Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
A record-breaking list of permits issued just in time for Demolition Day, featuring a massive collection of single-stories on Airport Blvd., right off Sims Bayou.
On Tuesday night, Houston’s first and only bayou movie barge docked at Guadalupe Park off Navigation for the first of 2 “sneak peek” video performances on the banks of Buffalo Bayou. On the opposite shoreline, a few cargo trains and a motorcade of dirt bikes rumbled past, but the night was clear and mosquito-free, show and boat organizer Bree Edwards claims. Plus, she says: The solar-powered cinema setup on the Tex Hex worked flawlessly. Her pix of the scene:
GETTING THE PURPLE FROM GREENS 
“He developed a purple dot right between the eyes, and within 2 hours it spread over his face and his abdominal parts and within 6 hours he was completely purple.” — Matthew Finn IV, telling reporter Sally MacDonald what happened after his father got a small cut on his leg while fishing in a freshwater tributary of Greens Bayou. The elder Finn died Monday, 11 days after the incident. His family blames an aggressive bacteria — which his doctors have been so far unable to identify — for the death. [MyFox Houston] Photo: MyFox Houston
WHERE HOUSTONIANS HIDE FROM TOURISTS Writing in the travel section of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, devoted Cardinal fan and reporter Diane Toroian Keaggy blows the lid off the great Houston population hoax: “Who am I to argue with the U.S. Census, Greater Houston Convention and Visitors Bureau and Post-Dispatch pal and Houston native Aisha Sultan? But no way is Houston the nation’s fourth largest city. Where are the people? Certainly not downtown, which cleared out immediately after the Astros win. The Museum District, easily reachable from downtown by rail and home to the Houston Zoo, Children’s Museum and Museum of Natural Science, also seemed strangely quiet. We wanted to visit the Contemporary Art Museum, the Byzantine Fresco Chapel, the Menil Collection, the Houston Center of Photography and the wacky folk-art mecca called the Orange Show. Each was closed on Tuesday. We could have visited the Space Center Houston, which includes the tram tour of NASA’s Johnson Space Center, but it’s 25 miles south of downtown and costs $21. That’s too much money and time for a short two-day trip. Instead we visited the Museum of Fine Arts, which features an impressive collection of Impressionism and the Weather Museum, which feels more like a seventh-grade science project than an actual attraction. Don’t bother. . . . We continued our search for life at the Galleria, one of the nation’s top malls. A-ha! So that’s where everyone was hiding. Home to Fendi, Dior, Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent, Versace, Tory Burch and other impossibly expensive boutiques not found in St. Louis, the Galleria boasts 375 shops spread across two large buildings. Bring comfy, but fashionable, shoes. The mall claims to attract 24 million shoppers each year, and only a few seemed to be buying Gucci glasses, Kate Spade earrings and Jimmy Choo pumps. The rest could be found skating on the indoor ice rink or slumming it in Banana Republic, Apple and Claire’s.” [STLToday]
A new “final” rendering is out for the second phase of Blvd Place, which includes a brand-new 48,500-sq.-ft. Whole Foods Market near the corner of Post Oak Blvd. and San Felipe just north of the Galleria (and yes, only a few feet east from the old Eatzi’s location), as well as two 4-story mixed-use buildings flanking it along Post Oak. Plus: a parking garage in back. The 4-story buildings (marked 1N and 2 on the recently updated site plan below) will have 2 office levels above 2 floors of retail, like the lone building in Blvd Place’s first phase, which opened last year a block south. Wulfe & Co.’s Elise Weatherall tells Swamplot the remaining portion of the old Pavilion on Post Oak on the site will be demolished this fall; construction on the new Whole Foods and the adjacent buildings is scheduled to begin about the same time, with everything opening in the first half of 2013.
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Where are all the demolitions scheduled to take place Saturday, in Houston’s annual mass celebration of destruction? Reader Ed from Westbury has put together a handy-dandy map using BatchGeo that shows the locations of the buildings targeted by the city’s Neighborhood Protection department that have received demolition permits since last Friday. There should be more than 400 in there. Is your favorite condemned building missing from the map? Ed promises to update it over the weekend with any permits taken out today. Click here to see a larger version.
Map: Ed from Westbury
Just another 50 or so to throw in for good measure:
COMMENT OF THE DAY: THE GANG THAT COULDN’T EAT CHAMETZ “Biker gangs in Meyerland? Girl what part of Meyerland did you live in? We lived there for 12 years on Indigo St., the part between Endicott and Rice, and never once experienced biker gangs or ANY undesirable folks at all. Even with our close proximity to Meyerland Plaza, we never saw such people. The only gangs we saw were families walking to temple, especially during Passover. That is one of the most homogenized neighborhoods in Houston, next to Bellaire. Biker gangs? Yeah, right.” [MarketingWiz, commenting on Wichita St. Mystery House Goes on the Market Today: Your First Peek Inside]
Photos of a 2-story brick home in the Easton Commons area of Copperfield featured on Swamplot last Friday have since found their way onto 2 national real-estate websites. 14818 Chetland Place Dr.’s moment in the media spotlight is surely a testament either to a nascent farm and star-making infrastructure for breakout local real-estate listings — or to the sheer attention-getting power of bizarre listing photos.
Opening date for the brightly colored new 40,450-sq.-ft. Whole Foods Market on West Dallas and Waugh: June 22, the company reports. What about farther afield? A Whole Foods spokesperson says the company has no current plans for a store in Katy, but Nancy Sarnoff reports sources have told her the grocery retailer “is in negotiations to put a 30,000 square-foot store at the corner of Grand Parkway and Fry Road.”
Photo: Candace Garcia
Is this unassuming building on the same block as Irma’s Restaurant downtown Andy Fastow’s new Houston hangout? Federal prison officials wouldn’t confirm it to him, but Chron energy reporter Tom Fowler figures Fastow’s not-entirely-disclosed location has gotta be the Leidel Comprehensive Sanctions Center at 1819 Commerce St., 3 blocks north of the baseball stadium formerly known as Enron Field. Other recent Enronian visitors to the same facility: former chief accounting officer Richard Causey, who went home Tuesday; Enron Broadband’s Rex Shelby, who’s been there for about a week; and Fastow’s wife Lea, who visited for a month in 2005. Fastow may not stay long, though — Fowler reports he should be eligible for some form of in-home confinement as early as a month from now.
Photo: GEO Care
More dangerous buildings marked for the great Demolition Day this weekend. Plus a few rejects thrown in for good measure.
COMMENT OF THE DAY: HE-MAN, YOU HAVE THE POWER TO SAVE THESE TURRETS! “This house will more than likely be torn down. It’s a shame, really, because it’s one of the most unique structures in town, but the list of people who, a) could afford the $300K price tag, and b) would want to live in a house that looks like Castle Grayskull, is probably pretty short.” [Stormy Blanco, commenting on Wichita St. Mystery House Goes on the Market Today: Your First Peek Inside]
After the Orange Show, the Beer Can House, and the Third Ward home of the Flower Man, probably no Houston home has accumulated more outsider-art street cred than Charles Fondow’s decades-long transformation of a former Riverside Terrace daycare center into a bubbling stew of half-timbered gables, turrets, and towering rooftop decks. The ongoing Wichita St. skyward expansion project had an air of mystery, too. In Jennifer Mathieu’s 2001 Houston Press profile, Fondow comes across as shy and self-effacing, though he had by then spent $300,000 and countless hours of hard work on his grand, mostly-DIY creation, inspired by visions he had collected from visits to exotic far-away lands like Russia and Green Bay, Wisconsin.
Fondow, who loved to travel, passed away in March after falling ill on a Caribbean cruise. His gotta-keep-adding home-improvement project had lasted 31 years. And earlier today, a for-sale sign went up on the property. The listing features a first public viewing of what everybody wants to see: the building’s innards. Could this place be just as weird and wonderful inside as what Fondow carefully assembled outside and on top?
