COMMENT OF THE DAY: THE PARKING SPACES OUT FRONT 
“So my friend’s neighbors on both sides and across the street have used pea gravel to make head-in parking spaces in front of the their houses in the Heights.
In doing so they eliminated 2-3 parallel street parking spots in front of each house, as well as taking over what I assume is the city right of way. I assume this can’t be legal, but then this is Houston so who knows?
Anyway these neighbors throw fits if anyone parks in their spaces. My friends like to have people over and now parking is a real challenge. I’ve been confronted by the neighbors before and have told them that these are not their spaces and they vehemently (violently) disagree. Am I right? Am I wrong? Should I just pretend they aren’t there and park behind them on the street like I would have had they not taken over those spaces? Is there anything that can be done?” [charlie, commenting on Where the Sidewalk Goes Private in Cinco Ranch] Illustration: Lulu
Sign up for the Newsletter
If you think this pool perched on an eastern bank of Lake Livingston is enormous — and with a jetted “lazy river” and 2 islands included it certainly is — just wait until you see the house that comes with it. You’ll be waiting for a while, though, because it isn’t built yet. This main-house-less property, which has been on the market on and off since spring of 2012 for $3.4 million, has a homesite all picked out — it’s just up the steps at the lower left of the photo immediately above. There’s a pool house and a boathouse and even an arbor structure already set up — just no house house.
While you’re waiting for one to show up, though, why not stay a while in the on-site warehouse? It’s got built-in living quarters:
- 5531 Dawnington Pl. [HAR]
How about a public park that also serves as a multi-story entrance to Downtown’s extensive underground tunnel system? One that might even provide a little natural light or outdoor seating for below-the-deck diners? This pie-in-the-basement concept for the block-size surface parking lot between One and Two Shell Plaza made an appearance in the Chronicle‘s real estate blog last week — though the architecture firm Gensler had first posted it online this past spring. For the company’s own “Town Square Initiative,” designers were charged with envisioning a new type of town square for various cities around the globe. Tunnel Loop Square, for the block surrounded by Walker, McKinney, Louisiana, and Milam, was one of several proposals stemming from the firm’s Houston office.
A rendering showing a standalone-look Dior boutique in the new River Oaks District has made an appearance in a brochure now available on the website of the project’s developer, San Diego’s OliverMcMillan. And while rumors that the not-so-far-from-the-actual-River Oaks development might feature a boutique from the French fashion house have been bandied about since Christian Dior shut down its Galleria store last year, neither the project’s developer nor the retailer have officially announced the company’s return to Houston. A slightly different version of the above rendering appears directly on the River Oaks District page of the developer’s website, but in place of the Dior logo is the word “Tread”:
No demolition permits were approved yesterday; city offices were closed for Veterans Day.
- Houston Historical Commission Votes To Consider Landmark Status for Astrodome [Houston Chronicle]
- Astrodome Not the ‘Top Priority’ in Judge Emmett’s Life; Commissioner Radack Hears of Plan To Turn Dome into Organic Fertilizer Factory [Houston Chronicle ($)]
- Rosenberg Officials Hope New Aldi Distribution Center, Business Park Means More Growth [Prime Property]
- Pondicheri Rumored To Be Adding Cafe, Bakery Above West Ave. Restaurant [Culturemap]
- Painted Cow Sculpture Stolen from Heights-Area Business Recovered [abc13]
- Bakery Boss Turns Third Ward’s Not Jus Donuts Purple [Houstonia]
Photo of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston: Curt Littlejohn via Swamplot Flickr Pool
A regular Swamplot reader has a question about the sidewalk on the south side of Cinco Ranch Blvd. as the street passes between retention ponds for the North Lake Village and South Lake Village neighborhoods, just west of Cinco Lakes Dr. (map here). “The sidewalk exists on the south side of the street block from Peek Rd. to Mason Rd. When it reaches the pond, the sidewalk moves to the inside of the fence and becomes private. The fence is between the street and the sidewalk.” What’s a pedestrian supposed to do when the only sidewalk moves into a gated area, and is marked as off limits? Asks the reader: “Can a pedestrian be cited as a trespasser? Note the North side of the street is a golf course with no sidewalk.”
Going into the 2,034-sq.-ft. former Washateria space at the back of the little shopping strip across Greeley St. from the Blue Bird Circle Shop on West Alabama: a soon-to-be beer-and-wine-licensed coffee shop called Siphon Coffee, set to open late this year or early next. The space is shown on the far left of the photo above. Owners Michael Caplan and Edward Treistman write on the coffee house’s Facebook page that there’ll be food enough for breakfast and lunch too, once the place opens, after they get help from former Brasserie 19 chef Amanda McGraw with the menu and training.
THE WOODLANDS’ NO-FAULT DEFENSE 
The Woodlands Development Company is trying to hold the line in its legal battle against a growing number of homeowners claiming that repeated damage to their homes is the result of movement along 3 separate geological faults running through the community. According to reporter Cindy Horswell, the company is going further than simply claiming that the building and ground cracks and resulting new alignments in the properties must have been the result of something other than surface fault lines. A statement penned by developer spokesperson Susan Vreeland-Wendt appears to claim the fault lines do not exist: “We have done actual testing, and none of the testing that we’ve done to date has found any evidence of an active fault line in proximity to any Woodlands residence.” That contradicts the claims of the now 2-dozen families from the Carlton Woods, Alden Bridge, Cochran’s Crossing, and Sterling Ridge neighborhoods involved in or about to join the lawsuit, which was originally filed in March of this year, who say a 1993 letter proves the developer knew about the problem. “The plaintiffs’ attorneys say five different geologists have verified the existence of at least three fault lines — Big Barn, the longest and most active line that runs about 33 miles underground from a salt dome near Hockley to the flank of a salt formation near Conroe, as well as two smaller faults, Jones and Panther Branch. The San Jacinto River Authority’s geological report also recently pinpointed these same surface faults when working on plans to install a new 52-inch pipe to bring water into The Woodlands. To protect from the shifting soils, a special flexible pipe will be used wherever the pipe crosses a fault zone. ‘They do exist, and they are active,’ said Mark Smith, division manager over the water authority’s water project.” [Houston Chronicle ($)] Fault-line map: KHOU
An entry posted over the weekend to the website of Ziegler Cooper Architects indicates that the local firm has won Shorenstein Properties’ invited competition to remake the soon-to-be-former ExxonMobil Building (at right), a prominent, bristly, and standoffish figure on the southern edge of Houston’s Downtown since 1962. The redo, which will be far more extensive than a simple reskinning, removes the most distinctive feature of the building, originally designed by L.A. architects Welton Becket for Humble Oil: the 7-foot-deep shades, cantilevered from marble-clad columns, that help shield sunlight from all but the top of the tower’s 44 stories.
Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
Gotta uproot before we can plant. So here goes:
- Slowing Local Job Growth Weighs on Commercial Real Estate Market [KUHF]
- Map: Residents Who Lived Farther from the Astrodome Were More Likely to Vote It Down [Houston Politics; story ($)]
- Owners of House of Pies on Kirby Still Hoping To Reopen Before Thanksgiving, with an ‘Updated Look’ [KHOU]
- Houston Commuters Spend on Average 52 Hours Stuck in Traffic Per Year, Finds Texas A&M Report [Culturemap]
- New Fiesta Mart Opens Today on Conroe’s East Side [Courier of Montgomery County]
- In the Van for the Art Guys’ ‘Utterly Pointless’ Loop 610 Spin [The Great God Pan Is Dead; previously on Swamplot]
- Number of Houston Visitors Increased 5 Percent Between 2010 and 2012, Finds TNS [Houston Business Journal]
- Painted Cow Sculpture Stolen from Heights-Area Business OurBlok [abc13]
Photo of Downtown from Westheimer at 610: Russell Hancock via Swamplot Flickr Pool
What kind of crazy idea is this — an actual open design competition for proposals to remake the Astrodome? And even stranger: One where the winners are scheduled to be announced a few days after voters pass judgment on what county officials had already declared to be the only viable alternative to demolition? Only now — given the results — maybe the timing and the concept don’t seem so absurd?
“Reimagine the Astrodome,” of course, was meant to be a design competition — not one focused on financial or political viability. (Maybe some other folks could put together a corresponding challenge focusing on those aspects.) The sponsors, the Architects’ Newspaper and YKK AP (yeah, the company with its name on your zipper) were hoping that “winning proposals would serve either as a swan song for a doomed architectural icon, or as inspiration for its possible future.” And what came in? 23 submissions ranging from “feasible interventions . . . to wildly imaginative and utterly improbable schemes that nevertheless encapsulated the heady spirit that originally propelled this project to completion in the 1960s.” And the winner, as announced yesterday by a jury not looking for cash flows or approval by the Houston Texans and the Rodeo but rather “strength of concept” and “quality of presentation”: this parking garage. A monument, as the jury of designers put it, “to the pain in the ass that parking is in Houston.”
