- 3321 Avalon Pl. [HAR]
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Tag: 77019
NEW NORTH MONTROSE APARTMENTS LEAVE HANOVER, MOVE TO RIVER OAKS 
Residents of the recently opened Hanover West Gray apartments at 1340 West Gray got an unexpected notice in their mailboxes this month: Their new homes at the corner of West Gray and Waugh (replacing the Tavern on Gray and some neighboring structures) now feature a River Oaks address. Hanover sold the 275-unit structures effective March 13 to AMLI. And the new owner is calling the complex AMLI River Oaks, after the tony no-apartments-please neighborhood whose eastern border is three-quarters of a mile to the west. [Houston Chronicle; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Hanover Company
A futuristic pneumatic vacuum elevator (top) links levels within a 2006 steel-and-stucco townhome developed by Carol Isaak Barden and designed by former filmmaker Francois de Menil, architect of the Menil Collection’s Byzantine Fresco Chapel. Originally, this property was the Two in a duo Barden named the One-Two Townhomes. The bermed-skirted property rises over street-level garages on a site located a block south of Allen Pkwy. and Buffalo Bayou in Temple Terrace. The larger of the units had its resale premiere last week at an asking price of $1.395 million. Back in 2008, it sold for a disappointing $749,000. In the scenes arranged inside, a strategically placed palm tree on the site appears to have been cast in a supporting role.
4 Stories Plus
What more quintessential closeup image of Houston is there — the kind you really aren’t likely to come across too many other places — than the one that shows a 17-story office tower under construction right next door to a single-family home? So when you hear of a Montrose resident complaining that the huge and noisy construction crane planted just a few feet beyond his fence to construct the “boutique” building at 2229 San Felipe is causing cracks in the concrete patio and the interior walls of his home, that the smell of diesel is overwhelming whether he’s in the back yard or inside on the ground floor, and that the fumes and noise from the regular Saturday concrete pours cause regular headaches for family members — well, it kinda does make you sit up and pay attention, if not simply to marvel at the unique properties of Houston development regulations and practices that allow such remarkable juxtapositions in our midst.
Still, the owner of the home at 2244 Welch St. might be forgiven if he doesn’t get so philosophical about the wondrous scene arrayed before him. “No representative of Hines has EVER come to us to express any concern about what they are doing,” he wrote over the weekend to an online newsgroup. “Even the construction workers admit they are not comfortable with the position of this crane. So everyone else got paid off, just not us I guess.”
This past Saturday, he filed a report about the situation with the EPA. What happened next?
Next Door to 2229 San Felipe
Why would patrons at Rita Wanstrom’s Roaring 60s bar at 2305 S. Shepherd Dr. — just north of Fairview — regularly retreat to the bathroom to put their pants on backwards? In the late 1980s, the site of the nightspot, along with a few neighboring buildings, was replaced with the Shepherd Place office tower pictured above (an enterprise that reportedly bankrupted former governor John Connolly and a few other investors in the project). But back in the uh, roaring sixties, the bar was a famed lesbian hangout — subject to regular police raids focused on female zipper placement.
Lesbians in the Roaring 60s
LAWSUIT WON’T STOP CONSTRUCTION OF HINES’S SAN FELIPE TOWER — AT THIS TIME 
Yesterday a Harris County judge issued an order denying the request of some neighbors of 2229 San Felipe across from River Oaks for a temporary restraining order halting construction of the 17-story Hines office tower going up on that site. The neighbors had filed suit last week, complaining that (among other things) the building would interfere with their privacy, cause unreasonable traffic delays, devalue their own nearby properties, and erode the character of the neighborhood. “Unfortunately, Harris County does not make transcripts of arguments at the hearing available online,” writes the tipster who sent Judge Michael Gomez’s order to Swamplot, “but this could be a sign that Judge Gomez may be less receptive to the Plaintiffs’ arguments than those that were heard in the Ashby highrise case.” Maybe. Twice on the signed order, after the word “denied,” the judge added in the phrase “at this time” by hand. [Prime Property; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Hines
Robocop may have moved on to the real Detroit, but Houston will always have Reality Bites. And today folks around the movie biz are celebrating the movie’s twentieth anniversary. The Winona Ryder-Ben Stiller-Janeane Garofalo-Ethan Hawke pic filmed here and there about Houston (with a few disguised-L.A. settings thrown in for good measure) was released on February 18, 1994. In and around the Gen X coming-of-age coming-out reality-TV disaffection storyline, the movie depicted the overgrown charms of Alden Place, the little North Montrose neighborhood of duplexes and 4-plexes that made living in the shadows of Downtown seem so easy and affordable back then. Twenty years on, how’s it doing?
Alden Place and Time
If the panoramic photo above makes it look like these newly erected concrete tilt walls, having been boiled and baked on the ground and then propped into place, are about to envelop the 2-story strip center building to its north on S. Shepherd Dr. just south of Welch known to most as the longtime home of the Hot Bagel Shop — well that appears to be the idea. These photos were taken over the weekend. Last November, Swamplot reported on plans for Shepherd Commons, at 2015 S. Shepherd, a new 2-story replacement strip mall which Hot Bagel Shop and River Oaks Nails, according to the source, were intending to move into. After the move, it was reported, the original strip center would be knocked down and a second phase built in its place:
Plain or Poppy?
A slideshow featured on the website of the Houston Business Journal (and noted in our Headlines post this morning) features the 7 most expensive homes sold in Houston last year. Coming in at No. 3 is the full-floor Huntingdon condo unit where former Enron CEO Ken Lay used to live. 2121 Kirby Dr. Unit 33 and its mopey-castle-in-the-sky interior (shown below after the furniture was removed) was listed for sale by his widow, Linda Lay, back in 2010 and featured on Swamplot occasionally over the following years as it hopped on and off the market a few times and descended in fits and starts from an initial (off-market) asking price of $12.8 million to the mid-single-digit millions. MLS and county tax records show the 9-bathroom, 6-elevator, 12,827-sq.-ft. pièd-a-terre with the $10K+ monthly maintenance fee finally sold last February to an entity controlled by another local CEO, for a (still-record-making, but more than half-off) $5.5 million, though the list price had by that time fallen $100K lower.
Much Lower, but Still Sky High
Having completed demolitions of facilities it owned on the property, including its fleet maintenance facility at 801 Gillette St., a couple of public works buildings at 812 Gillette, and a former HPD SWAT substation at 1500 W. Dallas, the city has now listed for sale the 10-1/2-acre swath of land along Allen Pkwy between the Federal Reserve building and Allen Parkway Village. The land includes San Felipe Park at 1717 Allen Pkwy., which fronts Houston’s premiere waterfront roadway opposite Buffalo Bayou Park. Also included, apparently: Land underneath 3 streets that extend into the property: Hopson St., Bailey St., and Golf Link Pl. The listing from Cushman & Wakefield says bids are due March 14th.
San Felipe Park and All
“They are definitely moving forward” on construction of the office tower at the corner of Spann St. and San Felipe between Kirby and Shepherd, a Swamplot reader reports from the scene across the street from River Oaks. Neighborhood complaints or no, Hines is ready to roll on its 17-story 2229 San Felipe development (portrayed in an aerial view among its low-rise neighbors at right). “They have scraped the land, built a cover over the neighbors garage, and fenced this property,” our correspondent reports. And oh, yeah: A crane has arrived.
- Previously on Swamplot: Dear Hines: We’d Settle for a Residential Midrise, Please, Hines Not Stopping San Felipe Skyscraper, Hines Develops Website To Explain 17-Story San Felipe Development, “Stop†Signs Oppose 17-Story Hines Office Building on San Felipe, A Look Around San Felipe at the Randall Davis Condos and Planned Hines Office Building Site, Hines Plans a Shiny New 18-Story Office Building Across San Felipe from River Oaks
Photo: Loves Swamplot. Aerial View of 2229 San Felipe: Hines
Sticking Up, for River Oaks
A passer-by sends this photo showing the scene this morning at the site of the Chateau Ten scaffolding accident that took place a few days before Christmas. The plank-covered Mercedes is gone, but the neighboring apartment building at 2233 Welch St., still wearing its recent quoined stuccover, doesn’t look much worse for the dust-up — does it?
Flashing News Update
in this week’s Houston Press, writer Dianna Wray wades into the murky waters surrounding the Harris County Flood Control District’s plan to move and rebuild the banks of Buffalo Bayou where it winds between Memorial Park and the River Oaks Country Club. The method of “natural channel design” the district plans to use in the $6 million project is meant to keep the bayou in place, using downed trees instead of concrete. But weren’t bayous born to wiggle? “If the Army Corps of Engineers approves the Memorial Park Demonstration Project permit application,” Wray writes, “construction workers could move in by the end of this year, using heavy equipment and saws to reshape the bayou according to a pattern that should, if the method is successful, lock the waterway into a form it will hold for generations to come. If the effort fails, the entire project could be blown down the river by one heavy flood, leaving nothing but naked, unprotected soil where the last of an ancient forest once stood.”
- Fighting for Control: Can Buffalo Bayou Survive the Latest Plan to Save It? [Houston Press]
- Conservationists have an eye turned to Buffalo Bayou project [Houston Chronicle ($)]
- Memorial Park Demonstration Project [HCFCD]
Plan of Memorial Park Demonstration Project: Harris County Flood Control District
The Banks of River Oaks
The new owners of Marfreless have updated the website of the shuttered River Oaks Shopping Center bar to indicate that it plans on reopening in January. Which makes sense, since the previously promised summer 2013 re-launch date for the 2006 Peden St. location has come and gone. A comment appended back in December to a Facebook photo album showing renovations of the signless institution’s famed dimly lit interior provides an actual opening date: “probably” January 17th. What delights await inside? A unisex restroom with 2 stalls, chandeliers, plus new VIP areas carved out of what were previously storage rooms: “There will be curtains upstairs that you can pull closed for privacy or open for groups. Or . . . pull closed for groups, if that’s what you’re into.” The stairs, however, will still offer the “same place to hit your head.”
- Marfreless To Reopen January 2014 [Marfreless]
- “Make-Out Bar” Marfreless is Expected to Reopen Soon [Eater Houston]
- Previously on Swamplot: The Return of Marfreless, Weingarten Responds: Hey, It’s Not Us, It’s Marfreless, The End Coming for Marfreless in River Oaks
Photo: Marfreless
Behind the Blue Door
Could the clipped and sculpted shrubbery outside this 1998 townhome (top) with fenced side yard have sent invasive shoots inside? A colony of photo-ready greenery appears to have taken root and taken over (above) within the otherwise cleared out corner unit, located in the Bakerdale subdivision of North Montrose, east of Montrose Blvd. near Wharton Elementary School on West Gray. The plantings aren’t the only signs of growth for the property. The asking price for the property, which earlier today was listed for a third time, is now $309,900. Back in its initial listing in September 2012, the price tag was $280K, which went down to $274,900 in October. A price reduction soon thereafter to $269,900 preceded the property being withdrawn from the market the following month.
Houseplant Heaven
