Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
These properties will soon be ousted from their rule.
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- 59 Northgate Dr. [HAR]
The new home of homeless services center SEARCH opened at 2015 Congress Ave. this morning, next to the Loaves & Fishes soup kitchen and across 59 from Minute Maid Park. The 27,105-sq.-ft. facility’s design has been greened up since last summer‘s pass-around of renderings for the space — in addition to the color on the exterior walls, renewable energy company and regular grocery-store-front proselytizers Green Mountain Energy footed the bill for some solar paneling and other energy-efficient upgrades. Operations at the organization’s fifties-mod space on McGowen St. (which got that unintentional contemporary update to its facade back in 2014) will end around June 24th.Â
Below is a recent-but-still-mid-construction look at the new building from the corner of Franklin and St. Emanuel streets, showing the structure in place across Congress from the Cheek-Neal Coffee building, (which, unlike the homeless services building, appears to be explicitly spared by some of TxDOT’s potential future freeway expansion plans):
Congress at St. Emanuel
COMMENT OF THE DAY: HOW TO CLOTHE INDECENT EXPOSURE OF HOUSTON’S CONFEDERATE TIES 
“Build a museum around it. Stop erasing our shameful past and start putting it in context.” [Memebag, commenting on Downtown’s Naked Confederate Birdman Unflapped By Renamings] Photo of the Spirit of the Confederacy statue in Sam Houston Park: Gabrielle Banks
TYPHOON TEXAS BOUNCES BACK FROM CHRISTIAN YOUTH LOCK-IN DISASTER 
Dennis Spellman has details on the chaotic scene that forced Katy’s Typhoon Texas waterpark, barely 2 weeks off of its mid-flood Memorial Day weekend opening, to shut down just 2 hours into an overnight youth lock-in sponsored by local Christian radio station KSBJ’s parent company. Spellman writes that Friday’s event quickly “turned into an out-of-control melee” that led to the park removing the group in the middle of the night; in addition to reports of violence and drug use among the 5,000 estimated attendees, witnesses tell Spellman that the teens disrupted the scheduled musical performances by throwing water at sound equipment, and rioted in the park’s pools before being ejected by police around 1:30am. The company says park staff worked through the night to clean up and was open by Saturday morning as regularly scheduled. [Covering Katy; previously on Swamplot] Aerial photo of Typhoon Texas at 555 Katy Fort Bend Rd.: Typhoon Texas
The spot Braun Enterprises has been sprucing up at 1815 Washington Ave appears to have been leased out last week to the folks behind the Texas expansion of Tennessee’s Gus’s World Famous Fried Chicken. Documents filed with the county show that an entity called Texas All Fry (registered to the address of the Gus’s location in Austin) signed for the space on Wednesday. Pandora and Throne Ultra Lounge are among the latest in the succession of night clubs and bars to have recently occupied the late-1940s structure, which sits across the street from B&B Butchers.
The above rendering (from the same leasing flier that accidentally leaked word of H-E-B’s negotiations for the Archstone Apartments spot at the corner of Washington and Heights Blvd.) shows the front facade with a new patio and a few more windows. A careful look at the building’s past listing photos show that some of the apparent reshaping may actually involve the un-bricking of some former doorways:Â
Coming to Roost
Swamplot is brought to you today by the new townhomes at 938 W. 22nd St. in Shady Acres, namely Unit B, Unit C, and Unit D. (Sorry, Unit A is under contract.) We sure appreciate the support!
What makes these modern townhomes built by Uptown Houston Development different from others in Shady Acres? You can see it in the top photo above: a second-floor atrium-style indoor-outdoor living space with large windows facing into the entry landing and an entrance through 10-ft.-tall 3-panel sliding glass doors into the main (indoor) living area. It’s the focus of the entire mid-level floor plan. The top floor includes the master suite and a second bedroom; a third is just off the entry on the first floor.
This part of Shady Acres is convenient to the 610 Loop and I-10. Wright-Bembry Park is on the same block; Crisp is a block away and Cedar Creek 2 blocks. But the burgeoning restaurant scene along Shepherd Dr. has made the neighborhood much more walkable. The sweet shopping center containing Fat Cat Creamery and Hugs & Donuts is 3 blocks away; newcomers such as Hunky Dory and Southern Goods are another block to the south; travel a few more blocks to the east and you’ll be in the thick of the Houston Heights’ 19th St. shopping district. The 365 Whole Foods Market planned for Yale St. at 610 will be a mile and a half away.
Find out more about these homes’ finishes and energy-efficient features on the separate property websites for each: Unit B, Unit C, and Unit D. To learn about the buyer incentive currently being offered, contact the listing agent with Berkshire Hathaway Homeservices Anderson Properties, Lauren Friese. And if you’d like to take a tour in person, stop by 938 W. 22nd St. between 1 and 4 pm on either Saturday or Sunday, this coming weekend or the next, for an open house.Â
Sponsors help keep Swamplot’s pixels burning bright. If you’d like to become one, please lookie here.
Sponsor of the Day
Architect Paul Kweton sends his idea for a multi-deck observation tower for Buffalo Bayou Park, adding to the list of unsolicited but interesting projects dreamed up for the public space. The plans and drawings show stairs spiraling continuously upward around a central elevator shaft, enclosed only by a giant net-like facade (as well as a smaller actual net preventing visitors from exploring the exterior of the structure).
Kweton has 2 potential locations in mind — the rendering above shows the tower on the lawn in Eleanor Tinsley Park, across the bayou from the now open Cistern (the long-defunct 1920s subterranean city water reservoir turned found-art piece and potential exhibit space).  The alternative spot is a little further west across Allen Pkwy., near the 1920s Gillette St. waste-incinerator site sold last year year for redevelopment into the Broadstone Tinsley Park Apartments:
Dreamt Up Near Downtown
- Land Tejas Cos. Breaks Ground on New Residential Community Called Balmoral Near Generation Park [HBJ]
- Crews Relocating Trees Ahead of Uptown Dedicated Bus Lanes Construction Next Month [Houston Chronicle; previously on Swamplot]
- Serendipity Labs Suit-and-Tie-Set Coworking Space Headed to Esperson Building, More Houston-Area Sites [Houston Chronicle]
- AllTransit Report Highlights the Catch-22 of Bus Service to Houston’s Suburbs [Houston Chronicle]
- Videos: What It Was Like to Ride the Rides of AstroWorld [Houston Press]
- David Crossley: In Houston’s Mobility Future, the Car Can No Longer Be King [Houston Chronicle]
- Are We in a Mattress Store Bubble? [Freakonomics]
Photo of Galvez: Russell Hancock via Swamplot Flickr Pool
Headlines
Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
These intriguing renovation projects are starting from the ground up.
- 35 Sutton Mill Pl. [HAR]
WHY THAT ONE HOME IN THE BRAZOS FLOOD ZONE DIDN’T FLOOD Meanwhile, in Abbeville: The giant water-filled tubes of California-based AquaDam are getting some love from a homeowner with property near last week’s mandatory evacuation zone south of Houston. Upon hearing the Brazos River Authority’s flood predictions, Randy Wagner says he drove to the company’s Louisiana headquarters to pick up the 400-ft.-long structure, and deployed it around his house in Rosharon: “I was the crazy guy,” Wagner told KHOU. “Everybody was kinda going by, laughing at me. But today they are really impressed . . . †The dams are marketed most heavily for construction purposes, but also as a replacement for sandbag barricades in flood situations. Notable past deployments include the Ft. Calhoun Nuclear Generating Station in Blair, Nebraska where the dams successfully kept out 2 ft. of water from the nuclear plant during flooding in 2011 — until the AquaDam was accidentally popped. [KHOU, New York Times]
Following this week’s report from the HBJ that the Loews hotel chain is currently considering an Uptown locale, a sharp-eyed reader points to a lot previously marked for 2 more towers to keep the BBVA Compass building company, just north of 2200 Post Oak Blvd. The land has been owned by Loews since 2014 (or by someone using the address of the company’s NYC headquarters); a tipster separately tells Swamplot that the company has been pricing out construction work on that particular spot, though nothing was official as of mid-May.
Architecture firm Ziegler Cooper has posted some renderings (including the one above) of a mixed use project apparently designed for the same BBVA-adjacent land (though labeled only as Confidential Hotel & Mixed Used Development). TRC Capital (formerly The Redstone Company) currently has some very similar renderings more prominently displayed on its website, once again labeling the residential piece of the project as the Perennial Hotel and Apartments, along with another office tower marked as 2100 Post Oak:
Newly Perennial
The flags have been lowered in front of the former N. Shepherd home of Fiesta Mart, now several days along on its journey toward pre-redevelopment flatness. A reader sends more photos of the action from yesterday afternoon, showing the demolition team munching its way east through the building:
Heights Dry Zone
Chronicle reporter Gabrielle Banks snaps a fresh photo of the Spirit of the Confederacy, the well-labeled century-old statue standing around by the lake on the west side of Sam Houston Park (near the split of Allen Pkwy. into Lamar and Walker streets downtown).  The statue’s placement was funded in 1908 by Houston’s still-active Robert E. Lee chapter of the national United Daughters of the Confederacy and is inscribed to “all heroes of the South who fought for the principles of states rights.” Despite the statue’s unambiguous Confederate sympathies and nearness to City Hall, the bronze statue has largely flown beneath the radar of the past year’s scrutiny of Houston school and street names.
Sam Houston Park
