This pair of drive-by shots shows what remained on Tuesday of the Hyde Park building that until recently housed South and Central American craft store Corazon. After receiving a series of short-term lease extensions, the store’s owner Chris Murphy told Swamplot last October that he only had a month left in the space at 2318 Waugh Dr., which had housed the store since 1998 and served as a canvas for Houston’s fifth red dot on its Fairview-St. side. (It opened a year earlier on Montrose Blvd. a few blocks south of 59 in a spot within the former Gramercy Apartments that’s now occupied by the Museum Tower.)
Murphy began renting the blue and gray building that’s now collapsing for $650 a month over the discouragements of his friends, reported the Chronicle’s Ileana Najarro, who warned him of its location in “the middle of nowhere” and of the visibly lopsided posture it’d assumed over its 100-year lifespan. (Joke’s on them: the building, wrote Najarro, went on to survive 8 car crashes during the time Corazon was inside.) Harris County’s appraisal district dates its construction to around 1880. Since then, it’s done stints as a smithy, glass-blowing studio, antique store, general store, and furniture refinishing shop.
Once the dust has settled from the demolition, a set of 3 townhomes are set to rise in its place. Murphy plans to continue dealing products from South and Central American artists online.
- Previously on Swamplot: Corazon Is Leaving the Corner of Waugh and Fairview for Real This Time; Corazon Will Hang Around Montrose for a Few Months More Before Its Building Gets Smashed Up;Â Corazon Now Being Removed from Its Big Red Dot Spot at Waugh and Fairview
Photos: Grey Stephens
Little by little The Montrose is disappearing. Montrose without the funky and without the charming is dead Montrose.
Death by a thousand demolitions.
I remember when it was the furniture refinishing shop and David Beebe ran that biz. He had rager parties in his home on the NW corner of Hawthorne & Stanford. If any of those walls could talk…Oy Vey… :-)
Sad…Montrose is gone. I remember when it was a gas station.
May have been the oldest building left in the city. Wow.
Did Fairview exist before the Montrose neighborhood?
@ bill_b – Tell it brother… That is what makes Montrose THE Montrose. All for $$$..I strongly dislike all of the crappy new /recent town house builds and the realtors who profit off the sales… . The houses are totally DEVOID of any character, charm or integrity. They’re crappily built-just ask the people whose Town House roofs/roof top decks LEAKED onto the floor(s) below during /after Hurricane Harvey . BECAUSE the builder – including that big offender Vinod Ramini @ Urban Living and the almost 40 building companies he fronts .After which he markets the product. Which,like being on some freaky schedule, starts having “issues”: SYNTHETIC “stucco” starts cracking, mechanical issues, doors/windows stick /don’t open/close, et al. Then the For Sale signs re-appear .And those current owners BAIL… There are other builders just as guilty.. And they KNOW who they are. As I built quality production aka tract aka subdivision homes in the early 1980’s from Spring to Katy , I KNOW what I’m talking about. I tell buyers to EDUCATE themselves-take a course, get INFORMED It’s NOT about “luxury finishes” , oceans of granite and stainless appliances.. .After all , they’re committing to 6-7 figure mortgages.. I walk through a sampling of Under Construction structures and see , in plain sight, numerous MISTAKES and just plain SHODDY, CRAPPY building techniques.. I’d pass on 99.9% of the inventory available…
@ Glen W. The neighborhood where the Corazon building stood until recently is located in the Hyde Park neighborhood .. The Hyde Park Civic Asscn. was formed in 1893. If Fairview existed then or later it probably was a rough, rutted, bumpy, fricking dirt “lane” !!! The special interests only want to make $$$. They have no RESPECT for history and integrity. And most,if not all , of the new construction: residential, commercial,, retail is BORING, STERILE, BLAND, GENERIC , UNORIGINAL, etc. But this debate has been raging & ongoing since time immemorial… Hyde Park is 12 feet above downtown and was dotted with gorgeous old oak trees. The souls of which WILL haunt the half-assed GREEDY builders !!!
Fairview had a streetcar. Too bad that was demo’d too. Would add such great culture to our City, like New Orleans or San Francisco.