Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
Don’t judge too harshly, the competition is tough.
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- 3215 Virginia St. [HAR]
Here’s the raw scene captured around lunch time today, when a small pack of excavators was sighted rooting through the debris at the base of the former Corporate Plaza I midrise. The increasingly see-through office building was fully de-striped some time between yesterday (second photo) and noon today (top); below is a quick video of the excavator crew gently yanking down a piece of what appears to be the 4th-story floor:Â
Break Another Little Piece
EL REY’S OAK FOREST LEASE IS UP AT THE END OF THE YEAR 
The site plan for the 33 1/3 @ Thirtyfourth retail development [which — disclosure — has been sponsoring Swamplot for part of this week] shows new construction directly on top of El Rey Taqueria’s Oak Forest branch at the corner of W. 34th St. and Ella Blvd.  Crescere Capital bought the land beneath the drive-thru Cuban-Mexican taqueria-coffee-house last April, though the company has been collecting other parcels on both sides of 34th east of Ella since at least early 2014. As of now, El Rey’s lease is scheduled to run out in December, before a scheduled January construction start for the retail center. El Rey currently operates 3 other locations: along Washington Ave., along Hwy. 6 south of 290, and across I-10 from Memorial City Mall. Photo of El Rey at 3330 Ella Blvd.: Stephen G.
If you missed yesterday’s big introduction of 33 1/3 @ Thirtyfourth, no worries — the 2.5-acre retail development coming to Garden Oaks and Oak Forest is Swamplot’s Sponsor of the Day again today, and you’ll find all the details right here. Thanks for supporting this site!
Wasn’t somebody telling us a while back that Oak Forest lacked retail excitement? Well, take a look at what Crescere Capital Management has in store for the intersection of 34th St. and Ella Blvd., where each day close to 50,000 cars pass by, on their way to and from Garden Oaks and Oak Forest: a 29,000-sq.-ft. (or so) multi-tenant retail center on the southeast corner.
The project’s (uh, record-setting) name is 33 1/3 @ Thirtyfourth. The design team is being led by architects Peter Merwin and Ted Rubenstein of the Houston office of Gensler. Broker Tony Armstrong of leasing firm A. A. Armstrong will be working to fill up the new development. Crescere’s Chris Hotze is probably best known to GOOFers as the developer (and still the owner) of The Shops at Oak Forest a few blocks north at 43rd St., which is home both to Plonk! and a Starbucks drive-thru.
What kind of retail is going to go in at 33 1/3 @ Thirtyfourth? Hotze says his team has “reached out to the neighborhood to find out what they are looking for. There are certainly tenants looking to go into a high-caliber center, and that is the market segment that we seek to fill.†Merwin says he sees it as a “neighborhood center with hip, ‘aspirational’ retail . . . a place where parents, children, and neighbors connect with their community on a daily basis.â€
Construction is scheduled to begin in January 2017.
Swamplot’s Sponsors of the Day get attention. Find out how you can participate in the program here.
Sponsor of the Day
A mid-day shot from the Starbucks at the intersection of S. Main St. and Buffalo Spdwy. shows the new fencing now up around the 4-and-a-half-ish acres boxing in the coffee drive-thru. The snapping reader says the lot was cleared out and fenced off last week, a little more than a year after the America’s Best Value Inn and its abandoned grocery-and-nightclub strip center friend were demolished in the name of Lovett. Here’s a peek through the chain link at the palm-lined lot:
S. Main
The blue all over the Mecom Fountain on Monday signaled the start of the now-fully-funded work to undo the damage to the 1960s monument caused by the quickly-backtracked application of limestone panels to its exterior earlier this spring. Also on the docket, as the panel damage gets fully repaired: another restoration, this one using architect Eugene Werlin’s original plans (which the fundraising group Friends of the Fountain says it found in a Houston parks department office).
The group says workers are using historically appropriate materials, including Cocoon brand liquid polymer coating (to be layered over the blue primer on the exterior) and Moon Dust plaster (to line the insides of the basins). Here’s a look at parts of the 1964 architectural drawings, which call for Cocoon in the notes:
Drained on Main
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- Houston Home Values Rising at Slower Rate Amid Oil Slump, Finds Harris County Appraisal District [HBJ]
- What $2,000 a Month in Rent Gets You Inside the Loop Versus Out in Houston [Houston Chronicle]
- An Aerial View of Bridgeland, the Third-Largest Residential Community in Houston by Acreage [HBJ]
- Slideshow: A Look Back at the Rice Building Downtown in Honor of Its 103rd Birthday [Houston Chronicle]
- Central Market at Westheimer and Weslayan To Undergo $10M Renovation To Add 10K SF [Houston Chronicle]
- Third Houston Location of Jerry Built Burgers Opening May 30 in Memorial City [Houston Chronicle]
- Peli Peli Opening New Location in LaCenterra at Cinco Ranch [HBJ]
- What Houston Can Learn from New York City About Becoming More Bike- and Pedestrian-Friendly [Houston Chronicle]
- Houston Now About 424K Residents Behind Chicago, on Track To Becoming Third-Largest U.S. City in About 10 Years [Chicago Tribune]
- FEMA Has Paid More Than $3B for Flood Losses in Metropolitan Houston Since 1998 [AP]
- Flash Flood Watch in Effect for Southeast Texas Today from 10 a.m. to Midnight [abc13]
Photo of Smith Street: elnina via Swamplot Flickr Pool
Headlines
Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
It will be the excavator’s way or the highway for these select few.
- 51 Robinlake Ln. [HAR]
The above heatmap showing where city parking tickets are most frequently issued is one result of an in-progress project by biology major and urban data enthusiast Jordan Poles. Areas shaded red mark where the tickets fall heaviest, while green areas see a lighter citation rain. Grey areas are not ticket-free — rather, the colored regions represent notable clusters of ticket activity (including Downtown, Montrose, Fourth Ward, Midtown, the Museum District, and the Rice Village).
Fine Maps
The semi-shrouded Houston Heights Beverage Coalition released a statement today filling in some details on the group’s plan to legalize take-home beer and wine sales in the Heights’ dry zone. The initiative was floated quietly on Cinco de Mayo by way of 109-word newspaper legal notice; the group’s longer press release clarifies that it will try to collect around 1,500 signatures in 60 days to call a special election for residents of the no-longer-a-city of Houston Heights. That election wouldn’t change the zone’s ban on liquor sales (or the need for a private-club-workaround for folks intent on selling it anyway), but would allow grocery stores to get in on the alcoholic action.
Coalition chair Steve Reilley tells the Houston Press‘s Phaedra Cook that H-E-B supports the measure — adding that the chain is probably going to move into the area if the change passes. Reilley also says that other grocery chains are involved with the coalition, but doesn’t tell Cook which ones.
Taking Names
COMMENT OF THE DAY: WHAT THE FORMER HEIGHTS POST OFFICE SPOT WON’T TURN INTO 
“11th St. is a thoroughfare. So is Yale St. . . . There is no street parking in that area. That really nice old town feel of 20th St. (19th?) is not something you can replicate here — that is a shopping/ restaurant district with grandfathered-in diagonal parking spaces and a road wide enough to accommodate it. If you want another town-center-type development, someone will have to build it (and acquire a lot more property than this space here). Typically, those historical main streets can’t be artificially manufactured. Just appreciate the one you have and be happy they didn’t build a 500-bed apartment complex next to your house.” [Commenter7, commenting on A Peek at What’s Up Next Once the Former Heights Post Office Comes Down] Rendering of planned Heights Central Station shopping center: MFT Interests
Today’s Sponsor of the Day post introduces 33 1/3 @ Thirtyfourth, a 2.5-acre retail development coming to Garden Oaks and Oak Forest. Thanks for supporting Swamplot!
Wasn’t somebody telling us a while back that Oak Forest lacked retail excitement? Well, take a look at what Crescere Capital Management is announcing today for the intersection of 34th St. and Ella Blvd., where each day close to 50,000 cars pass by, on their way to and from Garden Oaks and Oak Forest: a 29,000-sq.-ft. (or so) multi-tenant retail center on the southeast corner.
The project’s (uh, record-setting) name is 33 1/3 @ Thirtyfourth. The design team is being led by architects Peter Merwin and Ted Rubenstein of the Houston office of Gensler. Broker Tony Armstrong of leasing firm A. A. Armstrong will be working to fill up the new development. Crescere’s Chris Hotze is probably best known to GOOFers as the developer (and still the owner) of The Shops at Oak Forest a few blocks north at 43rd St., which is home both to Plonk! and a Starbucks drive-thru.
What kind of retail is going to go in at 33 1/3 @ Thirtyfourth? Hotze says his team has “reached out to the neighborhood to find out what they are looking for. There are certainly tenants looking to go into a high caliber center, and that is the market segment that we seek to fill.” Merwin says he sees it as a “neighborhood center with hip, ‘aspirational’ retail . . . a place where parents, children, and neighbors connect with their community on a daily basis.â€
Construction is scheduled to begin in January 2017.
Got an announcement of your own for Swamplot readers? They’ll be looking for it — if you sign up to be a Swamplot Sponsor of the Day.
Sponsor of the Day
On the agenda for tomorrow’s meeting of the University of Houston’s board of regents: a who-can-sign-for-it approval for the purchase of a 46-acre property in Katy, about a 10-minute drive from the 10-acre Cinco Ranch property the school is hoping to sell later this year.  The land occupies half of the big round tract at the northeast corner of I-10 and the Grand Pkwy. once slated to become Simon Property’s The Grand. That land was sold in 2014 to Moody-controlled Parkside Capital, which had been marketing it as a mixed-use office development called Verde Parc; if all goes according to the terms laid out in a late-April letter of intent describing the sale terms, the area will be rebranded as University Park (currently the name of the street the Cinco Ranch property sits on, at the intersection with S. Mason Dr.).
The Gensler site plan above appears in the notes that go along with tomorrow’s board vote; another aerial map clarifies that the University is buying the top half of the circle, not the bottom parcels:
Campus Parking
