04/18/11 8:06am

Moving into the site of the 7-story Compass Bank building demolished a year and a half ago at 2200 Post Oak Blvd., a block north of the Galleria: the bank’s new corporate parent, BBVA Compass. The subsidiary of Spanish banking giant BBVA will be leasing at least 6 floors of a new 20-story tower being developed on that location by the Redstone Companies and Stream Realty Partners. Not officially announced but still apparently planned for the northern portion of the same 6-and-a-half-acre parcel (the grassy area in the foreground of the rendering above, along Guilford Ct.): a second office building, hotel, and more structured parking. Redstone and Stream Realty had previously been marketing the mixed-use property as The Perennial.

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04/15/11 7:10pm

COMMENT OF THE DAY: SAVE THE GRASSLANDS “One of these days I’m going to start a movement to return Houston to the prairie that it was before World War II. I’ll organize a massive protest every time a new tree is planted, in an effort to restore Houston to the pristine flatland of pastures it originally was, before the invasions of those alien oak, pine and palm trees. (Never mind the tallows….)” [J.V., commenting on Clearing Out the Feagan Oaks from Magnolia Grove]

04/15/11 1:34pm

As of this morning, Historic Houston has been able to raise only $13,000 of the $50,000 executive director Lynn Edmundson had figured the organization would need to keep its North Montrose building-parts salvage warehouse in operation for just 3 more months. After this weekend, she tells Swamplot, she will have lost all employees other than her crew. That means the warehouse at 1307 West Clay St. will only be able to be opened by appointment. This Saturday from 10 to 4, though, she’ll be holding a last-ditch 50-percent-off sale with a bonus: All purchases will be tax-free.

As a nonprofit, Historic Houston is allowed to hold 2 sales-tax-free sales a year. Similar events put on by the organization in past years have been “pretty big successes,” according to Edmundson. “There seems to be something about not paying taxes” that really encourages people to buy, she says.

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04/15/11 9:54am

THE EMPTY FUTURE OF THE JOHNSON SPACE CENTER Former Space Shuttle manager Wayne Hale sees the writing on the wall: “Thousands of high paid, white collar jobs are leaving the Clear Lake area as NASA and JSC wind down. The City of Houston and the State of Texas have done, well, next to nothing. Nobody gets excited; nobody tries to bring new work here, a little lip service, no real effort. Nope, Houston does not deserve an orbiter because Houston doesn’t care. Don’t expect JSC and its mission control to be here forever just because we are entitled to them. No, with the level of interest that our citizens and leaders have in JSC, I soon expect to see that facility in the hands of a different federal agency. Soon the National Park Service will be leading tours through the historic – and empty – halls of the Johnson Space Center National Historic Site. Because we just don’t care enough to do anything about it.” [Space News]

04/15/11 8:55am

What’s been going on deep in this pine forest north of Houston, behind the fencing and security guards, where all those trucks have been driving in and out for months? A whole lot of logging at least, it looks like. While ExxonMobil continues to tell its employees that no decisions have yet been made about whether to consolidate approximately 17,000 of them from Houston and Virginia into a new 3 million sq. ft. office campus just south of The Woodlands, contractors working for the company have been stripping what looks like thousands of trees from its 359-acre property and preparing the site for construction of as many as 2 dozen office buildings, 4 enormous parking garages, and several other structures. These aerial photos of the site sent to Swamplot are dated March 12th.

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04/14/11 8:52pm

COMMENT OF THE DAY: NOT HOLDING UP SO WELL WITHOUT YOU Missing columns are nothing to snicker about. Have you ever spent sleepless nights wondering if your loved column will return? Have you experienced the pain of seeing your column with a Spanish Colonial from the other side of town? Well, you might think she supports you completely, but you’ll be the one left bearing the load. Mark my words you insensitive clods.” [kilray, commenting on Houston Home Listing Photo of the Day: Dramatic Entry]

04/14/11 8:40pm

The longtime owners of the now-shuttered original Otto’s Bar B Que and Hamburgers on Memorial Dr. filed suit on Tuesday against their former broker, Cushman & Wakefield executive director David Cook, claiming that he failed to let them know about several offers to buy their property. As a result, the lawsuit claims, the owners ended up selling their real-estate holdings for — and settling into retirement with — only a third of the money they might have otherwise received. Marcus and June Sofka originally listed their restaurant at 5502 Memorial Dr. and some adjacent property with Cook in August 2007. Two months later, according to the suit, the Ponderosa Land Development Co. submitted a written offer for the land to Cook for $105 a sq. ft. But the Sofkas claim they didn’t hear about that offer until much later. Why wouldn’t Cook have given them such good news?

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04/14/11 2:44pm

These are probably the last images you’ll see of two large oak trees on the 4200 block of Feagan, says the reader who snapped pix this morning of the clearance event that’s been going on there for the last few days. There’ll be no designing around them, apparently: A worker on the property “said he hated to do it but both remaining oaks were coming down.” Coming in, gathers the reader: maybe 28 new townhomes between Dickson and Feagan St., just west of Jackson Hill. “Numerous smaller oaks, pecans, hackberries that are now crunched on the ground” were hacked away earlier.

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04/13/11 5:06pm

COMMENT OF THE DAY: WORKS EVEN BETTER WHEN YOUR NEIGHBORS STUFF THEIR TOWNHOUSES WITH FOAM PEANUTS “I live in a 3 story townhome (2800 sq ft., shared walls, middle unit, north-facing) and the pleasant surprise for me has been the utility bills. July/August/September (bills since 2008) – no more than $140/month (@ ~.10/kw). Electrical bill drops down to <$100 in the winter. Since I have shared walls, the units on either side of me act as additional insulation for me.” [Terry, commenting on Houston Home Listing Photo of the Day: Dramatic Entry]

04/13/11 4:45pm

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04/13/11 2:56pm

A bit more on those twin brothers over in Meadowbrook Freeway who spent the last 3 months living in their home at 8402 Glenscott St. with the rotting dead body of their 89-year-old mother. Turns out Sybil Berndt was not found decomposing on the floor of the living room for all that time, as was first reported — her corpse was lying face down in the foyer, right behind the front door pictured here. Which might explain why Edwin Berndt thought it would be wiser to let in the police officer who came to investigate reports of concern about his mother (she wasn’t responding to her voicemail messages, a neighbor had reported) through the side door. Oh — and one more thing: Edwin and his brother Edward left their mother on the floor right where she fell for 3 whole daysalive — before she started in with that dying and decomposing bit.

The story of the 48-year-old couldn’t-be-bothered twins and the stench of their mother’s corpse has now been reported in newspapers, on teevee news, and on websites all over the world. But no retelling of the events we’ve come across so far has managed to surpass the deadpan drama of the Probable Cause affidavit prepared by HPD sergeant R. Torres, who was called to the scene shortly after Berndt’s body was found. Torres’s writeup brings together brilliantly the many themes of multigenerational family life the story so shockingly cartoons: fears of falling among the elderly, the selflessness of mothers, unacknowledged (or at least uncelebrated) birthdays, incapacitating miserliness, the difficulty of meal preparation, a parent’s financial support, bluffing, and of course, the ungratefulness of children:

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