05/24/17 3:30pm

It doesn’t take effect until August — but a new sales permit looks to have been okayed last month for 160 W. Gray St., bearing the name The Ginger Man – West Gray. The Rice Village bar has previously established outposts in locales as far-flung as Austin, Dallas, and Plano (and claims a somewhat looser connection to a trio of spots in New York and Connecticut), but a West Gray location would be the chain’s second spot inside the Loop(s). That spot, meanwhile, is still the home of Junction Bar & Grill, just north of the W. Gray Y with Webster St. — though the building itself (shown above) was listed for lease on LoopNet earlier this spring. Prior to the turn of the decade, the space previously went by The Wet Spot. 

A recent-ish photo from the lease listing (above) shows off the wrapping up of the Dolce Living apartments next door.  Not pictured, just beyond the duo of homes visible to the east below: the charred skeleton of Fuzzy’s Tacos, which was cleared out some time after its November flameout. 

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Midtown Fourth Ward Junction
05/24/17 12:00pm

Today our sponsor is the home at 2711 Morrison St. in Woodland Heights, which is being offered for sale by Norhill Realty. Thanks for supporting Swamplot!

Designed and built by award-winning design-build firm StudioMET — aka AIA Houston’s 2016 Firm of the Year — this custom home blends modern design with family-focused spaces both inside and out. In addition to the 3206-sq.-ft. main house, there’s also a 1122-sq.-ft., 1-bedroom guest quarters with a full kitchen and its own private entrance.

The Woodland Heights location — just a block off White Oak Blvd. — is convenient for active Houstonians. Before taking a short commute Downtown, you can swim a few laps in your 62-ft. pool, lay out on the sun deck, or go for a jog along the White Oak hike-and-bike trail.

It’s also a home for entertaining: Built on a 10,000-sq.-ft. double lot, this property includes a covered patio, sun deck, 3 balconies, and a landscaped back yard — plenty of space to host guests. And the separate guest quarters means out-of-town visitors can stay longer and more comfortably.

Start the day with your family in the island kitchen within the open-floor-plan main living area. Features include a glass-tile backsplash, granite countertops, a walk-in pantry, a stainless-steel Jenn-Air range, a built-in Miele coffee system, and a 4-stool breakfast bar.

The home is listed as a 3-bedroom, but the floor plan provides flexibility: You’ll find 2 additional rooms — currently being used as an indoor gym and a design studio. Both can be adapted to your specific needs.

Additional photos, a walk-through video, and listing details are available at norhillrealty.com.  If you are interested in more information or would like to schedule a showing, contact Vincent Biondillo at 713-449-2416 — or email him at vincent@norhillrealty.com. To keep up with Norhill Realty’s latest listings and real estate tips, follow up on the Norhill Realty Facebook page or check out the Norhill Realty website.

Show Swamplot readers what you’ve got going on. Become a Sponsor of the Day.

Sponsor of the Day
05/24/17 11:30am


The paved lot now being marketed as 1818 Washington Ave. (across Silver St. from that recently recolonized cluster of ex-nightclub buildings, and bookended to the east by the former bakery now housing B&B Butchers) appears to be marked for some higher purposes, per recently released leasing materials for the property. Plans on Lovett Commercial’s flier for the site show 2 structures (rendered above as things might look from Washington Ave., facing toward Tacodeli) that pretty much fill up the whole piece of land — but fear not, parking-requirement hawks! The land directly north of the property, a 2-block elongated space nestled mostly between Center St. and a stretch of Union Pacific railroad, is marked up to become a 4-plus-acre surface lot, with room for 542 cars or so; that’d likely more than make up for the parking spaces that B&B would lose, too.

That’s the apparent plan for now, anyway — the flier does point out that some kind of garage structure is probably on the table for later on. As for the yet-unbuilt spaces for lease: The site plans show an L-shaped 2-story building, plus a smaller, squatter freestanding restaurant space tucked back along the corner of Silver and Center. The larger structure has spots marked off for a couple of upstairs patios, as well as office use: 

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Parking Restructure
05/24/17 8:30am

Photo of the George R. Brown Convention Center: Russell Hancock via Swamplot Flickr Pool

Headlines
05/23/17 3:45pm

‘666 GET OUT’ HOUSE DRAWS IN A BUYER ANYWAY The 3-bedroom, 2-bath house up in Longview, TX, listed with spooky pronouncements like “666” and “GET OUT” smeared into the veneer of dirt in its kitchen (as recently seen on Swamplot’s Home Listing Photo of the Day feature) — was sold last week  “to a buyer over the phone who had never seen the property in person, just the online listing,” Heather Leighton of the Chronicle reports. The cryptic messages, which turned out to be pretty killer marketing, were put in place by the previous owners to deter break-ins. Although seller Amy Tabor of H5 Auction and Realty says the writing initially creeped her out, it did not deter her from selling the house to the highest bidder at last Monday’s auction (which started at $2,500). The company’s Facebook note about the home, which made no secret of the property’s decaying, peeling “fixer upper” conditions, simply urged buyers to “channel your inner Joanna Gaines” —- and received 88 percent more action than a normal post for the company. [Houston Chronicle; previously on Swamplot] Photo of 642 Sylvan Dr.: HAR

05/23/17 2:00pm

COMMENT OF THE DAY: ASPIRATIONAL HOUSTON DEVELOPMENT NAMING JUST AIN’T WHAT IT USED TO BE ‘Heights creep’ is to the 2010s what ‘River Oaks creep’ was to the 1980s/90s. Back in the 90s when I was living in a (moderately crappy) apartment near the corner of Kirby and Westheimer, anything between Buffalo Bayou, the West Loop, US-59 and Montrose might have been referred to as River Oaks. Hell, even the River Oaks Shopping Center isn’t even actually in River Oaks.” [Angostura, commenting on Putting the Heights Back In Its . . . Uh, Places; previously on Swamplot] Photo: River Oaks Theater

05/23/17 1:00pm

The Dallas-based real estate and restaurant developers at Syn Hospitality Group are hoping to have a Houston branch of flag-slathered bar and restaurant America Gardens open later this year (as rendered above), part of their in-the-works Midtown Common development over on Caroline St. just north of McGowen. The group went after some early city approvals earlier this year to bundle together a handful of property parcels on the block into the edgy unreserved shape shown above. That footprint, mostly sticking along Caroline but stretching across to claim a bit of frontage on Austin St. as well, leaves out the buildings occupied by Core Church Midtown, which is squeezed between the auto and auto accessory pairing of Fast Traffic Auto Work and Austin Radio and Speedometer. 

The group has released a few renderings of the first planned restaurant’s red-white-and-blue-bedecked interior, as well as its large outdoor patio:

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Dallas Comes to Austin St.
05/23/17 10:15am

New scribbles on a siteplan show a Sprouts Farmers Market marked in as a tenant for the planned redo of the former East Downtown Houston Post building over on Polk St. at Dowling Emancipation Ave. (Don’t get this spot confused with the former postal office Downtown, which is also being redeveloped by the Lovett Commercial folks — nor with the other former Houston Post building recently resuscitated by the Chronicle.) The leasing plan appears to show some new construction toward the currently empty Bell St. end of the double-wide block, making room for the Sprouts and for a few layers of parking garage. It also notes a drive-thru CVS on the northern side, along Polk:

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East of East Village
05/23/17 8:30am

Photo: Marc Longoria via Swamplot Flickr Pool

Headlines
05/22/17 4:45pm

PUTTING THE HEIGHTS BACK IN ITS . . . UH, PLACES “In their rush to capitalize on the popularity of the district, businesses and developers have awkwardly assumed the mantle of the name ‘Heights,’ even though they’re clearly outside the zone of its accepted borders,” writes Jeff Balke this morning for the Houston Press. Where exactly are those accepted borders? And which variation means what? Balke suggests something between a taxonomical scheme and an etiquette lesson on selecting the proper name for whatever flavor of Heights, Heights-adjacent and Heights-aspiring territory you may be seeking to invoke — from the historic city originally spurring the name, all the way to the fringe territories of Katyville and the Heights Walmart. [Houston Press; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Swamplot inbox

05/22/17 2:30pm

COMMENT OF THE DAY: I AM A METRO RIDER, I CONTAIN MULTITUDES “There are valid reasons for the increase in boardings, which sound like a lot but are only +4.65 percent year-over-year. FYI — a boarding is counted every time that a person steps across the threshold of a transit vehicle . . . To put things in perspective, that means that if I’m a park-and-ride commuter and I have to make 2 transfers each way every day of a 5-day work week to get where I’m going, I count for 30 boardings per week and 1,500 boardings per fifty-workweek year. It’d only take 60,000 of me to account for all of METRO’s users. That isn’t to try to generalize about their user base, but it is to demonstrate that not all boardings are created equal, and that the circumstances of even some modest fraction of super-users can easily help to make these big numbers possible.” [TheNiche, commenting on First Signs of This Year’s Sargassum Seaweed Invasion; Houston’s Top Crime Spots]