CANOPY’S NEW WAY IN 
A drive-in customer may have destroyed Canopy’s front door on Wednesday, but a bit of paint and re-engineering (a chair has been removed from the patio to make more room) now guides visitors to the side entrance. A special short-term exhibition of an improvised piece by artist Amy C. Evans now adorns the replacement plywood covering the spot where the car came in; it notes a few items on the restaurant’s menu and points customers both to the way in (through the patio door) and the neon OPEN sign. Well, used-to-be neon: The letters aren’t lighting up anymore after the accident, so more paint has been pressed into service (and applied directly to the window) to recreate their effect, below the still-lit neon tree. [Previously on Swamplot]Â Photo: Swamplot inbox
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Tag: 77006
About 3 years ago, Canopy added an actual canopy to the south side of its spot at the end of the 3939 Montrose strip center. (It required a variance from the city.) More recently, the restaurant has been busy installing a new coffee bar and bar bar in the space next door, which it’ll be expanding into. (Former neighbor Montrose Dry Cleaners relocated further north in the same center a while back.) But the latest addition proceeded much more suddenly: Yesterday afternoon, around 2:30, a customer saw fit to install a drive-thru directly in front of the restaurant, by stepping on the gas pedal while under the impression that the car was in reverse.
Not So Fast
Overhangs, cutouts, and eyebrow arches shade the balconies and patios of a 2005 stucco contemporary in Lancaster Place. The townhome’s price in its relisting today by the same agent, $749,990, is $100K less than in its initial appearance back in April. Price reductions in the interim sought $799,900 in May and $775,000 in July before the previous listing terminated Tuesday. The corner unit differentiates its footprint from a not-so-identical twin next door with sprout-and-chrome accents — and more:
Minty Fresh
- 1602 Hazel St. [HAR]
Is this Avondale property a home, a compound, or a discrete semi-plex? From the street, at least, the exterior remains discreet about its reworked interior space. And the downstairs does maintain much of the home’s original flow, heavy-with-trim formal rooms, and many of the 1940 structure’s early features (top). The same is true upstairs, though a section on that floor functions as an extensive separate suite. An aerie on the third floor adds even more living space. The property in the Avondale East Historic District appeared as a listing yesterday — with a $579,000 asking price.
4 Quarters
COMMENT OF THE DAY: THAT MONTROSE LOOK 
“If you really look at the building, it resembles a typical three story townhome, shrunk and widened to one level. Even the arched facade mimics the townhome in the background. And let’s face, the neighborhood behind it is rapidly becoming a majority townhome area if it isn’t already. So maybe it does resemble the neighborhood after all. . . .
If you seriously look at Montrose, it is just a polyglot of everything. A lot of it is butt ugly but the trees and grown out landscaping obscure it. My neighborhood and its adjacents are filled with homes, apartments, offices, etc. spanning 90 years of different styles and much of it is seemingly incompatible if viewed as a single entity. That is Montrose. It ain’t The Woodlands!” [JT, commenting on Raising Cane’s Is Almost Ready To Grab the Corner of Hazard and Westheimer with Its Chicken Fingers] Illustration: Lulu
The signs are now up at the new building under construction at 1902 Westheimer Rd., across the street from the Winlow Westheimer shopping center. And they say: Raising Cane’s. And that means your center-of-Montrose drive-thru chicken finger spot will be opening very soon. Raising Cane’s is no stranger to Westheimer; the new restaurant will mark Raising Cane’s fourth location on the street (it’s got the 12201, 7531, and 5015 spots already). But this’ll be the first one inside the Loop.
More pics of Lower Westheimer’s fast-food future:
Montrose Drive-Thrus
THE EMPTY LOT ON WESTHEIMER WHERE THE EDMONT WILL LAND 
This long-vacant lot at the corner of Westheimer and Kueter, next to the Central Houston Animal Hospital and the recently shuttered EJ’s Bar on Ralph St., has been tagged as the future home of the Edmont, a new restaurant being planned by the people behind Paulie’s and Camerata and a former chef at the Vallone’s steakhouse. Paul Petronella, David Keck, and Grant Gordon have hired Abel Design Group to cook up a new restaurant from scratch at 1634 Westheimer — the same site eyed 6 years ago as a possible spot for a 75-room hotel. The restaurant, scheduled to open sometime near the end of 2015, is being named after a different hotel that never existed, though: a Manhattan spot patronized by Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. [Food Chronicles; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Allyn West
Riverway Properties’ latest plan for a condo building at the corner of Montrose Blvd. and Marshall St. almost triples the number of units planned for the former site of the River Cafe — from 12 in a proposal aired only a few months ago to 34. But the building’s still set at 7 stories. The embiggening was made possible by expanding the building’s footprint onto a neighboring property (the brick house-turned office to the north) — and switching to an entirely different scheme, from a big-name architecture firm. Philip Johnson, who designed the original campus and many of the buildings for the University of St. Thomas a few blocks away, is not coming back from the dead for this project, but Philip Johnson/Alan Ritchie Architects, the New York firm that still bears his name, has replaced Element Architects as the building’s designers.
Round Three
A variance notice now up on the south side of Fairview St. at the corner of Montrose Blvd. is one sign that a full-block apartment complex is being planned for the site. Another clue: A reader tells us the Hollywood Vietnamese & Chinese Cuisine restaurant at 2409 Montrose Blvd., which occupies the only building on the block, is planning to shut down before the end of the month. A spokesperson for the planning department says a complete set of documents for the variance hasn’t been received yet.
Farb Montrose
The Waldo Mansion at 201 Westmoreland St. in Westmoreland, best known (well, for its interiors at least) as the terrestrial stomping ground of playboy astronaut Garrett Breedlove, the Jack Nicholson character in Terms of Endearment, is getting a bit of a haircut today. Tree crews have been working all morning to start the process of ridding the site at the corner of Westmoreland and Garrott of “many” of its large surrounding oak trees, a reader tells Swamplot. But only a single tree has been removed so far, as these photos show.
Terms of Dismemberment
DRIVE-THRU BANH MI SPOT WILL OPEN IN FORMER LUCKY BURGER ON RICHMOND BEFORE THE END OF THE YEAR 
Les Givral’s Kahve co-owner Qui Ly confirms to Eater Houston’s Darla Guillen that a new drive-thru banh mi joint named Oui Banh Mi will be taking over the keg-shaped longtime home of Montrose mainstay Lucky Burger — as Swamplot reported last month. In addition to the Vietnamese sandwiches, Oui Banh Mi will offer desserts from the Lys’ Oui Desserts spot on Kirby Dr., including macarons, tarts, and pastries. Scheduled opening date for the spot at the 1601 Richmond Ave.: before the end the year. And more locations are planned. The restaurant owners also posted a refrigerator-worthy “artist’s conception” of the renovated corner site (above) to the restaurant’s Instagram account. [Eater Houston; previously on Swamplot] Rendering: Oui Banh Mi
COMMENT OF THE DAY: SCREWING THE HAVES 
“Message to the cool kids: If you are really cool, move to a cheaper part of town. The squares who are pricing you out of Montrose will be punished by living exclusively among squares, and the cheaper part of town will be cool. However, if you move and none of that happens then you probably weren’t that cool.” [Memebag, commenting on New Owners to Montrose Apartment Dwellers: Everybody Out by the End of August, We’re Tearing These Places Down] Illustration: Lulu
The new owner of 3 adjacent 2-story apartment complexes at the western edge of Winlow Place in Montrose have politely asked all tenants to leave by the end of August. The fifties-and-sixties-era courtyard complexes, at 1920 W. Alabama St. (above), 2810 McDuffie, and 1924 Marshall, were sold by Prestige Holdings at the end of April to a company called City Centre at Midtown, which appears to be connected to apartment developer Dolce Living. The adjacent complexes together include 73 apartments; the 1.58 acres of land they sit on has frontage on West Alabama St. (between Hazard and Huldy, pictured above) and McDuffie St., which dead-ends into a parking lot shared by the McDuffie and Marshall St. properties. According to a tipster, a notice for the abandonment of that dead-end portion of McDuffie St. was posted in February. Admiral Linen’s 3-building complex (behind the Randalls grocery store) at 2030 Kipling St. is immediately adjacent to the properties.
‘Cuz We’re Building New Apartments
What’s been going on with the transformation of the former Wendy’s at 1303 Westheimer Rd. into the first Houston location of Doc’s Bar & Grill? The Austin import had been aiming for a November opening — last year. Now the target date is late August — a full year after Swamplot’s original story on the venture. A publicist attributes the delay to “a city plan to widen Westheimer,” which triggered some sort of redesign.
Here’s how it’s supposed to look when it’s finished:
Doc’s in Montrose
