The conquest of a long strip of land between Travis and Main known as the Midtown Superblock was completed last month, Shaina Zucker reports in today’s Houston Business Journal. The strip center at the corner of Travis and Anita once known as Liberty Square, and more recently for tenants Escobar and the Thien An sandwich shop, was sold to the Midtown Redevelopment Authority in September. Escobar, Thien An, and a second nightclub in the building will have until the end of the year to scram. The TIRZ plans to swap the land under the strip center with Camden Property Trust, in return for a couple of properties at the northern end of the same superblock.
That’ll give the Midtown authority a tiny bit less than 3 acres of land facing McGowen St., leaving Camden with the superblock’s slightly larger southern portion. The organization plans to build a park on its end — but one that includes 8,500 sq. ft. of retail space and 250 underground parking spaces, according to Zucker:
The consortium of independent arts organizations planning a theater and gallery complex at the corner of Main and Holman just got a step closer to the $25 million it needs to build the project. Two weeks ago, the group received a $750K grant from the Fondren Foundation. Last week it got word of an even bigger haul: a $6 million grant from the Houston Endowment. In August, the group — which includes DiverseWorks, Fotofest, and Main St. Theater — changed its name from the Independent Arts Collaborative to “The MATCH,” short for the Midtown Arts and Theatre Center Houston. The 59,000-sq.-ft. complex at 3400 Main St. is being designed by a match-up of San Antonio’s Lake Flato Architects and Houston’s Studio Red. [
The duplex at 720 Bomar St. adjacent to East Montrose’s tiny Peggy Shiffick Park is back on the market, a week and a half after its prospective purchaser, developer Vinod Ramani of Urban Living, scaled back his plans to build 3 townhomes on the site (pictured at left) to just 2, and just a few days after backing out of the deal altogether. Some neighbors concerned the planned 3-1/2-story townhomes would clip a large portion of the branches and roots of the park’s signature oak tree had opposed 2 variance requests Ramani had submitted for the project. In the meantime, both Urban Living and neighborhood groups were alarmed to discover that 
