 2 pagoda-themed strip buildings flanking the building’s parking lot that were put up a few years ago are still mostly empty — only a pho restaurant and a nail salon have moved in. The Pulgita con Aire, aka the National Marketplace flea market, now has its own building with an attached parking garage directly south of its former home (barely visible in the background between the 2 buildings), along Mosley Rd. at 9820 Gulf Fwy. D. Back in February, the owners of the Hong Kong Market agreed to pay $1.8 million in back wages and a $200,000 fine for underpaying the Houston grocery chain’s workers and misleading investigators about its labor practices.

Photo: Swamplot inbox

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Art
06/23/11 3:55pm

That’s What They All Say: The Kinds of Things You’ll Be Hearing at the New Permit Office

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Downtown, Openings and Closings, Public Art, Public Buildings, Renovations
11 Comments

Installed yesterday morning on the 3rd floor of the city’s new permit HQ and Green Resource Center at 1002 Washington Ave., which features dozens of other artworks: a text wall by Mary Margaret Hansen, the project’s lead artist. “Last spring, I filled entire yellow legal pads with transcriptions of real conversations, then got it all on a lengthy word document and finally edited it to phrases and expressions that best exemplify what happens when the city takes a look at a set of plans,” she writes. “Too wet! Mud in the beams. Call back when it dries up.” Also: “What about the fees?” and “I have lingering doubts.” Your favorites are all here. Or at least some of them:

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Cottage Grove
06/22/11 11:56am

The New Craft Brewery Coming to Cottage Grove

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Industrial Properties, Proposed Developments, Renovations
20 Comments

Startup Buffalo Bayou Brewing Co. will be located much closer to I-10 than to its namesake waterway, but founder Rassul Zarinfar says that’s by design. A Swamplot commenter dug up the address yesterday: The company has leased a 7,800 sq. ft. warehouse at 5301 Nolda St., at the corner of Detering, in Cottage Grove.

Zarinfar tells Swamplot he was happy to find a location that wasn’t “on the outskirts of town in a super-corporate industrial project.” The company plans to hand-deliver all the kegs it brews themselves, so highway access mattered. Having a location people could easily walk or bike to was also important to him. “Plus,” Zarinfar adds, “we wanted a warehouse that didn’t feel too much like a warehouse, but instead more like an art studio (since beer is art!).”

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Apartments
06/17/11 3:28pm

Swamplot Street Sleuths: The Smells That Drove the CPAs Away

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Downtown, Galleria, Melrose Place, New Construction, Office Space, Renovations
12 Comments

Got an answer to any 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.

  • Melrose Place: Waiting in line at the Starbucks drive-thru south of Westheimer, a reader snaps this photo of the former Crome Lounge at 2815 South Shepherd next door, and reports: “It has been vacant as far as I can tell for months if not a year. Now there is renovation going on.” What’s next for the former Fox Diner and Monarch Cleaners building?
  • Galleria: The HBJ‘s Jennifer Dawson reports that ahem, “distracting food smells” from “a fragrant cafeteria” that recently moved onto the same floor as the Houston CPA Society in the office building at 1700 West Loop South are what drove the professional association to leave its offices of 33 years for new digs on Post Oak Blvd. Sadly, the article doesn’t identify the cafeteria or the exact nature of the wafting “spicy aromas” that sent all those accountants packing. Any guesses?

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Downtown
06/06/11 12:46pm

The Slipcover Is Coming Off: Strip Show Begins on Main St. Corner Downtown

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Hotels, Houston Landmarks, Office Buildings, Proposed Developments, Redevelopment, Renovations
3 Comments

The streetclothes are already being shed from the recently vacated office building at the corner of Main St. and Rusk downtown where a Fort Worth development and hospitality company is planning its next hotel project. Pearl Real Estate announced plans to gut and renovate the 22-story building at 806 Main St. early last year. And now, a reader reports, permits are posted in the window and the paneling and windows in a single column have been removed.

Underneath the white-marble and brown-glass slipcover — installed about 30 years ago — is a stone, terra cotta, and brick building built about 100 years ago and expanded 10 stories skyward in the 1920s. The building is directly across the street from the brand-new BG Group Place.

Photos: Swamplot inbox

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Modern Design
06/03/11 10:57am

Village Louver Loser: The Defiftification of Fu’s Garden

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Renovations, Restaurants, Retail, Rice Village
17 Comments

This drive-by pic of the former Fu’s Garden Restaurant space at the corner of Kirby and University shows what looks to be the exfoliation of some of the building’s 1950s-era accoutrements. The longtime Rice Village restaurant closed quietly several months ago: “They seem to be removing the vertical louvers from the second story and boarding over the windows,” notes the reader who sent in the photo.

Photo: Swamplot inbox

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Critters
06/02/11 12:49pm

Uchi Houston’s Termite Appetizer

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Hazards, Lower Westheimer, Montrose, Renovations, Restaurants, Retail
1 Comment

Thank you, readers, for all the pix you’ve been sending of the ongoing strip show on Lower Westheimer just east of Montrose. Why are the outside walls now gone from the former Felix Mexican Restaurant? Termites ate ’em — or at least polished off enough lard-laden cellulose to require the entire exterior wood structure to be rebuilt. And really, how could the new walls going up for Austin sushi import Uchi — which will reportedly have “many of the same exterior features” as its Tex-Mex predecessor — taste any better?

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Art
05/18/11 5:01pm

Wichita St. Mystery House Goes on the Market Today: Your First Peek Inside

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Buying and Selling, Home Decor, Home Design, Homes for Sale, Interiors, Real Estate Marketing, Renovations, Riverside Terrace
23 Comments

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?

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Lower Westheimer
05/16/11 3:20pm

Finding the Uchi in the Ruins of a Tex-Mex Empire

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Montrose, Renovations, Restaurants, Retail
7 Comments

Is that just an old wall going the way of all stucco on the vacant former Felix Mexican Restaurant space at Westheimer and Grant? Or is architect Michael Hsu’s rehab of the space — which will turn it into a Houston outpost of Tyson Cole’s Uchi and Uchiko juggernaut from Austin, plus a few other lease spaces — already in progress? Candace Garcia’s brief photo report on one piece of the Great Lower Westheimer Restaurant Rejiggering, below:

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Memorial Heights
04/29/11 6:22pm

The Leftovers at Phil’s Texas Barbecue

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Openings and Closings, Quicklink, Renovations, Restaurants
58 Comments

THE LEFTOVERS AT PHIL’S TEXAS BARBECUE Katharine Shilcutt at the Houston Press confirms what readers have been telling us: that Phil’s Texas Barbecue closed for good on Tuesday, leaving behind a large and now-vacant BBQ-and-picnic-style spread at the intersection of Heights Blvd. and Washington Ave. Former energy executive Phil Stephenson did manage to leave the corner a fair bit cleaner than the way he found it: Carving a 7,000-sq.-ft. restaurant space out of the former Southwest Muffler and Brake building took 9 months. Phil’s opened last June. [Eating Our Words, via Twitter; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Houston Foodie

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Montrose
04/29/11 9:30am

Disco Kroger Breaks on Through to the Other Side

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Renovations, Retail
No Comments

And now, from roving Swamplot photographer Candace Garcia: exclusive pics of the brand new windows recently installed on the formerly blank south wall facing Hawthorne St. of the Kroger at 3300 Montrose, as part of the grocery store’s continuing renovations. Last we checked, construction was scheduled to be complete next month.

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