Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
It’s plain to see that the end is nigh for these buildings:
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- 13839 San Domingo Dr. [HAR]
Local AstroWorld debris hoarder Maria Medeles has listed nearly 400 pieces of park merchandise including giant ride entrance decorations, fiberglass statues of cartoon characters, concession menu boards, bathroom signs, and other whatnots on an online auction portal where the current bids range up to $2,300 for the item pictured at top. It’s only a fraction of everything she’s got, though: According to the auctioneer she’s engaged to get rid of the stuff, the list of items available will at least double in the days leading up to February 23, when Medeles and SITE Auction Services plans to hold a live, in-person auction at Emiliano’s, a sports bar and pool hall at I-10 and Wayside with a fighting ring out back where frequent lucha libre matches go down.
What other goodies could be made available at the event 2 and a half weeks from now? Probably some considerably large props and signs, but also some more mundane memorabilia as well. According to KHOU’s Jason Miles, “Medeles’ Astroworld obsession began with buying a bench when the theme park closed in 2005.”
- New AstroWorld auction is your chance to own vintage entrance sign, Bugs Bunny and more [Houston Chronicle]
- Astroworld memorabilia auction features hundreds of items [KHOU]
Photo: SITE Auction Services
Going Once, Going Twice
- New Common Bond Locations Opening in Med Center, Heights, Midtown, Plus 2 More Yet To Be Confirmed [Culturemap]
- 1415 Louisiana’s New Top-Floor Restaurant Strato 550 Will Be Houston’s Highest Vantage Point Open To the Public [HBJ]
- Richmond’s Farm-Centric Harvest Green Community Adding 290 New Homesites to Existing 1,300 Acres [Houston Chronicle; previously on Swamplot]
- Eco Firm Hired To Meet Regulatory Requirements for Environmental Mitigation in Construction of Houston-Dallas Bullet Train [Culturemap; previously on Swamplot]
- Wolfgang Puck’s Catering Company Signing Lease for Inner-Loop Location To Open in the Next Month [HBJ]
- Hines Releases Renderings and Details of 46-Story Downtown Apartment Tower Now Dubbed The Preston [Bisnow]
Photo of 317 W. 19th St.: Marc Longoria via Swamplot Flickr Pool
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Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
Clearing out some industrial grunge on Manchester St. is a refined choice indeed:
- 5510 Tupper Lake Dr. [HAR]
The arrival of chain link fencing outside the arched office complex at 2715 Bissonnet known as The Upper Kirby Building last week caught the attention of several Swamplot tipsters, who’ve sent in photos looking across the street at the new perimeter and the vacant scene beyond it. The image at top looks southwest to show the complex’s largest building, an L-shaped structure that fronts the central parking lot on 2 sides. In the second photo, you can see where that building abuts its neighbor, a smaller, rectangular structure that runs along the east side of the parking lot on its way out to the curb. Not depicted: a pair additional small 2-story buildings and their adjacent parking lots to the west, which take up the rest of the block ending at Wakeforest St.
An entity connected to Cornerbrook Development bought the whole 1.56-acre tract housing the 4 buildings last December and since then has filed a few permits to disconnect the plumbing, but it hasn’t laid a hand on the structures themselves yet. They all went up in late ’60s and early ’70s and — though currently vacant — recently played host to Montage Bridal, Synergy Day Spa, an Allstate insurance office, and an assortment of hairdressers.
Photos: Swamplot inbox
West U.
A Swamplot reader sends the photo at top showing a bright yellow permit notice for something called Kubo’s Sushi and Washoku up in the window next to Tacodeli’s storefront at 1902 Washington Ave. The portion of the building now sporting the sign — designated suite C — most recently housed a different sushi restaurant dubbed Kukuri, but not for long: It closed last March after just over 6 months in business.
The new Kubo’s sushi spot is backed by the same team behind former Japanese restaurant Kubo’s Sushi Bar & Grill, which closed its second-story spot in the former Rice Village building between Kelvin and Morningside drives in 2016 after about a decade and a half in business.
Photos: Swamplot inbox (sign); Kukuri (restaurant)
Raw Fish Redo
- Pokeworks Nearly Triples Houston Presence with 9 New Locations Planned [HBJ]
- Dunno Much About South Acres, but Redfin Sez It’s Desirable [Houston Chronicle]
- Former Ciao Bello Spot on San Felipe To Be New Flagship Location of Los Tios Tex-Mex [Eater]
- Owner Planning Substantial Renovations to One City Centre Building Downtown After Waste Management Leaves [Bisnow]
- 380 Agreement To Fund New Road Connected to Sam Houston Pkwy. for Missouri City’s Future CityPark Logistics Center [Community Impact]
- Residential, Industrial Development Further Endangering Wetlands in Galveston and Harris Counties [Houston Chronicle]
Photo of Memorial Hermann Tower: Marc Longoria via Swamplot Flickr Pool
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Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
Part two of the Jensen Dr. Goodwill takedown, plus a heavy helping of garage razing. How do you like them apples?
- 5450 Honea Egypt Rd. [HAR]
Probably the oldest thing hanging in the International Longshoremen’s Association Local 24 building in Pasadena is the 24-ft.-long mural shown at top, depicting — from left to right — the way black workers’ jobs at the Ship Channel evolved from the early 1900s to 1957 when the painting was completed. How the artwork made it from the banks of Buffalo Bayou to brand-new union building at 4060 Red Bluff Rd. is a story that spans about the same number of decades:
In the late ’50s, members of Houston’s black longshoremen’s union, I.L.A Local 872, commissioned an artist named John T. Biggers to paint something they could put on the walls of their meeting hall at 75th and Memphis St. Biggers — who after founding Texas Southern’s art department nearly a decade prior would go on to become one of the century’s most well-known black muralists — was pressed for time: “A UNESCO grant that I applied for two year earlier, to study traditional life in Africa, had come through. I was told be in Ghana by July 1, 1957 — three weeks away,” he recalled in a later interview. So he got to work like crazy in a studio at TSU, painting, “from 3 a.m. until classtime and after classes until midnight,” with the aid of sketches he’d made at the Port of Houston and the Ship Channel, writes historian Ollie Jensen Theisen. He met his deadline and turned over his work, History of the International Longshoremen’s Local 872, chronicles decades of history — from the heavy lifting of days past to a present moment in which a group union bosses foreground a few men on forklifts.
By order of a federal court in 1983, Local 872 merged with its whites-only counterpart Local 1723 to become Local 24. Biggers’ painting wound up in the second-floor auditorium of the new joint union’s building, which sits at 7811 Harrisburg Blvd. — between 78th and 79th streets — but received a demolition permit late last week.
Local 24 officials have already moved into their new home in Pasadena, completed following about 2 years of construction:
Houston Art History
Tenants have been filing out of the 5-story office building shown above at the northeast corner of Richmond Ave and Eastside St. in anticipation of its planned collapse 2 months from now, according one employee who’s still inside but won’t be for long. Building management gave all occupants — including Imparali Tailor, luggage retailer Kipling, and dozens of other business and medical groups — notice last year that they’d need to hit the road.
Designed by Wilson, Morris, Crane & Anderson, the building is one of a dozen vertically-windowed mid- and lowrises that then-not-yet-famous Houston developer Gerald Hines built along Richmond in the early 1960s to accommodate businesses looking to spread out away from Downtown for the first time. (3100 Richmond, on the other side of Weslayan Eastside, was his work too, as well as 3101 Richmond, which sits catty-corner to the soon-to-be demolished building.) By the time the Richmond Ave corridor of similar-looking office structures was complete from Kirby to Weslayan, it had served as a sort of “MBA course,” write Houston architect Barry Moore and preservationist Anna Mod, “for Gerald Hines and arch-competitor Kenneth Schnitzer [of Century Development],” the 2 of whom soon graduated to designing taller and more notable Houston buildings inside and outside of Downtown.
- The Richmond Corridor [OffCite]
- The Business Strip [OffCite]
Photo: Capital Realty
Richmond Ave Adieu
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Sponsor of the Day
- Facility at 700 N. San Jacinto St. Opening this Weekend To Make Processing Jail Inmates “More Efficient†for HPD [Houston Public Media]
- Big Ideas for Houston Infrastructure Include Underground Tunnel Systems from City Reservoirs into the Gulf [HBJ ($)]
- Developers Won’t Stack Multilevel Warehouses in Houston Until Land Costs More [Bisnow]
- METRO Proposes 75-mile Bus Rapid Transit System that Could Connect Downtown to IAH [Houston Chronicle]
- Even with Federal Aid, Disaster Relief Process is Fraught with Barriers for Marginalized Communities [The Urban Edge]
- Online Shops Slow Retail Construction in Houston, Down an Estimated 24% from Last Year [Houston Chronicle]
Photo of H-E-B Heights: Marc Longoria via Swamplot Flickr Pool
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