Montrose
11/15/10 6:28pm

Lard Almighty: Tower Theatre’s Coming Attraction Is Grease II

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A reader sends word that a TABC alcohol-license notice posted on the side of the former Tower Theatre at 1201 Westheimer — where Hollywood Video was sent packing late last year — reveals the name of the old-style Tex-Mex restaurant former Houston Press food critic Robb Walsh and Iron Chef contestant Bryan Caswell will be inserting into the long-gutted moviehouse. As announced in the Press‘s food blog earlier this month, it’ll be El Real Tex Mex Cafe. Alas, no notice has yet been posted warning customers of the restaurant’s special featured ingredient:

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Quicklink
11/15/10 12:11pm

Red Light Cameras No Longer Recording

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RED LIGHT CAMERAS NO LONGER RECORDING As of 10 this morning, all 70 traffic-intersection cameras have been turned off. Proposition 3, which would have allowed the cameras to continue to snap photos of red-light runners, was defeated by Houston voters 2 weeks ago. “City officials said they have $25 million in uncollected fines from citations that were issued. [Mayor] Parker said the city plans to aggressively go after those violators. City officials have not said when the cameras will be removed from the intersections.” [Click2Houston]

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Art
11/12/10 5:44pm

Prototype 180: The Great Sharpstown Turnaround Has Begun

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Spun around 180 degrees on its site yesterday: the 1,304 sq.-ft. Ranch house at 6513 Sharpview, before a small crowd gathered at Bayland Park next door and an online audience following the live-streaming cameras mounted to the long-vacant 1960 structure. Conceptual artist Mary Ellen Carroll‘s big house-twisting exercise was 10 years in the making. A reader sends in this report from the muddy field:

I missed the talks . . . but was there from about 11:30 ’till when they finished for the day at 2:30. What happened was they backed the house off the site, turned it perpendicular onto Sharpcrest, and then there was this great moment when the house was moving laterally along the street, and then they backed it in towards us (we were at the back of the lot, on the lot line that faces Bayland Park).

. . . The group seemed about evenly divided between architecture folks, including at one point Rice Architecture dean Sarah Whiting, art crowd types (Molly Gochman, Arturo Palacios), and the many friends MEC has made during her time in Houston due to her being such a nice person. A healthy handful of neighbors milled about, including this woman who stood on her roof with a cup of coffee, who at one point went inside and got an umbrella when it started raining.

Our correspondent also apparently missed some very hot Mexican food: Hometta blogger Jenny Staff Johnson reports a taco truck hired to cater the event caught on fire.

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Neighborhood Disputes
11/12/10 2:23pm

The Next Neighbor in Line for 2520 Robinhood Won’t Mind Getting Wet

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THE NEXT NEIGHBOR IN LINE FOR 2520 ROBINHOOD WON’T MIND GETTING WET Hudson Lounge owner Adam Kleibert is hoping his new bar directly to the east of the 2520 Robinhood at Kirby condo tower will get better treatment from his neighbors than the drenching and projectile greetings Hans’ Bier Haus directly to the west received last year. And he tells the HBJ‘s Allison Wollam that he and his brothers have some plans for the rest of the property they own directly adjacent to the tower. Once the lending market turns around, he says, they’d like to build a 33-room boutique hotel with a rooftop pool on the site. Kleibert says the Hudson Lounge is already planning a reception expressly for condo residents. [Houston Business Journal; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Candace Garcia

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Buying and Selling
11/11/10 11:11pm

KTRU Sale: No Need for Sneaky Visits After All

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KTRU SALE: NO NEED FOR SNEAKY VISITS AFTER ALL Texas Watchdog has now released all the emails it collected related to the sale of Rice University radio station KTRU’s FM broadcast license and its not-so-shabby transmitter in Humble to the University of Houston. And for the local-radio-obsessed, there are plenty of repetitive conversations to pore through. A couple of the messages, though, bring a little more clarity to what happened after one of the deal’s brokers, Public Radio Capital director of acquisitions Erik Langner, suggested that Rice invent some pretext to allow a consulting engineer to inspect the station (which is run by students they didn’t want to tip off that a sale was likely to take place). It appears no subterfuge was needed, after all. “They brought the station manager and one or two of the key staff into the loop on the sale,” a colleague of Langner’s wrote to KUHF general manager John Proffitt about a month later. As Texas Watchdog reporter Steve Miller notes, Proffitt later identifies the KTRU staff members as the station’s general manager and chief engineer — both of whom are Rice employees. [Texas Watchdog; previously on Swamplot]

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Buying and Selling
11/11/10 10:00pm

Comment of the Day: Selling Out from Under the Kids

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COMMENT OF THE DAY: SELLING OUT FROM UNDER THE KIDS “Would anyone charged with this project done it any differently? If you have to move your family to a new neighborhood, do you seek your kids’ permission first? Yeah, it affects them, but it’s not their decision.” [Carol, commenting on Getting a Good Look at KTRU without Tipping Off Students]

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Katy
11/11/10 1:50pm

How the TCEQ’s Been Able To Lower Radiation Levels in Katy Drinking Water

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All it takes is a little subtraction! Say you’ve got 20 picocuries of cancer-friendly alpha radiation per liter in your drinking water. Well, there’s gotta be some margin of error in measuring it, right? Say, 6 picocuries per liter? Then just go ahead and subtract that number out (because you’ve gotta be optimistic about these things, you know, or it’ll kill you). Then . . . voilà! Your level of those nasty little mutation-causing particles is now just 14 picocuries. And phew! what a relief! Because the EPA’s “maximum contaminant level” for alpha radiation happens to be 15 picocuries per liter, and those math wizards at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality have just saved your community’s water supply from receiving a violation notice! Slight problem: since 2000, the EPA has requested that states not use this little data-jiggering technique. But not to worry: TCEQ’s Linda Goodins, who oversees all drinking-water safety regulation for the state, doesn’t think the EPA’s request was an actual requirement. (Just to placate to those ever-meddling feds though, TCEQ discontinued its subtraction technique last year.)

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Buying and Selling
11/11/10 10:35am

Getting a Good Look at KTRU without Tipping Off Students

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GETTING A GOOD LOOK AT KTRU WITHOUT TIPPING OFF STUDENTS Or: Beware of those “inspectors” the owner brings through. Emails obtained by Texas Watchdog detail a sneaky technique agents acting on behalf of Rice University may have used to put together the sale of student-run radio station KTRU to the University of Houston — without having complete access to the facilities. In an email sent in May of this year to another broker representing the university in the still top-secret transaction, the director of acquisitions of Public Radio Capital suggested a way to put together a complete list of the station’s assets without “tipping off” the students in charge of the station that a sale was being negotiated: “We request that Rice provide a cover story for an independent 3rd party engineering consultant, to be chosen by UH, to perform an inspection of the transmitter building, transmitter equipment, transmission line, tower and antennae. Rice should actually hire the consultant we specify, so there will be no question as to the source of the inspection, which of course will have to be coordinated with the station engineer somehow. Rice can use any reason it chooses, some of which can include change of insurance, inventory needs, or any other plausible explanation.” Other emails indicate Rice officials had wanted to put KTRU up for sale 2 years ago; UH became interested in the station — now slated to broadcast in a classical-music format — early last year. [Texas Watchdog; previously on Swamplot] Late Update: Rice didn’t have to lie.

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Buying and Selling
11/10/10 11:10pm

Heritage Plaza Sells High

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HERITAGE PLAZA SELLS HIGH That vaguely Mayan-looking tower at the northwestern edge of Downtown sporting the popular no-neck stone-top-sinking-into-a-glass-base look will soon have a new owner. Brookfield Office Properties has agreed to buy the 53-story Heritage Plaza for an almost-local-record $325 million — thanks in part to a little 12-year $200 million loan from MetLife negotiated by the seller, Atlanta’s Goddard Investment. Goddard paid $121 million for the building a little more than 5 years ago; the company added a new 1,058-car parking garage catty-corner to the property in 2008. [Real Estate Alert; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Jeff Balke

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Comments
11/10/10 3:46pm

Comment of the Day: The Shopping Center with the Most Parking Spaces Wins!

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COMMENT OF THE DAY: THE SHOPPING CENTER WITH THE MOST PARKING SPACES WINS! “Reducing the number of parking spaces at this store would not encourage people to walk to get their weekly grocery shopping, it would just encourage them to drive to a different store.” [Jimbo, commenting on What the New Montrose H-E-B Is Gonna Look Like]

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Disaster Aftermath
11/10/10 1:42pm

Houston Buying 25 Shipping-Container Offices for Emergency Solar Power

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A small fleet of modified shipping containers outfitted with adjustable solar panels will soon serve as mobile emergency power supplies for the city of Houston. City officials are currently negotiating a contract to purchase 25 of the units, which are based on a prototype originally deployed as the green-themed sales office of a Montrose condo project. The solar-powered containers, called SPACE (“Solar Powered Adaptive Container for Everyone“), were created by a joint venture of local architecture firm Metalab, Joey Romano’s Harvest Moon Development, and design firm ttweak (best known for the popular “Houston. It’s Worth It.” marketing campaign). City sustainability director Laura Spanjian announced at the opening of the University of Houston’s Green Building Components Expo last month that SPACE and energy company Ameresco had been selected through a public-application process to supply the city with the mobile “solar generators.” Spanjian now tells Swamplot the contract should be complete “in a few weeks.”

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Crime
11/10/10 10:12am

Indoor Tropical Gardening in La Marque

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Galveston County Sheriff’s deputies, La Marque and Texas City Police, and officials from the Texas DPS Narcotics unit gathered for a garden tour yesterday in the back building of the purported cabinet-making business of Gregory William Stanley, at the southeast corner of 5th St. and FM 519 in La Marque. Thanks to careful attention to air flow and insulation, Stanley had been able to keep law-enforcement officials off the scent of his 240-plant greenhouse for a while:

The pungent aroma of marijuana was evident only upon entering the metal building.

The building had an extra ridge vent to help push the marijuana smell through the roof, sheriff’s office Lt. Tommy Hansen said.

“It’s all insulated,” [Capt. Barry] Cook said. “Foam board on the walls, silver insulating materials on the ceiling, and ultraviolet lights to help these plants.”

Oscillating fans still were blowing air through the rooms as authorities photographed the evidence.

“There’s a ventilation, heating and lighting system, and they’ve got fans moving the air to keep it cool and damp in here,” Cook said.

Video: Galveston County Daily News

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