A shiny new cistern is now in place at the former Sunset Coffee building at Allen’s Landing, which Buffalo Bayou Partnership and Houston First have been redeveloping into an office-topped boat-and-bike-rental spot. The 1910 coffee roasting facility has once again donned walls after moving past a Summer 2014 minimalist phase, and is currently decked out in a muted Café du Monde orange.
The no-longer-see-through structure is back to limiting the view from the Harris County Jail across the bayou (visible on the far right, above). A set of stairs are in place alongside the new cistern, along with railings around what appears to be the planned rooftop terrace.
***
Buffalo Bayou Partnership purchased the building with an eye toward preservation back in 2003; Houston First will take ownership of the building when reconstruction wraps up (which was originally planned for late 2015). BBP’s plans for the park at Allen’s Landing (where the Allen Brothers came ashore to prove that shipping vessels could travel up Buffalo Bayou as they’d been promising) also included a westward expansion along the bayou’s south bank toward Sesquicentennial Park.
- Sunset Coffee Building [Buffalo Bayou Partnership]
- Our Vision [Buffalo Bayou Partnership]
- Previously on Swamplot: Looking Through the Complete Renovation of the Sunset Coffee Building at Allen’s Landing; Historic International Coffee Company Building Downtown To Begin Serving Kayaks
Photo: Adam Williams
A very rare instance of an older structure being saved in the downtown area. Will be a great addition to the city. Now it’s time to continue the bayou-side trail eastward from here.
Wow, that’s a fantastic restoration.
restoration is a stretch. the only thing that exists from the original structure is the steel.
Now if they can only shoo away the perpetual gaggle of homeless derelicts that call allen’s landing home, this could be a nice public space.
Yeah, where do homeless people get off, entering public spaces?
@Memebag – I don’t mind that homeless people exist. I do mind them defecating in the downtown planters, littering all over the place, harassing me for money, smoking drugs under bridges, and sleeping in public places that should be an attraction for visitors. Regardless of whether you sympathize with their plight, they do detract from the cleanliness, safety and beauty of public spaces. In nearly every city of the world, cops harass and run them out of the most popular tourist areas for these reasons.
@Superdave: So homeless people can be in public spaces, just not the popular ones? How are you going to turn that into a law that withstands any scrutiny?
.
Ever been to San Francisco? Last time I was there, cops were not making homeless people leave popular tourist areas.
@Memebag You obviously missed his point. It’s not against something homeless in public spaces, its against defecating and harassing in public places. I dont care if that person is homeless or a drunk midtown bro, I don’t want them degrading our public spaces.
@ Rex: There seem to me to be a lot more drunk people in Midtown on any given evening in recent history that have houses than those that do not; but nobody cares about that very much. We call THAT economic development. That is okay. We even seem to like it.
That is also why its okay to propose that law enforcement should dedicate its time to displacing these people who have no money into the places in town where nobody else has much money and where little money is spent, because if you can do that then the housed drunks will be more inclined to spend their money in places deemed popular rather than in places a few miles away that are not deemed popular. And that is of tremendous importance, obviously, because if housed people go to drink just anywhere then a travesty would be the result. Doom would befall us, but he that should bear witness to it would be transformed into a pillar of salt. This is why it is vital to forcibly remove homeless from certain “special” public spaces.