Over the weekend, variance signs were posted at the dead-ends of Sul Ross and Branard St. near the Menil Collection and in front of the bank of antique shops facing Dunlavy. The notices are the clearest indication yet that some big new development is being planned to replace the Fiesta Food Mart at the corner of Dunlavy and West Alabama in Lancaster Place. Last month, Swamplot posted a reader’s report that the property had been sold and that a 6-or-7-story “West Ave-style” mixed-use project was planned for the 3.68-acre site.
Later today, we’ll announce the first 2 categories for the fourth annual Swamplot Awards for Houston Real Estate — the Swampies. And we’ll continue with the remaining categories over the rest of the week. The awards honor the neighborhoods, developments, designs, personalities, dreams, and absurdities that continue to make Houston real estate so entertaining.
“I don’t know whether he gets to take those paintings with him, but it looks like he’s in for an upgrade in the office department,” notes a reader commenting on the back-of-house museum real estate awaiting newly announced MFAH director Gary Tinterow in Houston. For a spread in the New York Social Diary last year, photographer Jill Krementz took this snapshot of the curator in front of the neater of the 2 desks in his park-view office at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “The director’s office at MFAH doesn’t exactly look out on to Central Park, but it’s much bigger.” (It faces a walled-in garden space shielded from Montrose Blvd. traffic.) And Tinterow’s new salary may afford him the opportunity to upgrade from the IKEA floor lamp highlighted in Krementz’s office tour. “Also, fun fact,” notes our reader: “Late MFAH director Peter Marzio never had a computer. They were just kinda beneath him, I guess. The only thing on his huge desk was a red telephone. It looked like a White House War Room or something.” [
A reader writes in to make sure we were aware that the world’s best book on the popular topic of Houston-area freeways — which just happens to be entitled Houston Freeways — is available as a free PDF ebook download on the author’s website (yes, 
That’s only the recent lineage of the tiny corner space at 1302 Nance St. in the old warehouse district at the northern stretches of Downtown, where former *17 chef Justin Yu, his pastry-baking wife Karen Man, and Central Market wine guy Justin Vann plan to open their new Gulf Coast-flavored restaurant. (Latin Bites will be escaping to the former Rockwood Room location at Chimney Rock and Woodway.) The trio promises not to take up any of the mere 26 seats in the former Erie City Ironworks space themselves. 
