“So the Eco-Shuttle looks a little funny with the new #Jitney decals,” tweet the folks behind the REV Houston service. Why are those little white electric vehicles that drive passengers around Downtown, parts of Midtown, and the Washington Corridor for tips only now wearing Jitney decals?
Because the REV shuttles, long a favorite citation target of city permitting officials, are now street legal. And here’s the technicolor medallion to prove it:
Okay, tell us what was the plan for that block south of W. 8th St. along the new Heights Hike-and-Bike Trail, between Nicholson and Waverly?
This large, open space will be available for community gardens, both cultivated and natural, think edible weeds. Small animal husbandry, such as goats, chickens and rats could also be sustained. Compost houses flank the development to show clientele how their homes will indeed return to their natural state a lá the second law of thermodynamics, or something like that. Between the back row of Compost Homes are the E-condos. These models reflect real world living as they do not have plumbing or electricity.
Huh? Well, it’s not even a year since Houston Indymedia reporter Keefski tried to explain it all . . . but the Waterhill Homes at the Heights development is at last seeing some action!
What kind of action?
A reader writes in to share the exciting news that one of those Northgate Custom Homes townhouses on Heights Blvd. that’s snuggled up next to the train tracks and just behind the recycling center on Center St. is now listed as “option pending” on MLS. Readers chose the complex as the city’s Best Vacancy in the Swamplot Awards for Houston Real Estate just a few months ago. Is someone buying right next to the tracks?
Well, not exactly. 114 Heights Blvd. Unit B, priced at $309,000, is the one that’s now listed as option pending. It’s shielded from those noisy trains by the full 20-or-so-ft. width of the adjacent townhome, Unit A. And here’s the featured view from one of its balconies:
COMMENT OF THE DAY: IMAGINING THE H-E-B HEIGHTS REVITALIZATION PLAN “The Sons of Hermann site would not have to be dry. There used to be a liquor store at the Boulevard and the bayou – Kims #1. Tapping in to all the people who now live within drunks-puking-in-your-driveway distance of Washington makes that site a good choice. Enter from Yale or Heights. Then maybe those condos that are 6 feet from the RR [tracks] would finally sell.” [finness, commenting on H-E-B Plans To Build a Montrose Grocery Store at Wilshire Village]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: LOOK OUT FOR THOSE TWEAKED TOWNHOMES! “. . . My reason for staying away from those townhomes…Any one of those townhomes could be easily tweaked in the future to be 2 apartments. Pair that with the common driveways and you could easily have alot of people sharing a pretty small area.” [justguessin, commenting on Comment of the Day: Here Come the Almeda Promoters]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: READING THE WASHINGTON AVE CRYSTAL BALL “Eventually people will get sick of having no place to park and the hot spot will move on. Prediction is for Brixx to go out of business within six months, Eight will turn into a restaurant within a year and Taps will probably stay as it is. Not sure about Roosevelt – could become a restaurant as it does have a parking lot of its own.” [MC, commenting on What It’s Like to Live on Center St.]
WHAT IT’S LIKE TO LIVE ON CENTER ST. From the Houston Press‘s magnum opus on the Washington Avenue scene: “Drunk people walk through the yard, pee on the house, sit on the porch swing and bark at the dogs. They scream and yell and fight until all hours every Thursday, Friday and Saturday night, and now during the day on Sunday. The music from District can be clearly heard from the driveway. ‘Right now you could go sit in my bedroom and feel how the house just thuds. The windows rattle,’ [longtime Center St. resident and property owner Helen] Espinoza said. There are constant accidents at the nearby intersection. With police focused on Washington, late-night drag racers take to Center Street. Espinoza says she has a hard time getting cops to come at all. [Neighbor Marie] Martinez, meanwhile, spends much of her time fighting new liquor licenses in court. She can’t hold them off forever, though, and while she’s fighting one bar, others pop up. Five liquor licenses are pending in the area right now. As more nightspots open, more people flood into the neighborhood to park. They block driveways or sometimes just use them, tear up the grass and get stuck in the drainage ditches. Marlene Gafrick, the director of city planning, says her department began working on the parking problems in March and has tried to bring each of the 35 to 40 bars and restaurants up to code. She too must hustle to keep pace with the development. Soon after one bar finally agreed to rent a nearby lot, for instance, the lot went under construction. . . . After a long fight, Espinoza finally won ‘No Parking’ signs on her side of the street. The factory across the way put up its own, with chicken wire, along its long and tall chain-link fence. People just cut them down.” [Houston Press]
HOUSTONIANS NOW EAT THEIR VEGETABLES IN THE STRANGEST PLACES 
Food and travel writer Salma Abdelnour, who grew up here, takes New York Times travel section readers on a tour of 5 Houston restaurants carved out of former something-or-others: the car dealership that became Reef, the ice house that became Beaver’s, the burlap factory that became Textile, the appliance warehouse that became Block 7 Wine Company. Somehow the spaghetti-western-themed strip center that ultimately became Stella Sola gets mixed up in this crowd (Abdelnour calls the building a “town house”). She adds: “In the film ‘Urban Cowboy,’ based in Houston and nearby Pasadena, the mother of the John Travolta character told him, ‘You just can’t get good vegetables in Houston.’ You certainly can now.” [New York Times] Photo of Stella Sola: 2Scale Architects
The Wall Street Journal‘s Katy McLaughlin picks on a few loud restaurants:
Many of the most cutting-edge, design conscious restaurants are introducing a new level of noise to today’s already voluble restaurant scene. The new noisemakers: Restaurants housed in cavernous spaces with wood floors, linen-free tables, high ceilings and lots of windows—all of which cause sound to ricochet around what are essentially hard-surfaced echo chambers.
Upscale restaurants have done away with carpeting, heavy curtains, tablecloths, and plush banquettes gradually over the decade, and then at a faster pace during the recession, saying such touches telegraph a fine-dining message out of sync with today’s cost-conscious, informal diner. Those features, though, were also sound absorbing. . . .
Restaurateurs often say the only complaints they get about noise are from older clientele. As people age—and particularly when they are 65 or older—they often lose acuity in hearing high-frequency sounds, making it harder to understand speech, says Mark Ross, a professor emeritus of audiology at the University of Connecticut.
The Corkscrew wine bar at 1919 Washington Ave. will be closing for good on February 9th. Appearing in its place by March will be a new “organic bar” from the same owners. Bee Love will serve infused cocktails and other drinks with fresh, local, organic ingredients and no syrups or mixes, reports the HBJ‘s Allison Wollam. And the bar will grow its own limes, oranges, and lemons.
[Corkscrew co-owner] Andrew Adams, who also owns The Washington Avenue Drinkery at 4115 Washington Ave., says it may take a little longer to get a drink at Bee Love than at other rowdy bars along the Washington Avenue corridor because the drinks will be made for “experiencing,†not just drinking.
Adams also says that by the end of March he plans to open a new over-30 nightclub right next door to Bee Love. It’ll be called Trixie’s and feature eighties music.
Photo: Heights Blog
A little more than 2 years after announcing they’d be closing down, demolishing the restaurant and selling the land underneath it, and 9 months after reopening the almost-60-year-old institution with great fanfare, the owners of Otto’s Bar B Que are now saying the restaurant at 5502 Memorial Dr. will be closing for good. Sort of:
Otto’s has a long list of customers, including former President George H. W. Bush. He came by yesterday to get a final plate of food before the business closed. The building will be demolished and replaced with a bank. The owner told us it was hard to say goodbye.
“We have some wonderful people here in the City of Houston that have supported us for hundreds of years. It’s a little, a little emotional,” said owner June [Sofka].
You will still be able to order a hamburger from Otto’s at that location for a few more months.
Photo: Flickr user tamtam.afropunx
Sometime after this photo was taken at the start of the month, the missing rail on the rebuilt trestle bridge over White Oak Bayou was installed. But the rest of the rails are gone! A 5-mile segment of the MKT Trail through the Heights, named after the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad tracks that used to run along it, opened over the weekend. The trail starts at 26th St., runs down Nicholson to 7th St., east along 7th for a bit, down and across the bayou. It ends at Spring St. and I-45. When will it connect to Downtown, or new trails to the north?
Four other bike paths opened in 2009, making 15 new miles in all:
COMMENT OF THE DAY: TRUST THE WEBSITE “I live in a bungalow in cottage grove . . . since 2005. [7677 Homes] bought the house in 8/2006. We have paid our rent on time and have asked SEVERAL times even as short of time as 3 months ago (when I saw land being surveyed next door) if they had plans on doing something with our home. They reassured me no worries the market is bad and we would give you 90 days to 6 month notice before doing that. Told me how well we have always paid, yada yada yada, well guess what found out Saturday they have plans on demolishing the house, only after we had to pay 155.00 so we could have heat, we have a 4 yr old in the house. They gave us 30 days to move (verbally) . . . and ofered us “another†house for 200 more a month, and failed to tell me it is listed as being demolished as well. I really thought the men were nice when we met them, but to do this behind our backs when we asked them to please give us alot of notice. Sad thing is, it is Christmas, times are hard, and they have had our house on their website to demolish since September and we never knew it or else we could have had all this time to save money to move. . . .” [Susan Dugas, commenting on Daily Demolition Report: Truck Tired]
A couple of months ago, a TABC application appeared outside the Indian Summer Lodge, Jeff Law’s quirky and colorful Quonset-Hut-turned-event-compound adjacent to the new Hike-and-Bike Trail off lower Columbia St. in the Heights. And so the rumor began that midtown’s Tacos-A-Go-Go might be moving or expanding there.
Now, however, the Indian Summer Lodge is for sale. A new listing was posted over the weekend on the MLS. The 16,170-sq.-ft. property features three buildings — the lodge, the “loft” (the Quonset hut), and a treehouse with skyline balcony.
Here’s what $775,000 gets you:
COMMENT OF THE DAY: WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THAT HOUSE THEY WERE GIVING AWAY IN THE OLD SIXTH WARD? 
“This house was torn [down] yesterday…very sad. [The] large house that is next to it was still there this morning. We will see if its there when I go home today. There is another small house on the same lot that was torn down about a week and a half ago.” [Casey, commenting on An Old Sixth Ward House To Take Home with You]
