The next piece of Art Blocks art was smoothed into place at the corner of Main St. and Walker this weekend, above the lightrail-facing side of inflation-aware Just a Dollar 19¢ & Budget Food Store. The mural, Jamal Cyrus’s Lightnin’ Field, is one of 4 that will be rotated onto the side of the 1929 building at 901 Main throughout the year leading up to next spring’s Super Bowl. The other projects to pretty up the Main Street Square area include the 60-foot-tall wooden Trumpet Flower that will grow between One City Centre and its parking garage, and the Color Jam street paint-up underway at the corner of Main and McKinney.
The signs for Just a Dollar 19¢ appear to have been artistically blanked as part of the installation; the convenience store, which opened on the corner in the early 1990’s in the former Krupp & Tuffly Shoes building, is shown above from the northbound Main St. Square light-rail station, between the restored facade of the Holy Cross Chapel & Catholic Resource Center (on the right) and the 46-story BG Group Place tower at 811 Main (on the left, across Walker St.). Here’s a twilight shot of the nearly completed mural, with a cherry picker still loitering in the bottom corner:
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And here’s a rendering of another of the murals planned for the spot (Roses and Hearts on the Blue Sky by Nataliya Scheib), shown above the dollar-ish store’s signs as they previously appeared:
- Previously on Swamplot:Â Downtown Intersection Already Getting Jammed in Anticipation of Super Bowl Visitors;Â Crowdsourcing the Giant Trumpet Flower That Will Bloom at Main Street Square
Images:Â Art Blocks Houston (first photo and bottom rendering), Christof Spieler (2nd photo)
I’m all for public art but it’s a shame those panels on the building are there in the first place. What’s underneath those panels is a gorgeous building. http://www.houstondeco.org/1920s/krupp.html
that’s the armpit of dtown houston – ground zero
I’m agast at the beauty of the original building and the horror of the modernization of it. It looks like someone decided the 70s strip mall look was cool. Tear that shit off
Major improvement – needs to be more of this in so many drab parts of downtown Houston. There are many, many, giant, blank walls off Main (when looking from the restaurants, nightlife), where art could be painted or projected and/or illuminated.
Art is much less expensive than tearing down a wall and redoing a whole façade. Good luck trying to get owners to do that.
The cheapest way to put art on blank walls is to do a Rothko. Just say the blank wall is art and be done with it.
Just a Dollar 19¢ & Budget Food Store has been there since the early 1990s? That’s about 25 years too long…..
GL – I agree that those panels shamefully cover a beautiful building. Oddly, the building next door that is now a catholic church was restored to remove similar panels. That corner would look much nicer with restoration. It would probably only require the removal of panels and a spray wash.
Hobo – the armpit of downtown is 2 blocks south of this location in front of a competing dollar store. Drug use/dealing seems a bit more open there.
This sh*tty store brings down the whole street. You cannot walk past with out some crackhead asking you for change. HPD has to be there constantly to keep the vagrants in check. I wish the city would declare the whole place a nuisance and get it to shut down.
They definitely need to take down that blank facade to expose the original building like they did next door. Hopefully the exterior is not ruined like the bricks were for the JW Marriott downtown when they removed the awful cladding.
I used to work at the Chapel next door as a summer job and I’m really glad they restored it to at least a facade. I had no idea panels covered the original architecture above that dollar store. I used to run to that dollar store a few times a week for snacks, but man it was rough in there.