COMMENT OF THE DAY: THE CLUE THEY’LL BE TEARING IT DOWN “The standard Texas Apartment Association lease does not give the owner the right to cancel the lease in the event of a sale. If the land value is approaching the as-built value, however, a smart landlord is going to put a clause in the lease that allows for a 30-day termination. At the complex I listed above, that was exactly what happened. The landlord had a cancellation clause in the lease for years before the property was sold to a developer. Some tenants may be turned off by it. It may have some affect on the rental rates. You have to weigh the pros and cons. Every situation is different.” [Bernard, commenting on New Owner Orders Everybody Out of the Greenbriar Chateau Apartments]
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Wait — haven’t we already seen “initial concept drawings” for the Independent Arts Collaborative building planned for the corner of Main and Holman in Midtown? Well, yeah, but those initial concept drawings were prepared by Morris Architects as part of a study just to sell folks on the idea. Since then, the IAC bought the former city parking lot at 3400 Main St. and Morris lost out on the actual commission to a mix-in combo of San Antonio’s Lake Flato Architects (best known in town, strangely enough, for 2 inner-loop grocery stores they’ve designed for H-E-B) and Houston’s own Studio Red (fresh from its work on the renovation of an old Downtown warehouse into the new Houston Permitting Center). So we’ve got a whole new batch of initial concept drawings to look through, this time from the building’s actual architects.
Shunning the typical secrecy surrounding not-ready-yet designs, the new arts organization has decided to show them off on its Facebook page — even before floor plans are ready — with a simple “let us know what you think.” What a concept!
LOCAL WEBSITE MAKES BOOK 
Does li’l ol’ Buffalo Bayou qualify for a river guide? It does now. Longtime bayou history boat tour guide Louis Aulbach — author of 5 river guides chronicling the courses and histories of a few West Texas waterways — has just published Buffalo Bayou: An Echo of Houston’s Wilderness Beginnings as a book. If you’re a bayou or local history buff and that title sounds familiar, it should: Aulbach has been posting extended excerpts from the project on his old-school HAL-PC website for years. [Memorial Examiner; Amazon link]
Following up on that former warehouse at 954 Wakefield St. in Oak Grove that last spring looked like it was well on its way to becoming a new beach volleyball venue, a passerby reports a couple of seemingly contradictory signs. On the one hand, there’s now a TABC notice taped to a window, dated earlier in January, which indicates that HFL Construction is applying for an alcohol license for this location. And the volleyball courts (at left in the above photo) look a bit more complete than they did last April. On the other hand, there’s now also a for-sale sign with the HFL Construction logo on it posted in front of the peoperty, the reader says.
- Previously on Swamplot: On the Beach in Oak Grove
Photos: Swamplot inbox
- New Water Line from Pelican Island Will Help Galveston Water Supply To Weather Big Storms [Galveston County Daily News]
- Booker T. High Raises Cash, Gets Wi-Fi in Effort to Reboot Historic Independence Heights School [Houston Chronicle]
- Dallas Taken off Drought List; Houston Probably Not Next [KUHF]
- UH Students OK $50 Service Fee Hike for New Football Stadium, Hofheinz Pavilion Renovations [Houston Chronicle; previously on Swamplot]
- Auto Repair Shop Owners, City Council at Odds over Consumer Protection Changes [Houston Chronicle]
- Motion-Detection Camera Designed for Wildlife Used for Doggie-Door Home Surveillance [KHOU; previously on Swamplot]
- Controlled Burns Will Visit Texas Forests for Next 3 Months [Cleveland Advocate]
- Sugar Land To Survey Satisfaction of Residents with City Programs, Services [Sugar Land Sun]
Time-lapse video from Montrose rooftop: Jackson Myers
COMMENT OF THE DAY: LICKED CLEAN BY MILLIONS OF COCKROACHES “Roaches? I didn’t leave them out. I just didn’t see any — as in, not one. No living creatures at all, except us humans. The place smelled clean, like fresh water. I wonder where those roaches went…. and (ugh) what they were eating down there in the ’80s.” [Lisa Gray, commenting on Comment of the Day: The Cockroaches Found That Cistern First]
The decent-apartments-not-too-far-from-Rice gig is up for the red-brick Greenbriar Chateau Apartments just south of Hwy. 59: According to a couple reports, residents of the buildings at 4100 Greenbriar received a letter today from Kaplan Management, notifying them they have until March 8th to leave. The courtyard-style 3-story Mansard-roof buildings, which date from 1969, will then be torn down and replaced with a “‘state of the art’ housing complex.” Renters current on their payments will be offered $250 to help pay for moving expenses, the letter said. An entity connected to InSite Commercial Real Estate bought the 3.63-acre site last August.
- Inner-Loop residents get the boot; apartments to be demo’d [Prime Property]
- RIP, The Semi-Venerable Greenbriar Chateau Apartments: You Have Five Weeks To Clear Out [Hair Balls]
- Previously on Swamplot: Demolition Watch: Greenbriar Chateau Apartments
Photos: Apartment Guide
ATLANTA HUTS FOR HOUSTON’S HOMELESS 
At yesterday’s meeting new city council member Jack Christie distributed descriptions of prefab huts and “low riders” produced by an Atlanta organization called Mad Housers, suggesting that similar structures — privately funded — could be used in Houston as they are in Atlanta: as shelters for homeless people. “You don’t see the sleeping bags out there, the newspapers,†Christie told reporter Chris Moran afterward. “These have a lock on the door so you have a sense of security.†The huts, which the Atlanta organization stresses are not intended as permanent housing, measure 6 ft. by 8 ft. with 12-ft. ceilings, and feature a sleeping loft, a locking door, and a wood-burning stove for heat and cooking. The “low riders” are 4 ft. by 8 ft. with only 4-ft. ceilings; they’re meant to allow residents to keep their shelters on the down-low, below vegetation lines or other screening objects where they wouldn’t want them to be too conspicuous. These smaller units come with a separate 4x4x4 storage box. [Houston Politics; Mad Housers] Photo: Mad Housers
Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts just announced the winner of its 3-architecture-firm face-off for the commission to design its new building for 20th and 21st century art. It’s New York’s Steven Holl Architects, but the institution put itself in the limelight too, declaring the firm had been chosen “to partner with the board and staff of the museum in developing” the expansion, which will also include a new parking garage.
That garage will be needed because the new structure will take up the 2-acre parking lot across Bissonnet from the museum’s main building between Montrose and South Main St. (Architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe added onto that building twice; it’s now known formally as the Caroline Wiess Law building.) The museum and its new director, Gary Tinterow, expect Holl’s design to integrate the existing sculpture garden on the northwest corner of Montrose and Bissonnet, and allow for expansion of the glass-block Glassell School just to the north.
Where’s Randall Davis gonna find buyers for the glitzy condos in this new 24-story Uptown highrise he’s planning — you know, the kinds of carefree, fun-loving sophisticates who’d regularly leave all the lights on in their bedrooms at night just to make sure the whole building glows like this? In other countries, probably. But they’ll be moving to Houston soon!
Knock off this one. Then you can knock off early.
- Harris County Included on List of U.S. Terrorism ‘Hot Spots’ [Houston Business Journal]
- Map Shows Ship Channel Demolition Targets [Prime Property]
- That UFO Spotted Over Houston Last Night Was Most Likely a Meteor [Houston Chronicle]
- Controversy over Downtown Homeless Shelter’s New Overnight Open-Door Policy [KHOU]
- Southwest Airlines Eying International Flights at Hobby [Houston Politics]
- Kemah May Regulate Horse-Drawn Carriages [Galveston County Daily News]
- The Woodlands, Oak Ridge North Sales Tax Revenue Sees Double-Digit Increases [Woodlands Villager]
- League City’s Renovated City Hall Should Reopen by End of May [Galveston County Daily News]
- Water Main Break on Braeburn Valley near Tanager Floods Streets [Click2Houston]
- First Meeting To Discuss 13-County Regional Plan Tonight in Galveston [Galveston County Daily News]
- Club Owners form PAC To Fight Recent Noise Ordinance Changes [Houston Politics]
- Last Chance To See the Menil Collection’s Byzantine Fresco Chapel Before Frescoes Leave [Art Attack]
Photo of Hermann Park: Theresa Quintanilla [license]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: THE COCKROACHES FOUND THAT CISTERN FIRST “Back in ’83 until about ’85 my buddies Colin Mazzola, Keith Tashima and myself would go down an open hatch into that thing — they closed it up sometime around ’86 or ’87 — this was back when jogging around the North side os Allen Parkway (near the celemetaries) was a little sketchy — people hanging out in the park near/under the Memorial Dr underpasses — anyway, what Lisa Gray left out was the 10 million roaches down there — we couldn’t hang out there for long — you couldn’t sit down or hang — BUT it was really cool and I remember being totally amazed that the City had an underground aqueduct/storm sewer overflow (yes it flooded and was impossible to go down the ladder) that was open and pretty much abandoned.” [David Beebe, commenting on Poking Around in Buffalo Bayou’s Abandoned Basement]
REPAIRS DONE, WEDGE AS IT WAS 
The Swamplot reader who noted a color change in the panels at the top of the WEDGE International Tower at Louisiana and Bell St. downtown last week informs us that they’ve since been returned to their original appearance, and submits this pic from a perch at the Tellepsen YMCA a couple of blocks away to prove it: “Presumably, as one of the commenters surmised, they were just running through some routine maintenance.” We now return to our regularly scheduled Swamplot programming. Photo: Swamplot inbox
