- Some More Details on Todd Interests’s Plans To Redevelop the Great Southwest Building into a Luxury Apartment Tower [HBJ]
- More Private and Foreign Capital Investors Than Institutional Are Still Buying Apartments in Houston Right Now Amid the Oil Slump [HBJ]
- Construction of Upscale, 5-Story Homewood Suites Gets Underway on Galveston’s Seawall [Galveston County Daily News ($)]
- Woodlands-Based LGI Homes Sold 853 New Homes in the Second Quarter, Up 29% Over Same Period Last Year [Realty News Report]
- Garden Oaks Isn’t the Ideal Location for Whole Foods’s New 365 Concept, Say Some Brokers [HBJ]
- Brick & Spoon in Montrose That Opened in the Former Bocados Spot Has Closed [Culturemap; previously on Swamplot]
- Is Leon’s Lounge Actually the Oldest Bar in Houston? [Houston Chronicle]
- A Few Highlights and ‘Secret’ Histories from the Astrodome Memories Archive Project [The Urban Edge]
- Updated System Maps Are Now Available Online Ahead of Metro’s Bus Network Change on Aug. 16 [Not of it]
- B-Cycle Use Up 20% in the First 7 Months of 2015 Compared to Same Period Last Year [The Highwayman]
Photo of the Astrodome: Russell Hancock via Swamplot Flickr Pool
Headlines
b-cycle use being up 20%. I absolutely believe it. I see people riding on them everywhere. I even saw a group of people had taken the east end trail out to harrisburg and lockwood on the rental cycles. awesome!
Interesting news about the Great Southwest building! Big fan of the addition that’s going on the surface lot- very fitting for the neighborhood with the early-20th century retro-industrial style (at least in the rendering)
The GSW tower is a fantastic example of preserved early Art Deco and deserves to be kept around (although I couldn’t care less about “Luxury Apartments” myself). Shame that the similar Texas Tower is gone now, but that building was already ruined with the removal of cornicework and that awful 1980’s lobby façade- and the replacement tower that’s going up is just spectacular.
RE: Whole Foods “365” Concept Store in Garden Oaks
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The article talks about how it being slightly outside the Heights (fronting the North Loop near Yale) but I’d say that it was a bit pioneering for Whole Foods. The store will draw the GOOFs and Heights people over since the spot is sort of a dead zone as it is now.
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Plus, the economics of land prices in that spot is probably better than trying to plunk it in the actual Heights – as the article’s commenter commented.
Brick and Spoon was a pretty decent restaurant and always filled up for brunch. Only reason I can think of why they closed would be that they closed for dinner. Which was a really really strange move.