- 265 Promenade St. [HAR]
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Here’s a peek from Colquitt St. at the early stages of the new science and healthcare center shooting up where the University of St. Thomas’s athletics fields used to be. Construction kicked off back in November, and at least part of the complex is expected to be ready for action some time in 2017. First off the line in Phase I should be the nursing school, along with the biology and chemistry departments.
No signs yet on the site of the winding astronomy tower that appears to be floating up through a hole in the trellis canopy enclosing the complex’s central courtyard, in the renderings from EYP. The planned tower would send students spiraling up above the center’s roof to an astronomy observation deck. The glassy base of the structure is shown hovering above a water feature:
To Astronomical Heights
IMAGINING A PEOPLE-FRIENDLY ALLEN PKWY. CROSSING 
“Texas is not a safe place to walk and bike,” writes Allyn West on OffCite this morning, taking a closer look at one of the entries released by architects at Gensler as part of a January exhibition of speculative design projects for neglected sites and structures around Houston. The Integrated Urbanism plan sets a towering mixed-use commercial and residential development on a narrow 11-acre plot of land along Buffalo Bayou; the entire complex is sewn together by a zig-zagging “park link,” which connects areas of greenspace and culminates in a bridge across Allen Pkwy. into the Buffalo Bayou trail system. West notes that projects in Houston can only do so much to make themselves pedestrian-friendly if pedestrians can’t get to those spaces: “Even our best mixed-use projects tend to be islands — walkable from within, once you arrive, but disconnected from the city. Houston, it seems, is good at fences, less so at bridges.“ [OffCite] Rendering of Integrated Urbanism from Buffalo Bayou Park: Gensler
COMMENT OF THE DAY: JOCKEYING FOR POSITION IN HOUSTON’S VERTICAL FUTURE 
“77004: THE new construction hotspot for townhomes, low/mid/highrises . . . Of course , the funny part is all of the leasing/real estate agents are going to tout the “views†from their respective buildings — which will probably get blocked by newer highrises. Just like on Post Oak Blvd., between Loop 610 and San Felipe Rd: The Hanover highrise apartment building had killer views south down Post Oak to the Galleria. Now Randall Davis built another awful high rise: the Astoria, which has some heinous, cheap-looking aluminum “crown†on top. And Interfin is completing its Four Leaf Place tower #5, where 24 Hour Fitness used to be . . . That stretch of Post Oak is becoming crowded. Thank Goodness my dentist’s office on the upper floors of the Wells Fargo Tower is on the NORTH side of the tower. Sitting in the chair, his patients have unobstructed views north over Tanglewood (which can never be built up) . . . Anyway, Houston keeps growing by leaps and bounds. Change: get in front of it, go with it, or get left behind. [Padraig, commenting on Strip Center Art Gallery Makes Room for Installation of Highrise in Museum Park] Illustration: Lulu
Today’s Sponsor of the Day is the wine-storage experts at Nos Caves Vin. Thanks for your support of Swamplot, NCV!
Nos Caves Vin provides “downstream” services for discerning wine collectors. Secure, climate-controlled wine storage is available at 2 locations: one in the Rice Village and the other in the Memorial City area. Each facility also accepts deliveries, has a private lounge, and is available for private tastings.
For storage at your property, NCV Custom Wine Rooms can bring your dream wine room to life. The team has years of experience designing and building award-winning custom wine rooms in both residential and commercial spaces. NCV’s work can be found in ranches in the hills of Boerne, in homes on Lake Travis, in highrises in Houston and The Woodlands, and in gorgeous homes throughout Houston, San Antonio, and Austin. The company also features a unique racking showroom, where you can discover the type of storage that best suits your needs. NCV repairs defective wine rooms as well.
Nos Caves Vin provides a full suite of wine collection management services — including inventory, packing, transporting, and short-term storage — and is an authorized installer for eSommelier.
If you’re interested in racking up interest in your company’s offerings, consider becoming a Swamplot Sponsor of the Day. Check out this page to find out more.
Sponsor of the Day
Greystar plans to squeeze a 375-unit apartment highrise on the same 1.35 acre lot at 6750 S. Main St. as an in-the-works hotel from Medistar. That Medistar project, which was originally planned as a 220-unit hotel-slash-apartment building on the same spot, will now be a 357-room just-hotel, and will share a lobby with Greystar’s apartment tower on the southern half of the block between Travis St. and S. Main at Old Main St. (across the street from the Texas Women’s University building.)
The two towers (rendered above styled as 1850, seemingly in reference to the Old Main address) will slip in between a Best Western and a Wyndham Hotel, and would total in the neighborhood of 800,000 sq.ft. of floorspace, Greystar’s David Reid tells the HBJ’s Cara Smith. The apartment unit floorplans range significantly in size— the largest 2 suites measure in around 3,800 sq.ft., and the smallest bottom out at an Ivy-Lofts-esque 349 sq.ft.
Old Main St. at Main St.
- Southwest Houston Charity Sues Landlord for Not Making Repairs Following Memorial Day Flooding [Fox 26]
- Katy City Hall Delayed by Late Doors and Roofing Materials [Community Impact]
- ‘Cook & Collins’ To Be Replaced by ‘Stoked Tacos’ [CultureMap]
- ChaiOne To Sell 1920s EaDo Schlumberger Building or Get a Hand Running It [HBJ, previously on Swamplot]
- Port Arthur Developer Buys Galveston’s Vacant Medical Arts Building [The Daily News ($)]
- Another Peek Inside the Ivy Lofts [HBJ, previously on Swamplot]
- World’s Tallest Watercoaster Coming to Schlitterbahn Galveston [Houston Chronicle]
- A Sixth BB’s Is Headed for Pearland [Culturemap]
- New Home Starts in Houston Down 14.7% Last Quarter Year-Over-Year, Finds Metrostudy [Houston Public Media]
- League City Mixed-Use Development Pinnacle Park Signs on 3 New Restaurants [Galveston County Daily News ($)]
- 6 Homebuilders Selected To Construct Hundreds of Custom Homes in Bluejack National Community [HBJ]
- Texas City Public-Housing Duplexes To Be Torn Down To Make Way for New Homes [Galveston County Daily News ($)]
- Creek Group Owner Buys Site of Former Wabash Feed & Garden on Washington Ave [The Leader; previously on Swamplot]
- Plans for Botanic Garden on Glenbrook Golf Course Move Along Amid Neighbors’ Protests [Houston Chronicle; previously on Swamplot]
- Vacant Third Ward Property Infested with Termites, Raccoons, Possums, Say Neighbors [abc13]
Photo of the Lancaster Hotel and Calpine Center: Fritz Dickmann
Headlines
Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
You pull and pay and put away for good.
- 12242 Innisfall Cir. [HAR]
MAPPING URBAN METHANE LEAKS BY DRIVING GOOGLE’S STREETVIEW CARS THROUGH THEM Meanwhile, in Los Angeles: Researchers are teaming up with Google to outfit Streetview camera vehicles with sensors to detect methane gas leaks in urban settings. The project, coordinated by the Environmental Defense Fund, found an average of 1 leak per every 4 miles driven around Pasadena, CA, and 1 leak per 5 miles in Chino and Inglewood. Drives through Boston and Staten Island registered as many as 1 leak per mile. The project is expanding to map more cities; no maps of Texas or Gulf Coast cities have yet been published. Researchers connected to the mapping initiative have also turned similar methane sensors on the neighborhood near the ongoing methane plume in Aliso Canyon, which has been uncontrollably leaking thousands of tons of natural gas since late October. [EDF via 538; Atlas Obscura]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: IT’S NOT THE SIZE OF INFRASTRUCTURE, IT’S HOW YOU USE IT 
“This is less about the size and population of cities, and more about growth and how it’s handled. . . . Growth has terrible problems; rapid growth makes those problems worse, and poor planning makes them worse. But the alternative of urban decline is far worse than even rapid, poorly planned growth. It’s easy to complain about traffic and overcrowded schools, higher housing costs and overextended public services. But would you really rather live with a decaying, unused infrastructure that local government can’t afford to maintain, and schools that are shutting down and neglected? Would you rather watch as the tax base erodes and the City government goes defunct? Would you want to sell your house at a steep loss? Not me. Look at Chicago. Look at what Detroit went through. Sure, the traffic jams are a thing of the past, but at what cost? One other thing to note is that small cities and rural areas can struggle with growth, too. Look at what happened in Karnes County when the Eagle Ford Shale boom was going on. They had problems with traffic, dangerous roads, a lack of housing and skyrocketing prices, overcrowded schools . . .” [ZAW, commenting on Comment of the Day: Drawing a Line on Urban Expansion] Illustration: Lulu
HOUSTON IS THE UBER OUTLIER 
Houston appears to be the only market in Texas in which Uber is willing to put up with regulations that complicate its business model, writes Madlin Mekelburg in the Texas Tribune — following the rideshare company’s abrupt cessations of service in Midland and Galveston on Monday. In Austin, Uber and competitor Lyft are currently funding a campaign against a recently passed city ordinance that would require more intensive background checks involving fingerprinting of drivers — a safeguard Uber accepted in Houston. “Sarfraz Maredia, Uber’s general manager over Houston, declined to say Tuesday why the company wouldn’t accept the same policy in Austin,” Mekelburg writes. “‘It has become clear that Houston is the outlier in how it has chosen to regulate,’ Maredia said. ‘The rest of our markets have focused on passing modern ride-sharing regulations. As a result, our expansion strategy in Texas has changed to focus on launching only in markets that are consistent with that policy.'” [Texas Tribune] Photo of Houston Uber HQ, 5714 Star Ln.: Uber Houston
Demolition began yesterday on one of the 11 remaining structures of Westbury Square at Chimney Rock Rd. and W. Belfort Ave., according to a post on the Westbury Civic Club’s Facebook page. The post indicates that the first building on the chopping block was one damaged by fire in 2010, but that the rest were not scheduled by the owners to meet their unmakers on Tuesday.
An agent for Camelot Realty Group told HBJ last July that the run-down 1960s shopping plaza was under contract by the Villas at Westbury Square, and that the buildings were slated for demolition at the start of last August to make way for more than 100 townhomes (or maybe a commercial development, depending on how things went). A Swamplot commenter noted, however, that the buildings were still standing in early January.
- Previously on Swamplot:Westbury Square Buyer Says All 11 Remaining Buildings Will Be Destroyed in 30 Days for Townhome Lots or Maybe Something Else; Westbury Square Headed for Sale, Exile of Remaining Tenants; Two Westbury Square Buildings Are Coming Down Now
Photo: Westbury Houston
Chimney Rock at W. Belfort
The image above, showing a fertilizer-grade ammonium nitrate (FGAN) facility loitering as close as 529 ft. from the edge of an unidentified school campus, appeared on slide 13 of a US Chemical Safety Board presentation in Waco last week. But where is this place? And where are the other Texas locations where similar facilities storing large quantities of ammonium nitrate are sited within half a mile of a school? The Board warns that there are 18 such cozy-ups in Texas, but doesn’t identify their locations — even the image shown above, grabbed from Google Earth and outlined, omits any street labels.
The Waco presentation talked through the safety agency’s recently released findings on the 2013 explosion in West, Texas (located in Central Texas). A school and a nursing home were among the nearby buildings that received serious damage from the fertilizer blast, which killed 15 people and injured hundreds; the safety board report indicates that holes in that city’s zoning laws allowed the storage facility to be slowly grandfathered into a residential area.
Finding out where chemical storage facilities are located, and what they store, is now more of a fun guessing game than it was before the West explosion: In 2014, then-attorney-general-now-governor Greg Abbott’s office ruled that state Tier II data, which documents hazardous chemical storage at private facilities, would no longer be accessible to the public. But those open records weren’t really necessary, not if you’re really trying to find the facilities: “You know where they are, if you drive around,” Abbott told reporters.
West Explosion Aftermath
- 2015 Was the Best Year Ever for Texas Homes Sales [Realty News Report]
- Air Conditioning Supplier and Natural Gas Equipment Manufacturer Headed for Land in Rosenberg Business Park [Realty News Report]
- 12-Story, 157-Room Hyatt Place Houston Galleria Now Open at 5252 W. Alabama [Houston Chronicle]
- Shoppes at ParkWest Near Grand Pkwy. Signs Anchor Tenants, Nears Completion [HBJ]
- New $45M Typhoon Texas Waterpark Next to Katy Mills Mall Will Open May 28 [HBJ; previously on Swamplot]
- Kirby Ice House Set To Debut in Late March in Upper Kirby [Culturemap; previously on Swamplot]
- Houston’s First Micro-Unit Condo The Ivy Lofts Already Has Dozens of Buyers Lined Up [HBJ; previously on Swamplot]
- Westmoreland the Best Inner-Loop Neighborhood for First-Time Homebuyers, According to Redfin [HBJ]
Photo: Jen Buccholtz via Swamplot Flickr Pool
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