NOW POPPING OUT BURRITOS 
Jack-in-the-Box-owned Chipotle competitor Qdoba Mexican Grill has opened its first Houston-area location (in a little while, at least) — in a former Hollywood Video location near Home Depot at the end of a strip center at 17400 Spring Cypress Rd. in Cypress, just northwest of Hwy. 290. Last year Brij Agrawal, the owner of 75 local Subway franchises, signed an agreement with the fast-casual chain to open 15 new Houston Qdobas within 7 years. [QSR] Photo: Qdoba Mexican Grill Houston
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After almost 3 years on the “closed on account of its gonna-be-torn-down” list, the Edwin Hornberger Conference Center at 2151 W. Holcombe Blvd. — the last remaining vestige of the famed Shamrock Hotel complex that once stood at the corner of Holcombe and South Main — reopened yesterday under new management. The 13,000 sq.-ft. ballroom facility is still owned by the Texas Medical Center, but it’ll now be run by Trevisio Restaurant and will be open to non-TMC events. In 2008, the TMC announced plans to tear down the conference center and build 3 floors of office space on top of an adjacent parking garage.
- Good news for the gala crowd: Hornberger Center reopens for all [West University Examiner]
- Previously on Swamplot: Just When You Thought It Was Already Long Gone: A Second Demolition for the Shamrock Hotel
A ROCKETSHIP RELAUNCH FOR THE JOHNSON SPACE CENTER? 
Construction of the new Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, the first new NASA spacecraft built for manned orbit since 1991, began earlier this week — in New Orleans (photo). And final assembly will take place in Florida. But a “senior administration official” tells space-beat reporter Todd Halvorson that the new 30-story tall Space Launch System for Orion that NASA is announcing today — with the strong support of Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison — will provide a “stable future” for Houston’s Johnson Space Center and 3 other human-space-flight facilities around the country. [Florida Today; NASA] Photo: NASA
COMMENT OF THE DAY: WESTERN AIR “. . . in cities old enough to predate water systems it was common for the favored side to grow upstream. Even after city sanitation, flood control, and car ownership that makes it possible to live ‘way up a hill without having to have the leisure to live so far from things – and even where that legacy doesn’t hold over in property investment – air quality is generally better higher up, nevermind views: so that in North America, where our water often flows to the east and south, even newer cities often favor west and north. Especially north. Nashville, Monterrey, East Bay, Memphis, and others where the east or south is higher ground, or cities where race riots took place after city sanitation came around, prove the rule by suggesting how much it takes to buck it and confirming why. Think about it and see why else you can come up with!” [Austin, commenting on Comment of the Day: The Common Divide]
SKANSKA HELPING HOUSTON CLUB TO EARLY EXIT
A year after Downtown’s Houston Club Building fell into foreclosure, the U.S. division of Swedish construction firm Skanksa has at last bought the 63-year-old building at 811 Rusk. But the new owner isn’t saying yet whether it plans to tear down the 18-story property. A company representative tells Nancy Sarnoff, though, that it will be “very difficult†to update and repair the structure. In any case, Skanska is letting tenants’ leases expire, and is helping the Houston Club itself relocate to “another downtown building†in February 2013, 2 years before its lease is up. [Houston Chronicle; previously on Swamplot] Photo : Silberman Properties
Also in the brand-new listing for a single-story “patio home” designed for the original owner by Preston Bolton off Yorktown: photos of the 2-bedroom, 2-bath pad from closer to its 1971 debut. If the now-empty home and its original blue kitchen don’t convey quite the air of Watergate-era sophistication you were looking for, try picturing yourself relaxing, internet-free, in the included black-and-white views. The 2,630-sq.-ft. home’s roof, AC, electrical panel, and water heater have all been replaced recently, but almost everything else is still as it was:
National attention may be focused on Central Texas-style barbecue, but food writer J.C. Reid says it’s time to put Houston barbecue back on the map. Logical first step in his Houston Barbecue Project, then: this interactive map of urban BBQ joints within Beltway 8. The project’s mission: “to revisit, document and recognize the East Texas-style of barbecue as it is embodied in the urban barbecue joints of Houston, Texas.” Reid drew the Beltway boundary just to limit the project’s first phase — he’s writes that he’s interested in expanding exploration to Houston’s outskirts and beyond once he — and any fellow BBQ adventurers — are able to document more of this city’s smoky inner sanctum.
What about the argument that city of Houston health and environmental codes are incompatible with good barbecue?
SHHHH ON THE TRACKS! FIRST WARD WINTER ST. QUIET ZONE ARRIVES IN 2 WEEKS 
Approvals all in, construction and signage complete, a “quiet zone” for the Union Pacific rail line that runs along Winter St. in the First Ward will go into effect on September 27th, after the end of a 21-day waiting period. Several years in the making, the zone will prohibit freight-train engineers from blasting their horns at grade crossings — unless something or someone is on the tracks in front of them. Not included in the loud-horn ban, reports the Washington Quiet Zone team, responsible for getting the quiet zone on Washington between Sherwin and National streets in place last year: the southernmost track running through the First Ward, which carries about 25 percent of area freight traffic. Adding that track to the new Winter St. zone may take several more years. [Washington Quiet Zone; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Sarah Fleming [license]
This handy list of addresses tells you where the ground-hitting action is:
COMMENT OF THE DAY: THE COMMON DIVIDE “. . . regarding the splitting of houston into east/west, is there any city in the US where the east side has higher average incomes and more infrastructure spending? seems that with most every city i can think of the east side is generally much more destitute than the west.” [joel, commenting on This Week, Houston Begins Slicing What’s Left of the Katy Prairie in Two]
ST. AGNES PICKS UP DROPPED SUIT 
The lawsuit the Academy of St. Agnes filed and then dropped last month against the city, the TABC, and the owners of a nightclub planning to open in the former Finger Furniture space at PlazAmericas is back on again, Purva Patel reports. The suit is an attempt to prevent the planned club, El Corral, from receiving a liquor license. A year ago, the private girls school bought the 18.7-acre former Gillman auto dealership at the corner of Bellaire Blvd. and Fondren, across the street from the former Sharpstown Mall, with plans to turn the property into an athletic campus. [Prime Property; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Candace Garcia
Something was missing, it turns out, in this brand-new home Mayor Parker turned over to Mary Porras in a “housewarming” ceremony on August 4th. Built by a contractor hired by the city, the single-story replacement house at 4005 Lila St. in the Fifth Ward had no insulation, an inspector from the state’s General Land Office discovered about a week later — after Porras had already moved in.
Just reduced a smidge: This 2-story four-squarish renovated 1914 home in Eastwood, just southwest of Eastwood Park. A few blocks north at Harrisburg and Lockwood, a light-rail station for Metro’s new East End line is supposed to open sometime around the home’s 100th-birthday mark. A porch wraps around the house, behind a front fence and driveway gate. And inside — a careful photographer has made sure you’ll notice — you’ll find lots of well-saturated colors.
Tuesday morning, not far from the former grounds of Forbidden Gardens, its now-ransacked replica gravesite of Emperor Qin, and his army of one-third-scale terracotta soldiers at the stub-end of Hwy. 99 and Franz Rd., TxDOT and a contingent of public officials will gather to celebrate the groundbreaking of a notable project for Houston: the paving of a $350 million four-lane toll highway with “intermittent” development-ready access roads across an expanse of largely uninhabited prairie land that stretches between Katy and Cypress. When it’s complete, the 180-mile-long Grand Parkway will be Houston’s fourth ring road, cutting through 7 different counties. But none of the planned segments will forge so dramatic a path through undeveloped land as this particular north-south stretch, called Segment E.
