COMMENT OF THE DAY: READING BETWEEN THE LINES OF A LEASES-NOT-UP-YET STORY 
“Translation: current tenants have murderously cheap rents and would not leave for a million bucks. Buyer is trying to play hard ball by threatening to let the property sit until the leases are up unless tenants take a crappy buyout offer.
Prediction: Buyer will eventually pay what it takes to get tenants out once they realize that no one will want to pay market rate to be in that old dog of a strip mall.” [Old School, commenting on Apartments and Retail for Westheimer and Montrose Corner? Not Until Half Price Books and Spec’s Scoot] Illustration: Lulu
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Tag: 77006
An Oz-like urban vista from an (apparently railing-free) rooftop terrace (top). An artsy interior with multi-level gallery space. The pairing often indicates a Montrose-area address, as is the case with this custom 2003 contemporary with 3 levels of art-friendly living space currently devoted to an installation of frosty, over-sized life savers (above), among other works. The work-live-studio property, located near the Waugh bend in Hyde Park, rolled onto the market late last week. Price tag: $1.3 million.Â
Dollars to Donuts
APARTMENTS AND RETAIL FOR WESTHEIMER AND MONTROSE CORNER? NOT UNTIL HALF PRICE BOOKS AND SPEC’S SCOOT 
The owner of the once-Art Deco but now slathered-with-stucco shopping center at the southwest corner of Westheimer and Montrose says it’s willing to wait 7 to 10 years for the center’s leases to run out before building something new on the site. Unless, of course, they can negotiate an early exit (or time-out while construction takes place) for the Half Price Books, Spec’s, Papa Johns, 3-6-9 China Bistro and Jack in the Box currently on the site. If they can’t buy out the tenants, PM Realty’s Wade Bolin tells Shaina Zucker, they’ll start leasing out the still-vacant spaces in the former Tower Community Center, which the company calls the Westmont Shopping Center. “PM Realty Group did not share early design plans,” Zucker adds, “but several sources confirmed the mixed-use structure could include residential with retail on the ground floor.” [Houston Business Journal; previously on Swamplot] Photo: PM Realty
Snooping around county records, HBJ reporter Shaina Zucker discovers that apartment developer Hanover Company has placed the long-vacant 10-story office building at 3400 Montrose Blvd. under contract. The developer wouldn’t respond to Zucker’s questions, but an officer of the Montrose Management District hints strongly that Hanover plans to tear down the structure across Hawthorne St. from Kroger and build — surprise! — “luxury apartments” in its place: “There’s no way they could remodel.†Scott Gertner’s Skybar — and Cody’s before it — once occupied the building’s top floor.
- Potential buyer under contract to purchase iconic Montrose tower [Houston Business Journal]
- Previously on Swamplot: Redo Plans for the Office Building at 3400 Montrose Blvd., Will 3400 Montrose Rise from the Dead?, Stone Panel Leaps to Montrose Blvd. Sidewalk from Former Skybar Balcony,Everybody Out: The Ghost Town at 3400 Montrose, Comment of the Day: A 3400 Montrose Blvd. Inspection Report, Why Scott Gertner’s Skybar Is Leaving the Montrose Sky, Scott Gertner’s Skybar Closing, May Take the Whole Building with It
Photo: Swamplot inbox
3400 Montrose
Going into the 2,034-sq.-ft. former Washateria space at the back of the little shopping strip across Greeley St. from the Blue Bird Circle Shop on West Alabama: a soon-to-be beer-and-wine-licensed coffee shop called Siphon Coffee, set to open late this year or early next. The space is shown on the far left of the photo above. Owners Michael Caplan and Edward Treistman write on the coffee house’s Facebook page that there’ll be food enough for breakfast and lunch too, once the place opens, after they get help from former Brasserie 19 chef Amanda McGraw with the menu and training.
The new Menil Drawing Institute building, being designed by LA architects Johnston Marklee (winners of last year’s competition), will sit on land currently occupied by the Menil’s Richmont Square apartment building. The arts institution doesn’t have plans to tear down the entire apartment complex, however: Drawings submitted to the planning commission as part of a variance application show only the northernmost bank — at the back of the site — wiped clean.
Handling cavity searches since 1976, a 1940 home-turned-dental-office sits on a well-brushed corner lot in Montrose within spitting distance of a private school campus. The property appeared on the market earlier this month with a sparkly asking price of $499,900.
- 1217 Bomar St. [HAR]
Declaring the 42-unit Montrose complex a “common nuisance,” the county attorney’s office and the state of Texas have filed a lawsuit against the owner of the former Skylane Apartments at the corner of Richmond and Hazard St. The suit claims that the apartment complex, now known as 1901 Richmond, “habitually” harbors criminal activity and that the owner has not done enough to fix the problem. Between August 2012 and October 2013, according to the complaint, police were called approximately 100 times to the property, resulting in reports of drug possession and sales, aggravated assaults, and the discharge of ï¬rearms. The attorney’s office wants the owner to post a bond and clean up the crime problem, or shut down for a year and forfeit the money.
BARS WITHIN A BAR AT LOWBROW IN MONTROSE 
Eater Houston reports that Lowbrow, the restaurant and bar from Free Press Houston founder Omar Afra, will open tomorrow night here at the corner of W. Main and Mandell in Montrose. This photo shows the mural that’s replacing the former Sophia sign. Inside, there will be even more art: The place will have wallpaper that sports drawings of the Astrodome, Houston Oilers logo, and Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk sculpture at the nearby Menil Collection. And it appears that there will also be a channel of rather meta reality programming for you to watch: “[A] projection screen . . . will play scenes from other local bars.” [Eater Houston; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Eater Houston
BIENVENIDOS, BRICK AND SPOON 
Eater Houston’s Darla Guillen reports that brunch and bloody mary purveyor Brick & Spoon is almost ready to open in Montrose after renovating the spot to which Bocados said adiós at 1312 W. Alabama, just across the street from the University of St. Thomas. Owners of the Louisiana chain Bryan Jewell and Ryan Trahan tell Guillen that they will be ready to go November 11. [Eater Houston; previously on Swamplot] Photo of Bocados: Panoramio user Wolfgang Houston
AFFECTING THE BAR-TO-RESTAURANT RATIO IN MIDTOWN 
An update about the former Midtown bar that a Swamplot reader reported was turning into a new Midtown bar: It’s gonna be a restaurant (that will serve drinks). Eater Houston reports that Michael Paolucci, who owns Pub Fiction, will be opening Cook & Collins, not (as had been reported) Bremond Street Grill, here in the former El Xuco Xicana space at 2416 Brazos near Bremond. Was there a change of heart or something? Nah, says Paolucci: “I know [M]idtown very well. There are too many bars and not enough restaurants. Until the restaurants start coming, it won’t become a world-class neighborhood. I’m from Chicago and in Chicago, for every bar there’s a restaurant; in [M]idtown, for every 20 bars there’s one restaurant.” [Eater Houston; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Swamplot inbox
There are almost 6,000 miles of street in Houston, according to the Memorial Examiner, and now about a half a mile of one in Midtown can call itself remarkable. The Greenroads Foundation, which confers on streets a kind of LEED-like designation, gave its first formal props to a project in Texas to Bagby St. between Tuam and St. Joseph Pkwy., for the $9 million in improvements built along the 0.62-mile span the past few months.
Included in those improvements are bike racks, street furniture, wayfinding signs, wider sidewalks, and narrower, less harrowing crosswalks. (You can see in the photo above that these improvements don’t include burying utilities.) But the designation isn’t meant just to make the lives of pedestrians more aesthetically pleasing: LED lights were installed; rain gardens were put in to help with drainage; “fly ash” concrete, which reduces carbon emissions, was used where possible; and Bagby itself, with its potholes, patches, and cracks, was repaved atop what the Midtown Redevelopment Authority calls “newly stabilized materials” that are supposed to require less maintenance over the long haul.
Here are a few more looks at the transformation:
 and Improved... "Pin It")
Architecture firm Stern and Bucek has come up with this rendering of the Menil Collection’s new cafe, part of the free museum’s long-planned expansion of its Montrose campus. The design for the cafe — which is yet to be named but will be run by Greg Martin (of Cafés Annie and Express and Taco Milagro) — appears to adapt and elaborate upon the gray bungalow at 1512 Sul Ross St., on the other side of that path from the Menil Bookstore; this is the same site, says a press release from the Menil Collection, that architect Renzo Piano originally had in mind for a similar amenity. So there’s that. Whatever it’ll be called, the cafe, it appears, will split the difference between the museum’s main entrance and the parking lot off W. Alabama.
- 3509 Stanford St. [HAR]
