Tag: 77002

Commercial Real Estate
08/27/07 8:34am

Houston Pavilions: Woulda Coulda Shoulda

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Condos, Development Strategy, Downtown, Mixed Use, New Construction, Nightlife, Office Buildings, Parking, Proposed Developments, Retail, Shopping Centers
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Houston Pavilions Aerial View, Downtown Houston

If you’re curious why the developers of Houston Pavilions, the $70 million mixed-use development under construction downtown, decided not to mix anything other than office space with their 360,000 square feet of retail and “entertainment” space, you’ll be interested to read the comments L.A. developer Bill Denton made to the CoStar Group:

[Entertainment Development Group] put the site under contract in January 2004, then three surface parking lots and a multi-level parking garage sitting on just over 4 acres, and the project has evolved ever since. “We originally planned for a hotel/condo component, but at the time, the city was just finishing off convention center hotels and hotel occupancy was only 52%; now its difficult to find a hotel room in Downtown Houston. So, we changed the plan into two residential towers, which stuck until 12 months ago. Demand on the residential was tremendous, but because of the mixed-use and density, we would have had to do subterranean parking, which blew the economics of the residences out of the water. So now its 200,000 square feet of office space, and based on demand for that so far, I wish we could do 400,000 square feet.”

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Demolitions
08/24/07 7:43pm

MainPlace: Hines’s 46-Story Green Pipe-Wrench Dream

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Downtown, Green Design and Development, Highrises, Office Buildings, Proposed Developments
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View of MainPlace, Hines’s Proposed 46-Story LEED Silver Office Building on Main Street in Downtown HoustonIt rises dramatically from the center of Downtown to face the morning sun. And the renderings sure make it look like a sleek, giant pipe wrench, the business end looking out over Houston’s industrial east side. Yep, there’s nothing the head office won’t be able to fix!

It’s MainPlace, a 46-story, one-million-square-foot green spec office tower, planned for most of the block surrounded by Fannin, Rusk, and Walker, at 811 Main.

The developer is the Hines CalPERS Green Fund, established by Hines and the California retirement fund to develop “sustainable” office buildings around the country. The core and shell, they promise, will be given a LEED-Silver rating by the USGBC. Don’t worry too much about all that, though: tenants will presumably be free to decorate their interiors with the usual endangered rainforest hardwoods and petroleum-based finishes.

That’s a five-story atrium up there on the 39th floor, facing a “sky garden.” Enjoy those trees in the rendering while you can; eventually, the engineers will start to think long and hard about hurricanes. More details and lots more zoomy pics, including closeups of that pipe-wrench jaw sky garden, after the jump.

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Demolitions
08/22/07 10:36am

Foundation Clears Midtown Lot, Sets Sights on Emergency Rooms

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Midtown, Proposed Developments
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Demolition of the Fu Kim Grand Palace, Midtown Houston, June 2007

Christus Foundation for HealthCare, liberated a year ago from ownership of St. Joseph Hospital downtown, is planning a new family health center in Midtown at the corner of Fannin and McGowen. That’s the recently cleared lot where the Fu Kim Grand Palace complex used to stand.

Foundation president Les Cave tells the Chronicle the new building will be

a 55,000-square-foot “super clinic” designed to keep the uninsured out of emergency rooms whenever possible while giving them specialized care in everything from cardiology to orthopedics to dentistry.

The San Jose Clinic, the oldest charity clinic in the country, will move into the new facility from its current location under Highway 59 near Minute Maid Park, along with social services functions from Associated Catholic Charities.

Photo of Fu Kim Grand Palace demolition: Flickr user Dan Sandler

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Alternative Energy
08/22/07 10:00am

How the Downtown Tunnel System Was Born

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Downtown, Houston History
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Houston Underground

Near the end of a short New York Times feature on Houston’s downtown tunnel system is this historical nugget:

[“Tunnel Lady” Sandra] Lord, a writer and Houston historian, traced the origins of the tunnels to Ross Sterling, an oilman and governor during the Depression, who, inspired by Rockefeller Center, linked two of his downtown buildings underground in the early 1930s. Soon after, an entertainment entrepreneur, Will Horwitz, connected three of his vaudeville and movie theaters to save on air-conditioning.

And they say geothermal cooling is something new for Houston.

Photo: Flickr user The Rocketeer

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Commercial Real Estate
08/06/07 10:39am

Downtown Rents: Going Up

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Downtown, Leasing, New Construction, Office Buildings
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5 Houston CenterLeasing rates at Five Houston Center downtown have reached $30 a square foot triple net, reports Globe St. That’s quite a jump from the building’s $18 rate a year ago. Other Class A buildings are not far behind.

Will prices stay high after all those new downtown buildings get built?

[Transwestern senior vice president David] Lee points out that when newer product comes on line, older buildings will work to catch up by making rates competitive. But with new buildings still 18 months to two years from completion in the CBD, current owners have an interesting advantage, he adds. “The guys that got their stuff in the ground a year and a half to two years ago and before are in great shape now,” he says. “In a two-year period, rates have essentially doubled Downtown.”

Photo of 5 Houston Center: HKS

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Downtown
07/31/07 12:03pm

Eye-Opening Parking Garage Design

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Lofts, Neighborhood Disputes, New Construction, Parking
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Hines Parking Garage at Walker and Main downtown

Hines’s new parking garage at the corner of Walker and Main downtown features an innovative lighting design that delivers benefits to neighbors. The problem: drivers parking at night in the unscreened 14-story garage might shine their headlights across the street, directly into residences in the Commerce Towers building across the street. The solution: flood the garage with so much light that cars won’t need to use their headlights at all.

Unfortunately, Commerce Towers residents don’t seem to appreciate all that attention to detail:

it is an extravagant eyesore that expands from Travis to Main (ironically, grossly overshadowing the light rail) and right on Walker. There is no skin on it, and so sits a concrete skeletal nightmare.

Not only is this grotesque structure visually nauseating, it also is a seizure-inducing brightly-lit nightmare! The structure is fleshed out with intensely BRIGHT floodlights on each of its 14 floors, including the roof, that release their ungodly glow (24/7) without obstruction into the living and bedroom units of the Commerce Towers Condominiums!

Hines vice president Clark Davis told the Chronicle two years ago that the garage, which sits on land cleared by demolishing the San Jacinto building, would be “architecturally significant.” Hines developed the garage for the company they sold the property to, Sunbelt Management of Florida.

Photo: HAIF user sevfiv

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Commercial Real Estate
07/26/07 8:05pm

The Beatles Slept Here

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Downtown, Hotels, Proposed Developments, Renovations
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Sheraton-Lincoln Hotel

And so, apparently, did Jack Ruby. The 28-story former Sheraton-Lincoln Hotel at 711 Polk downtown, vacant for more than 20 years and asbestos-free for almost nine, has a new suitor, reports the Houston Business Journal:

Omni [Hotels Corp.] said it and Atlanta-based Songy will transform the Houston hotel, near the George R. Brown Convention Center and what will be the new Houston Pavilions project, into an all-suites hotel featuring more than 400 suites, 30,000 square feet of meeting space and multiple culinary venues.

Other amenities will include a 13,000-square-foot wellness center with outside accessibility for nearby office workers, a fitness area with a Mokara Salon & Spa and personal trainers and nutritionists on staff to assist with creating customized wellness and fitness regimens.

After the jump, swank pix from the Sheraton-Lincoln’s sixties heyday.

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Downtown
06/15/07 10:42am

What’s So Frustrating About the Downtown Tunnels

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Shopping Centers
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Downtown Houston Tunnel and Frustrating Shopper

The mysterious Tunnel Mole, posting on Houstoned, provides a succinct list of shopping features missing from the not-so-glamorous Downtown daytime underground scene:

It’s got infinite ways to get annoying chores done, except it’s devoid of the most annoying ones that you want to do while you’re on the clock, like upgrading your cell phone. And here’s what else you don’t have in the tunnel:

*Music
*Movies
*Television
*Sex (not that we’ve noticed, anyway)
*Liquor
*Dreams of a Houston team snaring the pennant/Super Bowl

In short, anything that could sweep you up from the realities of life. The tunnel’s very grounded, because duh, it is in the ground.

Photo: “In space no one can hear you scream,” by Flickr user Matthew Wedgwood

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