Photo of White Oak Music Hall: Marc Longoria via Swamplot Flickr Pool
Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
Signals coming in from Marconi, plus this Bayram blam:
That’s 50 pounds of the city’s own name-brand organic fertilizer — dubbed Hou-Actinite — in the photo above. Every Houston resident gets the urge to help produce it sometimes through contributions to the municipal sewer system — which eventually arrive at one of the 2 largest treatment facilities in the city: the 69th St. Wastewater Treatment Plant off Clinton Dr. near Wayside and Buffalo Bayou, or the Almeda Sims plant near W. Orem Dr. and Sims Bayou. There, the raw material is heated until dry, sterilized, and ground into pellets of what the city calls “Class-A” product; in other words: top-shelf stuff. About 32,000 tons of it are made each year and shipped off to nurseries, as well as bulk agricultural buyers.
It’s nothing new; the city patented the process back in 1949:
COMMENT OF THE DAY: CONGRESS AVE. COLLAPSE WAS A LONG TIME COMING 
“Yeah, if you look on the street view of the building prior to collapse: nice big cracks in the masonry, which looks like a double or single wythe on the front and triple wythe in the sides. All of the bracing for the masonry appears to be missing, too. (You can see the slots at the higher elevations for the roof joists, which would have acted as a diaphragm for the structure.) Kind of amazing it took this long to collapse. Guess last night’s winds were enough to push it over the edge.” [Purdueenginerd, commenting on The Impromptu Collapse of a Congress Ave. Strip’s Most Worn-Out Pioneer] Photo: Arch-ive
The vacant, red-brick building on Congress Ave. shown above just west of Bastrop St. demolished itself this morning, leaving a gap between its turn-of-the-century contemporaries to the south and the metal-roofed warehouse north of it. During its earlier days, the building’s second floor was rented to boarders — a typical setup in this section of the Second Ward, which remained “almost entirely residential,” according to historian Stephen Fox, until Union Station opened in 1911, prompting warehouse and industrial redos nearby.
For about the last decade, it’s been roofless:
  
A handful of building permits filed recently over at the Marq’e Entertainment Center indicate that kids training center Soccer Hub is kicking off renovations directly behind the spot reserved for the new Spaghetti-Warehouse-like eatery the brand’s parent company is calling Warehouse 72. Together, both new venues will be taking over the space Korean buffet Kpop gave up last year on the shopping center’s non-movie-theater side, across the arch-fronted alley from Dave and Buster’s‘s almost-but-not-entirely standalone building. (There’s now a mystery-themed escape room up in its business, as indicated on the map above.)
It’s not an entirely even split: Soccer Hub is getting about 6,000 sq.-ft. while Warehouse 72 will have 8,600 — enough room for seating, prepared food retail fixtures, and a double-sided bar serving both the restaurant’s insides and a planned 750-sq.-ft. patio, reports Eater‘s Alaena Hostetter. Until the 2 get situated — or get beat to the punch by the Hugh O’Connors Irish-themed restaurant opening in space number 25 on the map —specialty soda and candy shop Rocket Fizz will remain the only thing inside the Marq’e’s center building. It’s been there by itself since Cafe Adobe closed in what’s shown on the map as spot number 26, leaving 10,000 sq.-ft. up for grabs.
Photo of Bayou City Art Festival at Hermann Square: Marc Longoria via Swamplot Flickr Pool
Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
Swiftly fly the years.
Looking east from what’s now the top of the soon-to-be-7 story Giorgetti Condo midrise on Steel St., you get a real eyeful of the planned 32-stories taller Hanover River Oaks apartment tower that’s rising next to it (and a glimpse at 2727 Kirby in the distance). Both unfinished buildings are going up on the northern half of what used to be the Kirby Court Apartments and together will occupy almost the entire block south of the former West Ave retail and apartment complex that’s recently made quite a new name for itself as “The Shops at Arrive.” A handful of houses and retail buildings along Kipling St. — including the Becks Prime on the corner of Kirby — are the only veterans sticking around.
A look in the opposite direction shows the Giorgetti’s bald head backed by neighboring townhouses along Virginia St.:
ARMY CORPS TO HOUSTON: IS THIS UNFUNDED PLAN FOR AN IKE DIKE SOMETHING YOU COULD GET BEHIND? 
Last Friday the Army Corps picked a favorite from among the 4 massive coastal defense plans it’d been studying — all variants of ideas Rice and A&M researchers proposed following Ike and said Houston needed to build in order to stand a chance against the next gigantic hurricane. The chosen one — a $23 to $31 billion undertaking — suggests constructing new levees that’d span all of both Galveston Island and of Bolivar Peninsula, upgrading Galveston’s existing seawall, and tying the whole thing together with a giant gate between the 2 islands that’d prevent storm surge from shooting the gap between them and entering the Ship Channel. A so-called “ring levee” — indicated above in red — would also shield Galveston’s backside from high water retreating back into the Gulf after a storm. For 75 days, the Corps will be taking comments on the plan in writing, or in person at any of the 6 public meetings it plans to host in November and December. Once the plan is finalized, “it will be eligible for congressional funding” — reports the Texas Tribune‘s Kiah Collier — “a phase with no deadline that many think could take years.” [Texas Tribune; full Corps study; previously on Swamplot] Map: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
Here’s another highlight from the city council’s meeting this morning: Plans to get rid of the cloverleaf interchange that moves traffic between Waugh Dr. and Memorial Dr. got the green-light and will be sent over to the Houston Galveston Area Council as part of an application for funding. The idea first emerged in the Buffalo Bayou Partnership’s 2002 Master Plan as a way to make room for more bayou-side park space at the crossroads. Right now, all the land adjacent to the ramps — shaded gray in the map above — is vacant, except for the portions lassoed by the circular roadways, where 4 isolated tree groves continue to undergo seasonal color changes. You can see they’re gone in the east-facing rendering at top included in the Partnership’s plan — replaced by inlets, islands, stormwater detention, and what looks to be a boathouse at the southeast corner of the 2 roads — all accessible from a network of new walkways that link up to existing bayou-adjacent trails.
In total, 16 new acres are expected to become part of the park — providing a continuous swath of green between Spotts Park and Cleveland Park, shown below on opposite sides of Waugh in a map from the 2002 plan:
PAVING THE WAY FOR A BIKE LANE ON W. FUQUA 
This morning, City Council plans to vote in support of some roadwork that’d add on-street bike lanes to W. Fuqua St. between Chimney Rock and Houston’s border with Missouri City, just west of Fondren Rd. Over that 1.7-mile stretch — which crosses over the Fort Bend Pkwy. — a couple upgrades for cars would be put in as well, including turning lanes at Fondren and traffic lights at W. Ridgecreek Dr. in place of what’s now a 3-way stop. It’s all lumped into that application the city plans to submit to the Houston Galveston Area Council in order to get funding for a bunch of other transportation projects around town, too, like that widening and heightening effort on Dairy Ashford. [Houston City Council; previously on Swamplot]
Photo of O’Quinn Medical Tower: Russell Hancock via Swamplot Flickr Pool
