The chain’s new 3004 Yale St. location opens next Friday, September 28 in the strip behind the 4-week-old grocery store and its parking lot off 610. Just off-camera to the left of the gym’s spot is the Verizon store that’s already doing business in the retail building.
It’s holding down the fort all by itself right now, but once Orangetheory moves in next door a bunch more tenants are expected to follow:
Signage is down and a closure notice is up on Blast Fitness’s now-former 3936 N. Shepherd storefront, which lies within the northern portion of the strip that Aldi plans to take over. Pictured above is that portion — just south of Garden Oaks Blvd. — where Yoga Collective and a next-door vacuum shop took off previously to make room for the grocer. Blast’s turf was on the south side of theirs, near where retail signs and parking activity pick back up on the right in the image.
For those in need of a new gym, not to worry: Blast is letting customers transfer their memberships to any location run by its affiliate brand Fitness Connection. The nearest of that chain’s 14 Houston fitness centers? Eight miles away in Greenspoint Mall.
Photos: Dan Bradley
Checkout lines at the new 365 by Whole Foods Market stretched about halfway to the back of the store during its opening yesterday as Independence Heights grocery pioneers crowded in to get a first look at the place — the chain’s tenth 365 store since the branding originated in 2015. None of the neighboring tenants are open yet in the adjacent strip center that stretches north along Yale St. But the 30,000-sq.-ft. grocery store’s 2 in-house restaurants are.
Juice Society (signage pictured at top) specializes in liquids while Peli Peli Kitchen deals South African food from this counter-serve spot:
A just-issued building permit indicates Aldi is now on its way to the north end of the Garden Oaks Shopping Center, pictured above, where it’ll occupy the spot formerly home to Yoga Collective — plus a little extra room the developer’s adding on to help it fit into the 95,046-sq.-ft. building. Before it arrives, exterior renovations will also make over the outer face of the strip.
Other comings and goings in the building just north of the North Loop: Life Savers 24-hour Emergency Room is taking over 6,300 sq.-ft., and Dollar Tree is due to relocate from its current spot in the main strip to the new freestanding building marked yellow in the site plan above.
Photo and site plan: Hartman
A construction permit filed yesterday reveals that Astral Brewing — the new beer venue headed to 4816 N. Shepherd — is beginning renovations to turn 9,208 sq. ft. of the 27,575-sq.-ft. warehouse building once home to Southern Truck Pros into a hub for brewing and drinking. The structure’s parking lot off Shepherd is shown full of trucks in the photo above, taken back before the auto shop shuttered.
A site plan posted on the brewery’s Facebook page indicates a combination of public amenities and mission-critical brewing facilities included in the redo:
When Paws Pet Resort finishes renovating the 2 warehouses south of its current one on Couch St. — east of Ella and in between 34th and 34th 1/2 streets — its total paw-print will include over an acre and a half of continuous land. Following about 5 years in the 6,000-sq.-ft. Garden Oaks warehouse building pictured above, the boarding house is expanding to the nearly twice-as-big former industrial building behind it at 3415 Couch St., as well as another smaller adjacent structure further south. The owners of Paws Pet Resort bought the soon-to-be-converted spaces last year — both of which sit off camera to the left.
Photo: Cortney K.
Braun has a 2-step plan for developing the former Aztec Rental Services property on 34th St. between Oak Forest and Ella. A brochure on the developer’s website designates the portion of the site to the east as that of future residences. On the western edge of the would-be housing spot, Aztec’s former storefront — pictured above — looks toward an additional 2-acre parcel the equipment outfitter gave up.
That’s where Braun wants to plant a pair of 10,050-sq.-ft. retail buildings surrounded by a moat of parking:
Here’s the new 2,500-sq.-ft. strip center planned in the parking lot next door to Prince’s Hamburgers’ abandoned building on Ella Blvd. north of 34th St. The photo above, sent in by a Swamplot reader, views the former restaurant from the north, outside the closed-down A1 Auto Deals used car lot near the train tracks that cross Ella south of Judiway St. Between the auto dealer and the restaurant is where the strip center would go, at the west end of what’s now an additional 13,204-sq.-ft. parking lot.
Prince’s took over the restaurant building from Jack in the Box in 2016:
The glassy storefront shown on the far right in the photo at top — on Ella Blvd. just south of W. 34th St. — is where Vietnamese restaurant Les Ba’get plans to move in once construction on the new 33 1/3 @ Thirtyfourth shopping center is complete. The restaurant’s existing location on Montrose Blvd. closed down last Friday ahead of the planned move. In its new life inside the shopping center [which is — disclosure — a past Swamplot Sponsor], Les Ba’get will have double the space it did in its former 1717 Montrose location as well as 80 seats, according to Eater.
The new 2.5-acre development shown from the north in the aerial above has been in the works since last year on the site formerly shared between That Pizza Place on Ella, the Century Marking stamp company office, and an El Rey Taqueria. Les Ba’get’s spot is pictured on the right in that photo, at the end of the brick strip adjacent to Ella.
Here’s the site plan for the whole complex:
Pictured above during its final stand on Slowpokes cafe’s patio last Saturday as workers took it down limb by limb: one of a pair of oak trees the landlord had long threatened to remove. The 2 trees — now fully chopped — stood on a lawn where Slowpokes patrons hung out between the strip mall that houses the cafe and Gardendale Dr., which runs to its south. The leafier photo shows the same tree alive in the coffee shop’s backyard last year.
A view from the corner of Alba St. and Gardendale looks west to show that tree about to be chopped and the other one already stumped:
THE ROCKY MOUNTAIN–THEMED BREWERY COMING TO GARDEN OAKS’ BEER ROW 
Construction began earlier this month, reports Jen Para, on a 1,600-sq.-ft. brewhouse for Walking Stick Brewing Co. in Garden Oaks. Also on tap for the 16,948-sq.-ft. site at 957 Wakefield Dr., pictured above from the back, which faces Judiway: a 3,600-sq.-ft. bar and patio featuring the brewery’s 7 beers, each of which is named after a peak in the Rocky Mountains. Walking Stick will sit directly across the street from the volleyball courts at Wakefield Crowbar and its neighboring Great Heights Brewing Co. microbrewery. Petrol Station is at the end of the block, at Golf Dr. [Houston Business Journal] Photo: Walking Stick Brewery
LIBERTY KITCHEN NOW FREE FROM GARDEN OAKS 
5 months after a grand reopening to celebrate the end of road construction along Alba Rd. that had been hindering access to the restaurant, Liberty Kitchen Garden Oaks has shut down. Last night was its last meal. The restaurant had opened at 3715 Alba Rd. in June 2016, taking over a renovation of the property (and demolition of an adjacent Quonset hut to make room for parking) originally intended to house a Facundo Restaurante. “We debuted a new menu, a new beer garden and a new parking lot in an effort to revitalize patronage” after the road construction ended earlier this year, write the owners of Liberty Kitchen. But that wasn’t enough, and Hurricane Harvey “served as an additional financial hurdle company-wide.” The Liberty Kitchen Heights, San Felipe, and Memorial City locations remain open; the Little Liberty in the Rice Village closed this past March. Photo: Oksana W.
Coming soon to the complex of light-colored industrial buildings across 34th St. from the Pat H. Foley funeral home and its accompanying embalming services facility, the Hare Krishna Temple and Cultural Center, and the Foster Family YMCA between them just south of Oak Forest: a 17,831 sq.-ft. retail and restaurant center redo. Revive Development’s Stomping Grounds, which will also include 5,000 sq. ft. of upstairs office space, is to be carved out of 4 buildings on a 3-acre site formerly occupied by vehicle-repair and service companies and the Bank Shot pool hall.
Drawings from Cisneros Design Studio show the 2-story metal building at 1229 W. 34th St. (pictured above) formerly occupied by a succession of electrical companies cleaned up, reconfigured, and outfitted with cantilevered balconies and glass curtain walls. A new building modeled after it is shown to the east, with an 8,000 sq.-ft. lawn bordered by patios fitted between.
224 parking spaces will surround the center’s main buildings and garden. Here’s a plan of the entire site:
