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Tag: 77027
The walls came down last week at the southwest corner of Edloe and W. Alabama streets, in the wake of a demo permit issued the week before. A few readers had eyes and lenses on the spot, which is currently listed for lease on LoopNet as 3000 Alabama Ct. but goes by 3501 W. Alabama in other county records. The walled complex (shown mid-teardown at the start of last week) was sold to St. Luke’s in 2009 by Metsun Senior Living, though it’s rumored to have been a former residence of deceased Greenway Plaza mastermind Kenneth Schnitzer.
St. Luke’s, whose main land holding sits catty-corner to the Alabama Ct. property, also owns the office park across Edloe, visible to the east of the freshly-emptied lot in this shot below from later last week:
Alabama Ct.
The Champions School of Real Estate’s former location at 4543 Post Oak Place Dr. is now home to Quality Life Fitness, which KPRC meteorologist Frank Billingsley and partner Kevin Gilliard transplanted recently from the southwest corner of Westheimer Rd. and Mid Ln. The space, less than a mile north of the gym’s previous strip center locale, has been refurbished and outfitted with a bamboo-floor studio for its new more-likely-to-be-on-the-ground clientele:
Post Oak Park
Here’s some hot and heavy demo footage of a frenzied excavator tearing apart the former Blanco’s Bar and Grill at 3406 W. Alabama St. this morning, as a worker hoses down the scene from off to the side. A reader captured the final show at the little blue honky-tonk, which housed live music for nearly 32 years before its November 2013 closure.
Hosed on W. Alabama
TINY IPIC THEATER WINS INJUNCTION AGAINST GIANT RIVAL OVER CLAIMS OF ANTICOMPETITIVE CONDUCT 
Florida-based iPic Theaters, reports Olivia Pulsinelli, has won a temporary injunction against Knoxville-based Regal Entertainment in a Harris County court last week. The boutique theater chain, whose first Houston location opened at 4444 Westheimer Rd. in the River Oaks District shopping center last November, filed a suit late last year alleging that Regal and fellow competitor AMC were muscling the new theater out of the market through ‘anticompetitive and unlawful conduct’, including demanding exclusive rights to show certain films or refusing to screen films also offered to iPic; Regal opted not to screen several major releases (including the latest Hunger Games installation and December’s Star Wars episode) at many of its Houston locations. iPic’s 12 theaters nationwide generally screen fewer films than its larger competitors while offering pricier amenities, such as dine-in service, pillows, and semipartitioned 2-recliner “pods”. A trial date for the lawsuit is set for October 3rd. [HBJ, Houston Press] Photo: Liz J. via Yelp
The north wall has been breached — windows have been carved into the facade of the Houston Chronicle’s freeway-front structure at the corner of the West Loop and 59 (where most of the paper’s staff will relocate early next year.) The multi-building campus under renovation at 4747 Southwest Freeway was bought from the Houston Post in 1995 after the competing newspaper folded; the Chronicle’s Texas Ave. space was bought by developer Hines in October.
The main building was powerwashed back to a gleaming beige over the summer — to brighten things up further, sections of the 1960s raw concrete Brutalist facade are currently being whitewashed as well, in line with exterior renderings released earlier this year by Gensler:
59 @ 610
Love that rush of vertigo from driving up the entrance ramp at Hidalgo St. onto the southbound West Loop? Freeway thrill-seekers may have some new options in a few years. The above rendering of new elevated express lanes along the West Loop between I-10 and 59 made an appearance at last night’s TxDOT Open House, where plans for the proposed project were presented for public comment. The drawing faces southwest across the intersection of San Felipe and 610 toward the Williams Tower (far left), and shows the lanes flying high over the existing freeway.
TxDOT also showed schematics and cross sections of the proposed additions — which include previously-considered dedicated bus lanes elevated along the path of the feeder road, from just south of I-10 to the junction with Post Oak Blvd.
Drive through the cross sections below, from north to south:
Up High in Uptown
You can see the “SORRY WE’RE CLOSED” sign on the door at Prince’s Hamburgers at the end of the feeder-road-facing shopping center at 3899 Southwest Fwy. in the photo at the top, sent to Swamplot by a reader. This Prince’s near Weslayan hasn’t been open for about a month, but the local chain still lists the location on its website, and at least one employee at another location was told by a manager that the site will reopen soon. Meanwhile, the Chronicle‘s Syd Kearney appears still to be waiting for a call back from the company’s management for info on the closure. All equipment inside appears to have been removed, a passer-by tells Swamplot.
- Prince’s Hamburgers closes Greenway Plaza-area store [Houston Chronicle]
- Previously on Swamplot: Old Prince’s Hamburger Sign Is Leaving North Shepherd for Points Even Further North
Photos: Joe Carl White (door); Prince’s Hamburgers (store)
Toast
It was introduced in April as the Arábella, but all you Randall Davis fans who’ve been trying hard since then to affect the correct pronunciation can relax your eyebrows. A reader sends in this closeup of the sign up on San Felipe, next to the driveway for the neighboring Target, advertising the 34-story condo tower the foreign-language-reference aficionado is planning to plant right in front of the just-about-complete SkyHouse River Oaks and across from Ashley Furniture on San Felipe, just inside the Loop. And behold! The accent is gone. Or rather, painted over, the reader reports.
Acute Name
“It looks amazingly shiny without the 50 years of grime,” notes the reader who late last week snapped these photos of the former Houston Post building at 4747 Southwest Fwy., tucked into the lifted right armpit of the I-69-610 intersection. The brutalist main building of the 7-building campus, designed in 1970 by Astrodome architects Wilson, Morris, Crain, and Anderson, is being powerwashed — with a significant portion of the work complete just in time for this week’s heavy rains.
Powerwashed!
Here’s the new view looking left as you exit the back front door of the Apple Store in Highland Village. The long-promised Cupcake ATM at the back of Sprinkles is all ready for its grand opening tomorrow at 4014 Westheimer. Why buy cupcakes from a glorified vending machine when you can walk in the store and have one handed to you by a real live person?
Sprinkles Redo
FLOOD NIGHT AT THE EDWARDS CINEMA GREENWAY PARKING GARAGE 
SUV-deprived Woodland Heights resident Mimi Swartz explains how she and her husband came to spend the very wet night of May 25th reclined in the front seats of their Honda Civic in the parking garage of the Edwards Greenway Grand Palace 24 at 3839 Weslayan St. — with a flank steak thawing in the wayback. They were on their way to a dry, refrigerator-equipped hideaway at the Hotel Derek when a stalled train and some high water blocked their tracks: “Next thought: About 0.7 miles to the south was a multiplex. We could catch a late show. Afterward, surely, the rain would have stopped and the water receded. If not, this place at least had covered parking. All during the 10:45 show of ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ — four other rain-soaked refugees had had the same idea — I couldn’t help thinking that if we’d had a truck like that of Charlize Theron’s character, I’d be asleep in bed instead of wondering how someone had managed to digitize her arm out of every shot.
By 12:45 a.m., the rain had not stopped. For a while, we stood in the parking garage beside the car, and I tried to snap cellphone photos of the lightning. The street below us displayed an impressive current. Finally, John and I got in the car and put the seats back as flat as they would go. Thirty years ago, this would have been exciting.” [NY Times] Photo: Cinema Treasures
RIVER OAKS BAPTIST SCHOOL BRINGS WAYWARD WESTHEIMER WALGREENS INTO THE FOLD 
A long-contemplated drugstore-to-Baptist-School handover finally took place last month. Back in January, Swamplot reported that the River Oaks Baptist School was in the process of buying the Walgreens at 3900 Westheimer Rd., in order to fit a “possible parking garage and secondary exit onto Westheimer†onto the 1.8-acre site. In announcing the transaction, however, the school hasn’t said precisely what it will do with its new digs — or when or whether the now-vacant drugstore building will be demolished. It is, however, developing a new master plan for the campus. The Walgreens relocated into the former Fresh Market across the street and on the other side of Weslayan — at 3745 Westheimer — in March. Photo: Swamplot inbox
THE SHOCKING REASON WHY SUPERMAN, BATMAN, AND THE FLASH WERE WASHING WINDOWS AT THE HOTEL DEREK TODAY No movie to promote. No pay squabble to publicize. No pediatric cancer patients to visit. Just: ’cuz. After a SkyEye HD copter spotted superheroes on the roof around lunchtime today, abc13 investigators called the Hotel Derek on Westheimer at the West Loop to get the marketing message. But none was available: “A hotel spokesperson says a standard window cleaning was scheduled, and guests and passersby just got a little something extra, courtesy of the window washers, who apparently took it upon themselves to show up for work in costume.” [abc13]
CUPCAKE ATM IS REALLY COMING TO HIGHLAND VILLAGE THIS TIME, SPRINKLES PROMISES 
If news that Sprinkles plans to bring a Cupcake ATM to Houston sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Today’s announcement marks the third time in 3 years that the California chain has declared that its lone Houston location — in Highland Village, snuggled up next to the Apple Store — would soon have one of the company’s signature baked-goods vending machines installed for all-hours use. Houston was to receive the second-ever such machine, after the Beverly Hills pilot (pictured here), in the summer of 2012. A second announcement the following year earmarked Houston for the fourth-ever Cupcake ATM that October (by then Chicago and Dallas stores had received theirs), after a holdup caused by “design issues.” Now Sprinkles is promising Houston the ninth Cupcake ATM in the country, opening this June 11th. It’ll be installed on the back side of the building at 4014 Westheimer, facing the parking lot. Inside, Sprinkles will be expanding its offerings to include cookies, ice cream, and attendant shakes, malts, and floats. Frequent Highland Village shopping center cupcakers will want to mark May 12 through 19th on their calendars — though perhaps only in pencil. That’s when the store is scheduled to be shut down for the installation of dipping cabinets along the back counter and cookie trays in its cupcake display area, as well as the exterior vending station. [Sprinkles Houston] Photo: Sprinkles
