This 3-bedroom mod and its carport on Cayton St. in Glenbrook Valley was designed by A. Carroll Brodnax and featured in the 1957 Parade of Homes. The few photos included in this new listing show the mid-century home in need of a bit of present-day attention — but the asking price is only $69,999.
A STANDOFF TO BUY HISD’S LAW ENFORCEMENT HS CAMPUS 
The 11-acre parcel for sale in Magnolia Grove where the High School for Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice stands has been the object of some poker-faced one-upmanship between two interested contenders: In one corner, you’ve got St. Thomas High School, whose campus is immediately south of here, and in the other you’ve got AV Dickson Street, a recently formed LLC named for the street the HISD magnet school stands on. The first round, reports the Leader’s Charlotte Aguilar, yielded a $40 million offer from little-known AV Dickson, with St. Thomas countering and raising it by $100. The next round will go off early next week. Aguilar adds that whoever buys the campus will be required to lease it back to HISD for the next 5 years, while a new spot is sought: “In keeping with a move by HISD to relocate its specialty high schools close to beneficial community resources –– the DeBakey High School for the Health Professions to the Texas Medical Center, the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts to the Theater District downtown –– a downtown location near police and sheriff’s headquarters and courthouses is being scouted.” [The Leader] Photo: HISD
If you knock them regularly, you get to know the tipping point — by feel.
Photo: Jackson Myers via Swamplot Flickr Pool
A reader sends in this photo of the Oak Forest Mobil at Ella and 1201 W. 43rd St., the death sentence of which was published in the Daily Demolition Report last Thursday. Once the station’s torn down, reports the reader, a Berryhill Baja Grill will be built on this corner; that’s according to a post the reader saw on the members-only Oak Forest Homeowners Association Facebook page. A bit more evidence: A since-deleted brief that appeared in the Houston Chronicle in March 2012 notes that Berryhill had been granted a sales permit at this address.
Photo: Swamplot inbox
It’s got some of the cachet of that tony ’hood’s name and none of the fuss of its actual hard-and-fast boundaries: The River Oaks District is, at long last, going up. The $150 million in construction financing that California-based developer Oliver McMillan scored started being spent Monday morning.
And other new numbers are in: The 14-acre mixed-use and misnomered development will comprise about 252,000 sq. ft. of retail and 92,000 sq. ft. of office space as well as 279 places to live — including the 18 3-bedroom homes planned for the gated Bancroft Place community-within-a-district.
Of course, the demolition is imminent of the old 4444 Westheimer apartments whose residents were assisted late last year with their evictions by “move out concierges” provided by Oliver McMillan. But hey — why let something like that stand in the way of something like this?
Do make sure you have access to a good vat of hot molten zinc. And then you can follow the rest of the steps landscape architects SWA Group took to insert the 345-ft. Jackson Hill pedestrian bridge over Buffalo Bayou:
COMMENT OF THE DAY: HOW TO DRUM UP SUPPORT FOR BETTER PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION IN HOUSTON, FASTER 
“Here’s what I say: make drivers suffer. Yeah, I’m going there. Make it worse to drive. Make the traffic back up. Don’t expand any highways for another 20 years. Don’t do it. Force public transit on this town.
Go ahead, blast me, let me have it. I don’t care. I just spent four fabulous days in Chicago, and I’m so sick to death of all the excuses for why public transit won’t work in this town. We want so badly to be seen as a world-class city, but we’re never going to get there this way. Public transportation can and will work but it’s not going to work if we keep pandering to the drivers who caterwaul constantly about the liberty driving allows us while sitting in the parking lot that is the NW Freeway at rush hour. Oh, but they’re going to get their transportation dollars to drop millions on an expansion of the aforementioned parking lot which will need expansion again in 10 years. What a bunch of garbage.
It’s the old chicken-or-the-egg question. Will it be demand that drives public transit or will it be the reverse? Right now, nobody is giving me much in the way of choices, but I suppose they will say because I drive to work every day, I must naturally love it. If I didn’t, I’d go ahead and pad an hour to my commute by taking the bus. They call this a ‘choice.’
It’s a false choice. Suck it up. Building the kind of public transit that is common elsewhere is never cheap, it’s never convenient, it always comes with a price, but so does catering to drivers. I say, to hell with drivers.
I understand there is some contradiction underlying this argument. The best public transit system would require hard choices in this town. A lot of nice, historic real estate would probably have to come down to make way for more stations and more tracks. And that kind of system emphasizes the kind of urban density we say we want but often oppose in specific cases. I’m guilty of that contradiction myself sometimes, I’ll admit it.
But Houston needs to grow up. Force it on us, go ahead. Make life miserable for the suburban commuters we pander to every time this subject comes up. It’s time. The pennypinchers and the naysayers can shove it.” [Anse, commenting on Federal Money Rolls In for Uptown’s Post Oak BRT] Illustration: Lulu
RADICAL EATS REPLACING LOWER WESTHEIMER’S PULLED-OUT ROOTS 
The Near Northside vegan dive Radical Eats is closing and relocating across town to the recently closed Roots Bistro on Westheimer, reports Gastronaut Katherine Shilcutt. (Roots closed in early June after some bungling of its marquee.) Shilcutt adds that Radical Eats owner Staci Davis sees the move to this less “scruffy” space as a chance expand her menu to include dishes that use meat, cheese, and eggs, a culinary move not without consequence: “She admitted that some of her diehard vegan customers were furious with her decision, even calling in to a radio show she was appearing on as a guest and lambasting her on-air. ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked, with a rhetorical shoulder shrug.” [Culturemap; Gastronaut; previously on Swamplot] Photo of 507 Westheimer: Allyn West
Where’s Mini? A reader sends this photo of the burned rubber sticking to the stucco wall of design and furniture store Internum at 3303 Kirby Dr., where the 350-lb. promotional fiberglass shell of a Mini Cooper had been not-quite-parallel parked since December. And parked illegally — at first, anyway, garnering a red tag on December 27 from city inspectors to go with that red holiday garland wrapped around the Upper Kirby street lamps.
Photos: Lisa Garvin (Mini); Creative Accidents (wall)
Photo of Oak Forest Neighborhood Library: Natalye Appel + Associates Architects
The latest pedestrian bridge to span Buffalo Bayou was craned into place this past Thursday. The 345-ft. bridge almost hooks up with the skinnier chain-linked one that spans Memorial Dr. from Jackson Jackson Hill St. on the north. The Buffalo Bayou Partnership’s master plan shows that this bridge will serve the so-called Lost Lake — a space for which is being cleared of all kinds of vegetation just west of this site. You could say that the bridge might also encourage Rosie Ruiz-inspired joggers to take a shortcut and avoid going the extra mile around the Shepherd Dr. bridge-under-a-bridge just a bit farther west.
