CITY COUNCIL TO CUT CHECK FOR SECOND WARD SENIOR HOUSING TODAY 
This afternoon, City Council is set to approve a $3.5M loan to the private developer who wants to build 3 stories of senior housing on Commerce St., inside the red box shown above. Roughly $2.2M of it would come from grant funds the city got its hands on from HUD, but hasn’t spent yet. The other $1.3M is sitting in a stockpile of Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone money that the city’s been planning to spend on projects like this one. Of the 120 units planned inside the apartments — dubbed Campanile on Commerce — 105 would go to tenants earning 60% or less than the area median income. [Houston City Council; previously on Swamplot] Map: Houston Planning Commission
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Photo of the Pierce Elevated: Russell Hancock via Swamplot Flickr Pool
Headlines
Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
Persistence is for those of us still around.
- 2214 Canterbury Ct. [HAR]
Renovations to turn the former Parsley Studios building at 1504 Yale St. into Blue Line Bike Lab‘s new Heights location are now nearly finished, and the most dramatic change is the new coat of light blue paint the structure’s 15th-St. side, pictured above. During the 75 years it housed the family photo business and functioned as a portrait studio for mayors and celebrities like Roy Rogers and Loretta Lynn — according to The Leader — the building underwent its fair share of paint jobs; the last big one washed out a checkerboard pattern along its Yale-St. side, leaving the structure mostly brown.
Last September, a liquidation sale emptied the place of “a quarter of a century’s worth of photo equipment, furniture, frames and photos,” reported the Chronicle‘s Jaimy Jones. By that time, most of the owners’ work focused on photo restoration, so brick-and-mortar amenities like formal seating — “and even a small dressing room with bright, round bulbs that frame a mirror atop an old-fashioned dressing table,” wrote Jones — were no longer necessary. The building sold to a group that’s linked to Blue Line, which has its nearest shop on the corner of White Oak Dr. and Columbia St. That existing location (which predates the shop’s other spot on Telephone Rd.) is now set to close, but not until a fleet of new bikes arrives the Yale St. building.
It’s shown empty in the photo below, although a newly-hung sign along Yale makes clear what will fill it:
1504 Yale St.
A SATURDAY NIGHT SWAN SONG AT SPRUCE GOOSE: SOCIAL FLYERS CLUB 
This past weekend was the last one ever for the concert venue known as Spruce Goose: Social Flyers Club on the second floor of 809 Congress, across from Market Square Park and directly above Henke and Pillot. The 100- to 300-person club only opened up earlier this year, but managed to stay booked through the summer and all the way up until its finale on Saturday, which featured — among others — self-described “Punkish?” band Branagan, shown sending things off in the photo above. [Spruce Goose: Social Flyers Club] Photo: Branagan
GOLDMAN SACHS FOLLOWING BARGAIN SALE OF BILL KALLOP’S YACHT BY MARKING DOWN HIS RIVER OAKS HOUSE, TOO 
Having already cashed out on the retired offshore oil and gas billionaire’s 217-ft. yacht Natalia Natita after he defaulted on a loan that it backed, Goldman Sachs is now attempting to sell Bill Kallop’s 5-bedroom mansion at 1708 River Oaks Blvd. Some of the highlights inside: a glass-domed living room and colonnaded natatorium with a sky ceiling mural above it. The property was previously listed for sale earlier this year at $15.9M but shortly after, Kallop filed for Chapter 11 (through his punnily-named business entity R.O. Mance 1708 LLC) and the home fell into foreclosure. The new asking price is a bargain: $9.75M. But it’s still nowhere near the markdown the bank took on the boat last year, which it sold to a Maltese buyer for $27.5M after originally asking $60M, according to the Wall Street Journal’s Liz Hoffman. At that time, Kallop’s other properties totaled “at least eight residences, including a Peruvian mansion, two homes in the Dominican Republic and a working cattle ranch in Texas,” reported Hoffman. [Wall Street Journal; walkthrough] Photo: HAR
Preservation Houston hosts its fifth annual Good Brick Tour at the end of the month. And it’s our sponsor today. Thank you for supporting Swamplot!
The clocktower of the former Oriental Textile Mill has been a recognizable landmark in the Heights for almost a century. The mill itself was built in 1894, when Houston Heights was still an independent city. Today, the sprawling factory has been imaginatively renovated as studios and offices — with much of its industrial character intact.
The Heights Textile Mill, at 611 W. 22nd St., is one of 5 award-winning historic homes and buildings that will be welcoming visitors in the 2018 edition of the Good Brick Tour. Guided tours to all the properties will take place from noon to 5 p.m. on Saturday, October 27, and Sunday, October 28.
Purchase advance tickets for the 2018 Good Brick Tour online for $25 per person through this Thursday, October 25. After that, prices will go up: Tickets will be available for $30 per person at any tour location during the weekend. Tickets are valid both days of the tour and provide 1 admission to each location on the tour.
Preservation Houston has recognized all the properties on this tour with Good Brick Awards for excellence in historic preservation. This year’s tour also features 4 award-winning historic homes:
- 67 Tiel Way, River Oaks: The works of legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright inspired this impressive 1949 home by Houston architects MacKie & Kamrath.
- 3702 Audubon Pl., Montrose: The colorful builder of this landmark 1921 airplane bungalow wired his home with gadgets of his own invention.
- 2119 Lubbock St., Old Sixth Ward: This charming 1892 Folk Victorian home has been restored to its original appearance with century-old woodwork and wall finishes intact.
- 934 Louise St., Sunset Heights: This quaint 1921 bungalow and its original garage apartment reflect the quiet appeal of the Craftsman style.
Show us your show house: Become a Swamplot Sponsor of the Day
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Note: This story has been updated
Late last week, associates of Capital Retail Partners filed a building permit to get started on the pair of back-to-back gabled buildings it’s had planned for Durham and 18th St. in place of 2 side-by-side houses torn down there earlier this year. It’s the second spot where Capital will begin replacing a pair of old Heights houses with 2 new house-like retail buildings, having already begun work 4 blocks north between Durham and Shepherd on its planned Bungalows on 22nd St. a few months ago. Despite the decidedly less bungalow-like design proposed for 18th St., the firm’s going with the same nomenclature for the duo (shown at top), dubbing it the Bungalows on 18th St.
Pictured but unconfirmed plans of the Bungalows show its half-as-large north building taken up by some sort of restaurant fronted by a patio and corner landscaping including street-address topiary. A main parking lot sits west of the building and its encircling new sidewalks and crosswalks. You can see a few angled parking spaces peeking out in the aerial rendering below:
The Bungalows on 18th St.
- Houston Home Sales Rose 11.6% in the Third Quarter, Finds Texas Association of Realtors [Houston Chronicle]
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- All the Street Closures Planned for Monday’s Trump-Cruz Rally at the Toyota Center [Houston Chronicle; previously on Swamplot]
Photo of container home under construction on McGowen St. between Hutchins and St. Emanuel streets: Russell Hancock via Swamplot Flickr Pool
Headlines
Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
It’s bedtime for these bedrooms:
- 6 Azalea Trail Ln. [HAR]
The map above shows the land (in red) that Rice is confirmed to have grabbed around the Midtown Sears (orange) it bought out last October, including 2 new parcels (green) it snatched up through holding companies within the last few months. In an email sent out to university staff on Monday, Rice U. President David Leebron said the school “will ultimately redevelop approximately 14 acres of Rice-owned property,” near the Sears building into what it’s calling the Midtown Innovation District. So what are the latest spots it’s gotten its hands on? The first, catty-corner to the Sears building itself at the corner of Wheeler and San Jacinto, is Jack in the Box‘s nearly half-acre lot; Rice bought it in August.
More recently, the school pushed east by picking up 4201 Caroline St., the brick office building shown below that occupies a quarter-acre directly next to Fiesta:
Sears and Friends
MONDAY’S TRUMP-CRUZ RALLY UPGRADING FROM HOUSTON RODEO TO B-BALL VENUE 
Citing “huge and unprecedented” audience registration numbers, the president’s campaign announced that his Monday rally to drum up support for Ted Cruz will no longer be held at NRG Arena (capacity: 8,000), but instead at the Toyota Center (capacity: 18,043). Trump said in August he planned to pick “the biggest stadium in Texas we can find” for the festivities, at which Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick will also appear. But his schedulers seem strangely to have ruled out the state’s fifth biggest one, NRG Stadium (seats 71,500), which — as Houstonia’s Morgan Kinney noted — sits right across the parking lot from the Arena and remains unbooked on Monday. [Politico] Photo of the Toyota Center: Russell Hancock via Swamplot Flickr Pool
“Houston must have looked huge to Lyndon Johnson as he drove toward it across the flat Gulf plains in his battered little car,†writes Robert Caro in his biography of the former president. Johnson’s destination: Sam Houston High School (shown at top), which opened in 1921 in place of the even-older Central High School on the block bounded by Austin, Rusk, Caroline, and Capitol — the same spot where the new Kinder High School for the Performing and Visual Arts is now “90 percent complete,†according to Paper City’s Annie Gallay.
Hired to teach public speaking and coach the debate team, Johnson — writes Caro — promised his new principal he’d win the state championship. He didn’t, coming in second at the tournament in Austin. Still, Johnson had succeeded in making a name for himself among staff — who gave him a $100 raise and a contract for the next school year — and among the school’s 1,800 students — who jockeyed for enrollment in “Mr. Johnson’s speech class†during the following school year. By the end of LBJ’s first full year at Sam Houston, reports Caro, enrollment had increased from 60 to 110 new students.
Sam Houston High to HSPVA
