SMALL COLD GALLERY SPACE GOING DOWNTOWN HOTEL SUITE MINI-BAR 
Having now sold out all remaining end-table and dresser drawer spaces in the hotel-room mini art fair he’s setting up in Room 307 of the Embassy Suites next to Discovery Green downtown, blogger Robert Boyd has found a tenant for one last untapped space in his Pan Art Fair, timed to coincide with this weekend’s Texas Contemporary Art Fair at the convention center down Dallas St. And that space would be: the hotel suite’s mini-bar. With only hours to go before tonight’s opening, Boyd has turned the space over to local experts with considerable experience running compact refrigerated galleries. Curators Emily Sloan and David McClain had been operating The Kenmore, a “cold self-run exhibition object” (which at approximately 3 ft. by 2 ft. by 2 ft. qualifies as one of Houston’s smallest art galleries) out of a few different local art spaces, including Skydive in Richwood Place. “I’m fairly certain I have no idea what [Sloan and McClain] will do,” Boyd is quoted as saying in a notice just added to the Pan Art Fair website, “but fuck-it, no one else wanted the fridge.” [Pan Art Fair; previously on Swamplot] Photo: The Kenmore
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HOW QUICK TO KICK ’EM OUT AND TEAR IT DOWN? “Can a developer who buys an apartment building (or duplex, four-plex, etc.) simply ignore an existing lease’s terms and give 30 days notice before knocking it down to build something new? Half the real estate developer/lawyer types I know have told me ‘no way.’ They say a contract is a contract and the new owner has to abide by that and let you live out the lease or offer a buyout. But the other half say there’s a loophole in Houston permitting that says if the new owner plans to tear down the building, once they have their variance granted, they can ignore the lease terms and just give 30 days notice to move out. Help! Do you have the definitive answer?” [Swamplot inbox]
Build us lots and lots and lots and lots.
- Chick-Fil-A To Open Eighth Houston-Area Location in Kingwood on Oct. 25 [Houston Business Journal]
- Galveston Restaurant Group’s Nonno Tony’s To Open at Pier 21 by Nov. 1 [Galveston County Daily News]
- Houston Fifth on Urban Land Institute List for Investors of Top Real Estate ‘Markets To Watch,’ Behind Austin [Houston Business Journal]
- Internal Documents Show BP Tried To Avoid Reporting Emissions Violation in 2010 [Galveston County Daily News]
- East Downtown Neighbors Complain About MegaBus Facility Noise, Diesel Tank [MyFoxHouston]
- Truck Fire on U.S. 287 Destroys Hundreds of Pumpkins Headed to Houston [Houston Chronicle]
- Live Alligator To Attend Texas Contemporary Art Fair Preview Party at GRB Tonight, Maybe [Glasstire]
- Breaking Down That $14M Summer Fest Economic Study [Rocks Off]
Photo of courtyard at South Shepherd and Kipling: Triniti Restaurant
Texas’s Department of Transportation has just announced the kickoff of a 2-year, $14 million study of options for new passenger rail service between the state’s “major metropolitan areas” and Oklahoma City. Funded by a grant from the Federal Railroad Administration, the Federal Highway Administration, the state of Oklahoma, the North Central Texas Council of Governments, and TxDOT itself, the study will compare options for enhancing existing Amtrak routes and building a new high-speed rail backbone through the state, as well as the possibility of public-private partnerships, the agency says. The proposed north-south route would connect San Antonio, Austin, and Dallas to its northern neighbor. (That follows the FRA’s longstanding designation of high-speed rail corridors; the federal agency’s proposed map of the South Central region is shown above.)
But what about, um, that other major metropolitan area nearby?
COMMENT OF THE DAY: WHAT IT TAKES TO BUILD AT THE UPPER END “You are right that you can build a very nice house for $150/sq. ft., but when you are in this stratospheric range, $150 is your starting point and you jump off from there. . . . Your roof will be slate and not composition. Goodness knows how much that costs, and how it impacts your structural engineering. Your floors will be stone and/or wide plank salvaged wood and not 2 1/2″ plain sawn oak. Your facade will be brick, not hardi plank, and bricks will cost $2-$3 each and not 50 cents. And on an 8,000 sq. ft. structure you may get 50,000, 100,000 bricks. Then you pay the mason. Your trim and doors will be custom manufactured and not stock. Your window package will be custom manufactured and not stock. Saw one house where custom fabricated metal windows cost $250,000. For the windows. Your light cans will cost 10x the cost of the cans you get in a builder spec house. You will have paid a lighting designer a fortune to tell you how to position those lights. Your HVAC, security, A/V systems will be state of the art, each of which will run tens and tens of thousands, if not more. You will insulate your house to an extreme level. And so on and so on. It all adds up . . . But yes, you can build a nice house for $150/sq. ft., but if you are building on a 50,000 sq. ft. lot on the corner of Kirby and Inwood, you just won’t.” [KG, commenting on Houston Home Listing Photo of the Day: Out of the Closet]
- 5802 W. Bellfort St. [HAR]
An investor in a possibly nonexistent real-estate venture headed by his friend Billy Frank Davis tells Chronicle reporter Mike Tolson that Davis didn’t let on to his friends that other friends had also invested with him: “He didn’t want word of mouth. Bill’s image was always the most important thing to him. He always portrayed himself as a very successful and wealthy person. Everybody thought Bill had money.” On Monday, the disbarred attorney pled guilty to a single count of wire fraud in connection with a Ponzi scheme that bilked his friends and golfing buddies at the Champions Golf Club, the River Oaks Country Club, and the Braeburn Country Club out of $7.8 million. According to Tolson’s report, however, the losses may have been much higher than that.
- Houston a Finalist in Bid To Host 2017 Super Bowl [Ultimate Texans]
- Closure of Devon, GenOn Offices Downtown Could Drive Down Rental Rates [Houston Business Journal]
- League City Has Nearly a 2-Year Backlog of Sidewalk Repairs [Galveston County Daily News]
- Texas Business Group Backs Plan To Double Texas Vehicle Registration Fee [Texas Tribune]
- Nearly Half of Houston’s Residents Foreign-Born or from Another State, Analysis Finds [Houston Business Journal]
- Second App Lets You Hail Houston Cabs from Your Smartphone [Click2Houston]
- Vandalized Obama Mural Near Breakfast Klub To Be Repainted with President in ‘Uncle Sam’ Pose [Culturemap]
- J. Randall Powers’ ‘Ultra-Refined, Art-Filled’ Townhouse Featured in Architectural Digest [Culturemap]
Photo of Buffalo Bayou at I-45: Russell Hancock via Swamplot Flickr Pool
STUDEMONT KROGER MATCHES WALMART’S OPENING DATE 
October 26th is gonna be a busy day for the once-industrial zone south of I-10 just west of Downtown. Sure, it’s Halloween candy-hoarding time. And you’ll have 2 large new venues for it. It’ll be opening day not only for the Walmart SuperCenter at 111 Yale St., but for the new 79,000-sq.-ft. Kroger less than a mile away at 1440 Studemont. [Previously on Swamplot] Photo of Kroger under construction: Swamplot inbox
COMMENT OF THE DAY: BUMPER CROP “I wish acorns could be sold. I would be a filthy rich millionaire. Unbelievable how many my 2 oak trees produced and they keep falling. this past weekend, I filled my black trash can 4x to dump in the back. There are still a lot more.” [robin varner, commenting on Headlines: Mall of the Mainland Discount; Houston Raining Acorns]
ART OF THE DOWNTOWN HOTEL SUITE FURNITURE 
Blogger Robert Boyd’s upstart Pan Art Fair — now touting itself as “Houston’s smallest art fair” — has been digging deep into the furniture of its Embassy Suites hotel room venue (Suite 307) to find space for more exhibitors. Added to the showing space for the fair, which runs at the same time as the much larger Texas Contemporary Art Fair across Discovery Green in the GRB beginning this Thursday: exhibits in the end-table and dresser drawers. Four of the six sliding spaces, dubbed “micro-booths,” have already been snatched up by artists and galleries, according to the fair’s website. Still available: the south end-table drawer, listed as the former location of “the installation Gideon Bible Piece.” [Pan Art Fair; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Embassy Suites
- 2909 Inwood Dr. [HAR]
