Montrose
05/18/11 12:51pm

Restaurant Recycling: Molina’s Comes Back to West U, Greatfull Taco Takeover

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There’ll be a West-U-ish Molina’s Cantina location for the first time in 3 years — once the Tex-Mex chain opens up its new digs in one of the spaces left after the twin Terlingua Texas Border Cafe flameouts in March. Molina’s will go into Terlingua’s Braes Heights Shopping Center space on Bellaire near Stella Link. The last West U Molina’s, on Buffalo Speedway, closed down 3 years ago to make way for H-E-B’s Buffalo Market.

In other on-the-ashes-of-failed-restaurants news, the former Sabetta Cafe space at 2411 South Shepherd near Fairview is now the home of recently opened performance-art venue Greatfull Taco.

Photo of future Molina’s Cantina location, 3801 Bellaire Blvd.: West University Examiner

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Correctional Facilities
05/18/11 11:09am

Andy Fastow Comes Halfway Home

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ANDY FASTOW COMES HALFWAY HOME The Enron trial star rolled into town from Louisiana with an entourage yesterday to begin a 6-month stay in an unidentified Houston halfway house. The former CFO of Houston’s most famous company ever pled guilty to 2 charges of conspiracy for misleading investors about Enron’s pretty darn tricky financial situation; he began a 6-year sentence — marked down from 10 for some good testifyin’ — in 2006. Fastow is scheduled to be released on probation and go all the way home on December 17th. [Houston Chronicle]

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Buffalo Lakes
05/17/11 11:09pm

Comment of the Day: There’s a New Dry Buffalo Lake in My Back Yard

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COMMENT OF THE DAY: THERE’S A NEW DRY BUFFALO LAKE IN MY BACK YARD “I just did a google maps search of my place and I noticed the giant lake that they dug out in my ‘backyard’ for this mysterious Buffalo Lakes project. You would never [have] guessed something was going on back there because of the heavily wooded area. No water filled in yet but they cleared out the entire tract. I kept hoping something would develop back there and looks like there is finally some activity. . . .” [Chris, commenting on Gardening from the Sky] Plan: Kirksey Architecture

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Buying and Selling
05/17/11 5:35pm

Flipper Comes to Town: The Man Who’s Going to Save Houston Real Estate

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Oily 3-time Survivor loser Russell Hantz (pictured above in the shark-wrestling competition from Survivor: Samoa) tells Entertainment Weekly he’s come to town “to bring Houston’s economy back on its feet.” How’s he gonna get the market back from its tippy-toes? By flipping houses — then bragging about it on-camera. Apparently, a gig like that pays pretty well.

Hantz’s reputation as a tell-’em-straight kinda guy was sealed in January when the Daily Beast revealed him as the mysterious source of persistent leaks about the reality show’s top-secret storylines. In his contracts, Hantz had agreed to pay “liquidated damages” of $5 million if he revealed which contestants had been eliminated before episode air dates. CBS responded to the breach by suing the message-board commenter who posted the tips — and featuring Hantz in Survivor: Redemption Island, which began airing in February. (The suit against Survivor Sucks website poster Jim Early was dismissed.)

CONTINUE READING THIS STORY

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Downtown
05/17/11 1:06pm

The Top-Secret Downtown Location of Houston’s New Freetail Brewpub

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THE TOP-SECRET DOWNTOWN LOCATION OF HOUSTON’S NEW FREETAIL BREWPUB The Freetail Brewing Co.’s second-ever brewpub will go into 20,000 sq. ft. of “a historic building in downtown Houston,” the company announced today. What’s the address? “Out of respect to the developer, the exact location cannot be named at this time,” reads the press release. Respect! Oh, yeah, and a few details are still to be worked out, including some financing that’ll need to be complete within 90 days. The $4.2 million facility will span 3 floors of the mystery building and include a company store, plus restaurant and bar space. It appears the Houstonification of the San Antonio company has already begun: “Unlike Freetail’s original location, which is primarily one big room with a patio overlooking the Texas hill country, Freetail Houston will feature traditional restaurant seating, private dining space, and a “game room” with pool tables, shuffleboard, darts and numerous televisions.” We’re guessing that downtown building isn’t on a pad site by the freeway, though. [Beer, TX]

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Magnolia Grove
05/17/11 9:50am

Last Stand in Magnolia Grove

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Actual trees are still standing in the Magnolia Grove lot where that live-oak clearance event began last month. What’s left: A little street mustache lining Feagan St., between Snover and Jackson Hill. The reader who sent these photos — and says she appreciates “raw” local real-estate news — wants to know what’s going in.

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Quicklink
05/16/11 10:51pm

Gardening from the Sky

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GARDENING FROM THE SKY And the Brays Bayou-side Google Earth image updates are in: “This week, I was checking things out on GE and low and behold, my latest flower bed addition was clearly visible from the sky. I know this image is very recent, because I installed the bed over the Christmas holidays – before that it was struggling St. Augustine grass. Now anyone in the world can zoom in and see the shape of the dirt covered with bark mulch (no large plants yet, but they sprung up nicely this spring).” [HoustonGrows] Image: Google Earth

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Lower Westheimer
05/16/11 3:20pm

Finding the Uchi in the Ruins of a Tex-Mex Empire

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Is that just an old wall going the way of all stucco on the vacant former Felix Mexican Restaurant space at Westheimer and Grant? Or is architect Michael Hsu’s rehab of the space — which will turn it into a Houston outpost of Tyson Cole’s Uchi and Uchiko juggernaut from Austin, plus a few other lease spaces — already in progress? Candace Garcia’s brief photo report on one piece of the Great Lower Westheimer Restaurant Rejiggering, below:

CONTINUE READING THIS STORY

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Notices
05/16/11 7:30am

What Happened to Swamplot Comments — and Some Apologies

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Over the weekend, a series of 8 inflammatory comments were posted to this website and remained visible to readers for as long as an hour before they were noticed and removed. Efforts to fight comment spam and abuse aren’t unusual or ordinarily newsworthy. These comments, however, were notable because they directly insulted and threatened a Harris County judge who has been assigned to hear a legal complaint filed against Swamplot. The comments appear to have been an attempt to fool readers unfamiliar with this site into believing that the threats and insults were coming from particular Swamplot readers who comment here frequently, or from people familiar to our editorial staff. To be clear: The comments did not come from anyone associated with this site — or sympathetic to it.

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Downtown
05/13/11 12:06pm

Your Guide to Houston’s Crash Hotspots

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Texas Watchdog crunched 2009 car-crash data from TXDOT to find the parts of town where wrecks were concentrated. The heatmap above resulted from plotting location information from almost 100,000 Harris County incidents, most of which included exact coordinates. The winners? Two separate sections of Downtown and the intersection of FM 1960 and Hwy. 59 north, near Deerbrook Mall. (One of those Downtown hotspots, centered on Metro’s Main St. headquarters, includes the Pierce Elevated.) Also noteworthy spots for wreckage buffs: 2 sections of the Southwest Freeway — one at the West Loop and the other at Hillcroft.

Downtown also topped Texas Watchdog’s separate breakdowns for accidents involving road rage and collisions involving cellphones. But second- and third-place winners in these categories produced more local champions: Westheimer at Hillcroft, the Galleria area, and 59 at Kirby all ranked highly as sites for road-rage incidents. For cellphone-related accidents, the top areas were Montrose, an area just south of the Galleria and southwest of the 610-59 interchange; and the route from the Johnson Space Center to I-45. The northeastern corner of the 610 Loop at Liberty Rd. won the fatality division outright.

Map showing wreck concentrations: Jennifer Peebles/Texas Watchdog

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Critters
05/13/11 10:41am

Houston Bites the Most

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HOUSTON BITES THE MOST Dogs bit mail carriers more times in Houston last year than in any other U.S. city, the U.S. Postal Service announced yesterday — in advance of National Dog Bite Prevention Week. 62 dogs got a taste of a Houston postal employee in 2010; San Diego and Columbus, Ohio, ranked second, with only 45 incidents each. The nationwide tally: 5,669 canine attacks on mail carriers in more than 1,400 cities, costing the agency nearly $1.2 million in medical expenses. [USPS]

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