COMMENT OF THE DAY: THE ROOMS IN THE OLD RICE HOTEL HAVE BEEN SHUFFLED AROUND A BIT 
“Jim is absolutely correct. The Old Capitol Club was adjacent to The Flag Room, on the first floor. The Flag Room space is now Sambuca. A little internet sleuthing pulls up a dining room shot of some built in booths surrounding structural columns that now frame the stage at Sambuca.” [Josh, commenting on The Rice Hotel’s Storied State Bar, a Favorite Among Lawyers, Will Soon Turn into a Lawless Kitchen] Illustration: Lulu
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Tag: 77002
Be careful not to confuse these life-and-death downtown bar stories: As we learned this morning, the Live! at Bayou Place bars are now dead. But the Live Sports Bar (no exclamation point!), which died back in 2009 at 405 Main St. is about to be resurrected. But in name and address only: A Live Sports Bar — same name, but with different owners — will be opening up in a slightly smaller version of the original space (4,000 sq. ft., marked down from 6,140) across from the Preston St. light-rail stop sometime in the next few months, once the buildout is complete. A Swamplot reader captured the above photo showing the new head-turning banner now posted out front.
Photo: Swamplot inbox
Same Name, Same Spot, Different Owners
The 4-bar complex upstairs in downtown’s Bayou Place known collectively as Live! at Bayou Place shut down at the end of last month. “Cowboy bar” PBR, Lucie’s Liquors, Shark Bar, and Chapel Spirits had replaced Slick Willie’s Pool Hall and Rocbar in 2011, around the same time the Sundance Cinemas took over the Angelika Film Center spot downstairs in the same building. (Previous upstairs nightspots had included BAR Houston and Whiskey Creek.) The 4 bars took up 18,000 sq. ft. of space, and required a single admission for entry.
A reader notes that Sundance, The Blue Fish, the Bayou Music Center, the Wine Cellar, Hard Rock Cafe, and Italian restaurant Little Napoli are still open in the same building, a 130,000-sq.-ft. entertainment complex carved out of the former Albert Thomas Convention Center almost 17 years ago.
- Previously on Swamplot:Â Report: Sundance Cinemas Replacing Angelika Film Center at Bayou Place; Bar Smorgasbord Moving in Upstairs
Photo: Shea Serrano
Downtown Shutdowns
The State Bar and Lounge, which shut down this past weekend after more than 15 years in a storied space that was formerly home to the Capitol Club in the Rice Hotel, is about to undergo a “massive remodel,” a source tells Swamplot.
The members-only Capitol Club was once the haunt of a number of powerful and well-known attorneys, politicians and other powerful men in the city; according to KHOU’s Doug Miller, it was also the site of President Kennedy’s last drink (unless, of course, he polished off a few more daiquiris in his hotel room after his late-November 1963 visit). In its quasi-reconstruction and rebirth as a public establishment after the renovation of the Rice Hotel into the Rice Lofts in 1998, the spot maintained popularity among lawyers — especially the newly minted ones: Many would head to the State Bar to celebrate passing the state bar.
To judge it by its name, however, the new second-story venue now being planned there may have a slightly different set of guiding principles. A bar named Lawless Kitchen and Spirits will open in the space after renovations are complete, the source tells Swamplot.
Is This Still Legal?
USPS, ON THE OTHER HAND, STILL LIKES ‘CLUTCH CITY’ 
The marketing-giddy corners of the internets may be buzzing today about the new “City with No Limits” branding campaign for Houston, but the U.S. Postal Service, it seems, is still stuck on an earlier nickname for the city. Reader Christopher Andrews tweets this screenshot showing the results that appear if you ask the USPS website to list all cities in the 77002 Zip Code. Strangely, “Clutch City” does not appear in the results for 77027 — the Zip Code of the former Houston Summit (now Lakewood Church), where the Houston Rockets played when they won the NBA championship in 1994 and 1995. The team didn’t move into the Toyota Center (in 77002) until 2003. [Twitter; try your own Zip Code search here] Screenshot: Christopher Andrews
THAT BAR ON THE RICE HOTEL BALCONY IS CLOSING 
Another change coming to the Rice Lofts, now that an entity connected to the Trammell Crow family has purchased the building from Post Properties, and apartment-management duties are being turned over to Greystar: The State Bar and Lounge, which spilled out onto the Travis St. side of the former Rice Hotel’s second-floor deck facing Texas Ave., is shutting down, sources tell Swamplot. Last call will be late Saturday night. Photo: The State Bar
Reader Mat Wolf sends in a couple of photos showing new but temporary street-level views of the building that for 34 years ranked as downtown’s tallest: the 1929 Gulf Building (officially, the JPMorgan Chase & Co. Building) at 712 Main St. Although views like the one above taken from the northeast, looking down Main St. from Texas Ave. have been available for quite some time (until about 10 years ago graced by a suburban-style McDonald’s in the foreground), sightlines of the 36-story tower have widened with the demolition of the Texas Tower at 608 Fannin St.
Behold another shot taken from the corner of Fannin and Texas Ave., in front of Christ Church Cathedral:
Engulfed Views Downtown
THE SWEET SMELL OF HOUSTON HISTORY 
Embarking on a tour of Houston by means of a “site-specific narrative” created by 3 artists as part of the Mitchell Center for the Arts’ first CounterCurrent Festival earlier this month, critic Betsy Huete picks up her “survival pack” of a bottle of water, a Metro day pass, a phone charger, and a bottle of Purell hand sanitizer enclosed in a koozie, and heads to the first stop: Allen’s Landing. There she encounters one of the artists, Lacy M. Johnson: “Johnson suggested I begin reading the essays accompanying The Invisible City, a series of writings tied to specific coordinates within the city of Houston. I would have to read each excerpt at each location to fully understand the work. The writing tied to Allen’s Landing was a brief recalling of Houston’s history, starting with its birth as a settlement at Allen’s Landing and, eventually, a meditation on the city’s rabid desire to erase itself and rebuild, leaving a palimpsest of memory and history. As I descended the stairs overlooking the bayou’s lush greenery on that crisp spring morning, with an erect corporate sky line as backdrop to errant clothes and shards of glass, with the stink of urine-saturated concrete pervading my nostrils, Johnson’s statement could not have rung more true. It was beautiful.” [Glasstire] Photo: Scott Ehardt [license]
Here’s a drawing of the new apartment block Dallas architecture firm Hensley Lamkin Rachel is designing for a Dallas developer on the block surrounded by Caroline, Austin, Pease, and Jefferson streets downtown, a few blocks southwest of the Toyota Center. There’s a surface parking lot with a few shade structures on the lot now. Leon Capital Group is hoping to get a piece of the city’s $15,000-per-unit tax rebate program for the 220 units in the 6-story structure. A note on the company’s website says the project “is planned to begin” at the end of this year.
- Block 365 – Downtown Houston Multifamily Development [Leon Capital Group, via HAIF]
Rendering: Hensley Lamkin Rachel
Block 365
A website entry noted by eagle-eyed HAIF commenter Urbannizer indicates that Starwood Hotels and Resorts plans to convert the Stowers Building on the corner of Fannin and Walker downtown (pictured above) into an Aloft Hotel. Aloft Houston Downtown will open at 820 Fannin St. in June 2016, according to the company’s listing of upcoming Starwood properties. The 10-story former headquarters of the G.A. Stowers Furniture Company was built in 1913 and renovated for office condos in 2005 by Spire Realty. It’s the only building left on the block now dominated by the BG Group Place tower fronting Main St.— the previously neighboring buildings were torn down in 2008.
- Starwood Hotel Directory: New Hotels [Starwood]
- Stowers Building [Arch-ive.org]
- Stowers Building to Become an Aloft Hotel [HAIF]
Photo: Mike Bloom Jr.
Starwood on Fannin
The lobby for the new 25-story luxury Downtown hotel announced yesterday — an add-on for the GreenStreet conversion of the former Houston Pavilions — will be on its top floor. A pool and bar will sit above it on the roof level. Its highlighted contours tracing a giant question mark, the sleek modern 225-room tower will be planted on top of the remains of former Houston Rockets center Yao Ming‘s flopped restaurant. It’ll sit back from Main St., behind XXI Forever, hugging Fannin on the block also bounded by Polk and Dallas. But the Hotel Alessandra isn’t meant to spike the retail flow in the failed-mixed-use redo project — instead, it’ll include 7,000 sq. ft. of retail and restaurant space on its bottom floors, and connect to the project’s Main St. shops and Fannin skybridge.
Here’s a view from Main St., looking southeast along Dallas:
25 Stories
There’s been a “slight change in plans,” a post on the Facebook page of a new South African restaurant headed for Main St. downtown announced earlier this month. The owners of the Springbok had earlier posted renderings of their planned redo of the space at 723 Main St. But the target has been shifted somehow, and they now plan to open 2 doors north, in a space that’s more than double the size and includes 2 patios — at 711 Main St. Unit 1, directly below the Capitol Lofts in the block between Capitol and Rusk. Late last week, a reader spotted the TABC notice pictured at left posted to the door.
- Slight change in plans [The Springbok on Facebook]
Photos: Swamplot inbox
Here’s some evidence that Hines Residential is ready to go ahead with construction of its 33-story apartment tower at the corner of Travis and Preston, catty-corner from Market Square: The surface parking lot on that site closed down over the weekend. “The lot’s money machine and parking lot signage are gone,” reports the reader who snapped these views. “I’m sure better fencing and gates will soon arrive.” In the meantime, newly installed curbstops are blocking the driveways.
Unpaving Paradise, Putting Down a Parking Lot
A sharp-eyed reader has spotted what appear to be security cameras popping up on traffic signals at intersections in Midtown over the last couple of weeks. “I assume this is an extension of the downtown camera system that was announced in December,” notes the camera-watcher, who submitted these uh, surveillance photos of the installations at Gray and Bagby (top) and Webster and Bagby in front of the Capital One bank branch (above right). “They appear to be spreading south. Currently I see them on Gray and Webster. The intersections at Bagby got 2 cameras each. Microwave backhaul antennas are visible in the photos.”
- Houston adding 180 security cameras downtown [Houston Chronicle]
Photos: Swamplot inbox
It’s Springtime for Surveillance
Notice anything different about the vacant former city code-enforcement building at 3300 Main St. lately? Well, go around to the Travis St. side (at left) and you’ll see it: A sign indicating the property is for sale went up there quietly last month. So quietly, in fact, that there doesn’t appear to be any information about the sale on the website of the building’s owner, the Midtown Redevelopment Authority, which purchased the full-block property from the city in a curious deal 3 years ago for $5 million, and — as a public entity — isn’t required to pay any property taxes on it. “Everything real estate wise that Midtown does is very hush hush,” notes a reader who brought the sale to Swamplot’s attention.
Hey, Pssssst!
