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In the Grogan’s Mill neighborhood of The Woodlands, a 1985 Mediterranean spreads across a half-an-acre lot served by a loop-tipped roadway that appears in aerial views to resemble an inverted golf club. That’s rather fitting — the property overlooks a fairway of the tournament course of the Woodlands Country Club. The floor plan, meanwhile, includes its own pool room (top photo). Laps on the housing market date back to June of 2010, when the asking price bobbed for a bit at $949,000 before sinking to $693K. A 2011 re-listing splashed water at $900K before a late 2013 surge upped the ask to $1.15 million. That’s also the price sought in a brief spring-to-summer 2014 listing as well as the re-re-re listing by a different agent dating from Black Friday. Let’s take a swing through the place:
Pool Hall
A few days ago Jay Roussel went on Amazon and ordered a copy of Why Did the Chicken Cross the World?: The Epic Saga of the Bird that Powers Civilization for his friends Christian and Lisa Seger at Blue Heron Farm in Field Store, TX, about 45 miles northwest of Houston. When Lisa Seger opened the slapped-together-looking and poorly-taped package, she found no poultry tome, but rather a mysterious and heavy green cylinder. A mini-monolith of sorts.
As reported on the Blue Heron Facebook page, Christian Seger said, “This appears to be part of Amazon. Like, literally, part of Amazon. Part of the belt from the warehouse.”
The Harmony Wedding Chapel at 8120 Gulf Freeway has been one of Houston’s most familiar freeway-side landmarks for 50 years, a little slice of backstreet Las Vegas that has now provided 5 generations with cheap, often hastily-arranged weddings. (Even today a bare-bones ceremony with no guests is a mere $50.)
But as the site of the first gay marriage in Texas, it is a landmark in American LGBT history too. There on the banks of Sims Bayou, on October 6, 1972, Brownsville-bred former high school football player Antonio Molina married William “Billie” Ert, a female impersonator who performed in local nightclubs as “Mr. Vicki Carr,” in tribute to the El Paso-bred singer. (One such spot was Ursula’s, a lesbian-friendly bar at 1512 W. Alabama, the future home of a succession of failed restaurants and now the home of the Skin Renewal Center.)
Handing over a wedding certificate Ert obtained by appearing in front of court clerks in very convincing drag, the couple exchanged vows before an activist chaplain they had brought in, and sealed them with a kiss. A firestorm awaited them outside the chapel’s Gulf Freeway feeder road-facing doors.Â
Highwayside History
- 10,897-Acre Industrial Park Cedar Crossing Sold for Undisclosed Price in One of the Largest Land Sales in Houston History [Houston Business Journal]
- Rice University To Transform Village Arcade from Suburban-Style Shopping Center to Something More ‘Hip’ [Houston Chronicle]
- Liberty Kitchen’s Fried Birds to Get Dedicated Home by March: The Former Church’s Chicken at Heights Blvd. and 6th St. [Culturemap]
- Local Pour To Open Early Next Year at Hughes Landing’s Restaurant Row on Lake Woodlands [Houston Chronicle]
- Sugar Land Community Riverstone Debuts 2-Acre Recreation Complex Dubbed ‘Big Adventure Park’ [Culturemap]
- British International School of Houston Secures Land for New 274K-SF Campus at Westgreen Blvd. and Franz Rd. [Prime Property]
- How Moving Texaco from Beaumont to Houston Forever Changed the Course of the Bayou City [Bayou City History]
- Galveston Police Animal Services Remove Illegal Pet Caiman Alligator from Galveston Backyard [Click2Houston]
Photo: David Elizondo via Swamplot Flickr Pool
Headlines
Now approaching the Big 1-0, an artsy 2004 contemporary by architect Allen Bianchi has been on the market for a month (this time), bearing a $2,799,000Â asking price. A previous listing in the summer of 2013 briefly sought $100K more for the property. The 5,595-sq.-ft. home is planted at the crossroads of Cherokee St. and Sunset Blvd., just north of Rice University. Houston’s headlining art museums are three-quarters of a mile to the east. The house of stucco, glass, and steel is itself a bit of a gallery.
The South Side of the L
A reader sends in this photo of a good-sized live oak — estimated at 30″ caliper — brought down in the First Ward near Sabine St. and Ovid St., Â perhaps Houston’s most classically-named corner.
Baker Subtraction
Urban Living was added as a defendant last month to a lawsuit filed in February by 8 plaintiffs against 2 companies run by Saeed Qazi and Saleem Qazi, both of whom are also being sued individually.
The suit revolves around 6 adjacent homes in the First Ward — 1919 through 1929 Johnson St. — built around 2008 by the Qazis and their companies, Zenith Urban Homes and Zenith Signature Homes. Once built, the homes were exclusively marketed and sold by Urban Living.
Sawyer Heights Lawsuit
Here’s a look at Houston’s upcoming second location of the New Orleans-based PJ’s Coffee chain. The banner is up and workers are inside the new mini-strip mall at the Cottage Grove corner of Larkin St. and Durham Dr., just south of Yuppie Dog pet care, and just north of a taco truck-friendly parking lot and a Wendy’s, and just across the Katy Fwy. from looming competition in the form of a strip-mall Starbucks.
Caffeine Fix
- Construction Begins on New HCC Campuses at Northline and the West Loop [Prime Property]
- ITEX Group Planning $41M Mixed-Use Development in Former Flea Market Site at Griggs and Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. [Houston Chronicle]
- Largest Christian’s Tailgate Bar & Grill Now Open in the Energy Corridor at 1010 Hwy. 6 N. [Houstonia]
- Indeed, Krispy Kreme Is Opening Next to Bear Creek’s Centre at Yorktown Crossing February 17; Pasadena Outpost To Follow [Eater Houston]
- New Urban Eats Bar, Restaurant and Marketplace in Soft Opening Phase at 3414 Washington [Food Chronicles]
- First LEED-Certified Starbucks in Houston Planned for 3017 N. Durham [The Leader]
- Avery Johnson Sells His Woodlands Mansion for $6.1M, Down from Initial Listing of Nearly $9M [Culturemap; previously on Swamplot]
- LEED Certification Increasingly Important for Class B Buildings [Houston Business Journal]
- How Lovett Hall’s Pink Texas Granite, Ozark Marble, and Byzantine Flourishes “Materialized” Houston’s Cultural Identity in 1912Â [Gray Matters]
- Yearly Salary of $51,200 Required To Afford a Median-Priced Houston Home, According to HSH.com [Prime Property]
- Ranking the Livability of Houston Neighborhoods [Houston Chronicle]
- Houston’s Telecommuting Workforce Increased More Than 100% from 2012 to 2013, According to Census Data [Houston Business Journal]
- Remembering the Houston Chronicle’s Downtown Legacy As the Newspaper Prepares To Leave [Houston Chronicle]
Photo of Uptown: Marc Longoria via Swamplot Flickr Pool
Headlines
- 12435 Whittington Dr. [HAR]
With its quirky cutouts, windows shaped a bit like marine hatches (no rivets, though), and central tower, a 1994 contemporary in gun-metal gray floats a bit like a battleship on its interior lot within the Memorial Drive Manor neighborhood of Hunters Creek Village. Located on a big lot west of Chimney Rock Rd. and south of a bend in Memorial Dr., the spit-and-polished property has been on a mission to secure a tenant since its listing in late October. Last month, the rental rate dropped $2K to $6,500 per month on a year’s lease.
Cleared Conditions
