WEEKEND CROWDSOURCING EVENT YIELDS HOLOCAUST MUSEUM HOUSTON NEW OLD ARTIFACTS AHEAD OF ITS GRAND REOPENING 
Note: This story previously stated that the museum had accepted artifacts as donations over the weekend. While the museum has agreed to consider certain items further as donations, it has not officially accepted any of them yet.
Owners of Holocaust-era documents, photographs, and other Jewish WWII memorabilia made their way out to Holocaust Museum Houston’s temporary location in a Kirby Dr. office park south of 610 yesterday between noon and 5pm where curators scrutinized their belongings and — in some cases — agreed to consider them further as potential donations. If accepted, the new artifacts would help fill up the museum’s more permanent home at 5401 Caroline St., which is scheduled to reopen in June having more than doubled in size to 57,000 sq.-ft. since last year. At least 2 of its mainstay exhibits are already there: a 25.7-ft.-long German rail car like those used to carry Jews to their deaths during the war and a 37.1-ft Danish fishing boat of the type used to rescue thousands of them in 1943. After being moved over to an adjacent lot in early last year, a crane airlifted the 2 vessels back onto the grounds of the museum in May so that a new portion of the campus they belong to could be built around them as part of the expansion. [Previously on Swamplot] Rendering of museum expansion: Holocaust Museum Houston
Sign up for the Newsletter
Tag: 77004
Construction appears to have picked up lately on the not-yet-named bar going up on the corner of Emancipation Ave and Rosewood St., according to the photo at top sent in by a Swamplot reader. The new structure is across the street from longstanding Third Ward watering hole Dbar and its adjacent parking lot. (Formerly known as Dowling Street Lounge, Dbar did away with that name around the same time that Dowling St. became Emancipation Ave.)
The new build on the west side of the street looks to include a few parking spots of its own on both Emancipation and Rosewood. One casualty of the work so far: the sign shown above telling truckers not to use Rosewood as a thru-street to the 288 feeder, which runs one block west of the construction site.
Photos: Swamplot inbox
4420 Emancipation
WHERE TO GLIMPSE METRO’S FIRST DRIVERLESS SHUTTLE IN ACTION NEXT YEAR 
“The surge of students biking and walking” along the closed stretch of Wheeler Ave. shown above that forms TSU’s “Tiger Walk” will soon “be joined by a slow-moving, minivan-sized driverless shuttle,” reports the Dug Begley in the Chronicle‘s last Sunday edition. “Though it will run a small, circuitous route at first,” he writes, METRO’s long-term goal is to nudge the shuttle out onto Scott St., where it would stop at the Purple Line light rail station between the TSU campus and UH’s TDECU Stadium. “Transit and university officials are working on an opening day,” according to Begley, “likely in mid-to late January.” [Houston Chronicle] Photo: Campuspride.org
Frenchy’s Chicken is gearing up to open a new restaurant on Scott St. so that it’s original — there since 1969 — can get out of the way of Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church‘s planned expansion. (You can see the church’s slated roofing peeking out behind Frenchy’s in the photo above.) The restaurant’s new location: 2 blocks south of the current one, in the former O’Sat Auto Detail shop pictured at top on the northwest corner of Blodgett St. There, a spate of building permits filed within the last few months reveal Frenchy’s management is about to get started on renovations.
It’s a bit of a detour from the chain’s original relocation plan. Last May, Frenchy’s top brass Percy Creuzot III (the son of the chain’s founder Percy “Frenchy” Creuzot, Jr.) told the Chronicle‘s Cindy George he’d staked out a spot 5 blocks north of the current one where Alabama St. ends across from UH’s indoor football practice building. Sure enough, Creuzot’s business partner Anthony Gaynor consolidated several adjacent lots he owned at the southwest corner of Alabama and Scott 2 into a single property last year — and a few months afterward, demolished the building it that’d done stints on it as number of different barbecue joints:
Third Ward
EVERYONE ORDERED OUT FROM UNDER 59 OVERPASS ON WHEELER, BUS PARKING TO TAKE THEIR PLACE 
Crews are emptying the Wheeler Ave. tent-stead underneath 59 of all its homeless residents, their belongings, and accumulated residue — Mayor Turner said in a series of tweets today — clearing the way for a new fenced-off bus parking lot to take over the property. Signs announcing the ouster and incoming fences went up Tuesday, said the mayor, and this morning, a METRO bus was on site “to take the 45 or so residents to shelter,” after they “voluntarily accept offers,” to relocate. A month ago the city declared the setup a public health nuisance, reports the Chronicle, a state designation slapped on areas that could be hazardous to those nearby. That’s right around the time Rice bought the office structure one-block north of the encampment, presumably for the so-called Midtown Innovation district it’s now cobbling together from land on both sides of the vacant Sears building it owns as well. [Houston Chronicle] Photo: Swamplox inbox
The map above shows the land (in red) that Rice is confirmed to have grabbed around the Midtown Sears (orange) it bought out last October, including 2 new parcels (green) it snatched up through holding companies within the last few months. In an email sent out to university staff on Monday, Rice U. President David Leebron said the school “will ultimately redevelop approximately 14 acres of Rice-owned property,” near the Sears building into what it’s calling the Midtown Innovation District. So what are the latest spots it’s gotten its hands on? The first, catty-corner to the Sears building itself at the corner of Wheeler and San Jacinto, is Jack in the Box‘s nearly half-acre lot; Rice bought it in August.
More recently, the school pushed east by picking up 4201 Caroline St., the brick office building shown below that occupies a quarter-acre directly next to Fiesta:
Sears and Friends
STATE OF QATAR CHIPS IN $2.5M FOR RIVERSIDE GENERAL HOSPITAL REDO 
Standing alongside ambassador Meshal bin Hamad Al-Thani yesterday in the archway of the hospital’s 92-year-old nurses’ quarters, Ed Emmett thanked Qatar for its donation to help get the hospital back open. It’s the first allocation the country has made from the $30M Qatar Harvey Fund it created last September. (Its diplomatic rival the United Arab Emerites volunteered $10M the same day, according to Al Jazeera) What is it that the money will actually pay for at the Third Ward property the county bought earlier this year? TBD, Emmett tells News 88.7’s Davis Land, although he notes that the county does plan “to have Riverside provide primary and mental health care as part of the Harris Health System,” the network of publicly-owned county hospitals that provide care to under- and uninsured patients. [Houston Public Media] Photo: Ed Emmett
Spotted on the Instagram story for a not-yet-open venue calling itself The Gypsy Poet: TABC signage going up where it plans to move into Core Church Midtown‘s former home at 2404 Austin St. It’s the fifth liquor-purveying establishment planned for the block — bounded by McIlhenny, Austin, McGowen, and Caroline streets — in the past year-and-a-half, none of which are open yet. But which together have now succeeded in reserving almost all of the space there for themselves.
According to its pastor Jim Stern, Core Church had been negotiating to move into a smaller spot at the back 2404 when the landlord tabled that option and switched its current lease over to a month-to-month agreement. Shortly after, in mid-February, the church was given 60 days to hit the road. It left in mid-March. “I am wondering if we were ‘pushed’ out because of the bars,” Stern tells Swamplot.
- See You Soon [The Gypsy Poet via HAIF]
- Previously on Swamplot: America Gardens Declares Victory Following 2-Month Crowdfunding Campaign; Core Church Midtown Flees Its Austin St. Strip Center in Advance of Syn Hospitality’s Bar Quartet; America Gardens, Small Bouquet of Other Upstate Restaurants To Be Planted in Midtown
Photos: The Gypsy Poet (sign); Core Church (Jim S.)
Change Comes Knocking
Three months after a group of freewheeling bike advocates marked off a portion of McGowen St. for cycling-only use, their work has vanished — effectively ceding the road back over to car traffic. The smaller photo above shows members of Bike Houston as well as other volunteers laying down boundary lines, directional arrows, and rubber barriers along the south side of the road at its junction with the Columbia Tap Trail between Burkett and Nettleton streets. At top is what that stretch looks like now from the opposite side of McGowen.
Backpedaling
AMERICA GARDENS DECLARES VICTORY FOLLOWING 2-MONTH CROWDFUNDING CAMPAIGN 
More than $230,000 have now been raised by online investors who pledged allegiance to the planned bar with their wallets over the summer. Although there had been some work at the property before the campaign kicked off in July, the developer Syn Hospitality claims it’s relying on the additional funds in order to really get down to business at the site on the corner of Caroline and McGowen in what it’s calling “East Midtown.” It plans to keep accepting money until November 15. [Previously on Swamplot] Rendering: Syn Hospitality
Although only one includes living space, both structures shown separated by St. Charles St. in the rendering at top are intended to give people spaces to live. The big one — depicted in more detail above — is Kirksey Architecture’s 5-story design for an affordable housing operations center, to be placed directly across the street from 20 units of actual housing. The Midtown Redevelopment Authority bought the vacant land for both sites along Elgin in 2015, back when the renovation of neighboring Emancipation Park was still taking shape.
On the left in the aerial below, you can see the parcel where the HQ is planned across from the park and its on-site Emancipation Community Center:
Third Ward
The bright red paint job that began creeping up the front face of the closed-down LaDet Motel at 2612 Riverside Dr. a few weeks ago has now reached its eaves, leaving the street-facing portion of the building completely recolored. It’s pictured at top in its current state, behind a trio of off-hue red tags stuck on the gate that closes it off from the street.
The original house — built between 1928 and 1929 — is wrapped on 3 sides by apartments put up decades later. Portions of them — the 2 side walls fronting the entrance driveway and the gables along the street — have gone red as well:
Katharine Mott House
COMMENT OF THE DAY: ANOTHER MFAH STICKER SOLUTION 
“It will be a sad day in Houston when there are no MFAH stickers stuck to things in the Museum District. You’d think that the museum long ago would have embraced the tradition and added some weird sculpture-looking things in front of all exits that say ‘stick stickers here.’ It would reduce the occurrences of random vandalism by hoodlums. I wonder how many tags they expect to ‘lose’ as part of this experiment?” [toasty, commenting on Flood Bond Passes; Harvey Movie Sets Its Premiere Date; MFAH Stickers Swapped Out for Reusable Tags] Photo of sticker collage at Binz and San Jacinto streets: Alley Lyles
Vanished from the Midtown benches along Main St. are the potted plants that recently sat on them. The 3 sets of 3 plants each — at Holman St. and on both sides of Main at Winbern — appear to have all been yanked off by force.
Their adhesive residue shows just how attached they were in the first place, with 4 points of contact leaving their marks in place of each pot.
Weeded Out
A new sketch of the Almeda Rd. building that Art Supply on Main wants to construct and move into shows the borders and outlines of what’s planned for its exterior. Like the current store — soon to make way for the highrise that’s taking over its lot between Drew and Dennis streets — the new one will include studio and living spaces along with retail, all within 2 stories. It’ll sit on a 2-plus acre site — highlighted by the red polygon in the map above (and nuzzled by a pale blue limb of 500-year floodplain) — originally part of Riverside Terrace, now just west of 288 and across from Our Legends Cigar Bar off Oakdale St.
Parking will remain in the back, with entrances off Oakdale and an alley to the south indicated in the site plan below:
Midtown Moveout
