A fireplace-turned-fish-tank (top) lends an unusual element to this Sharptown Country Club Terrrace property. It’s another by-the-barrier home, this one on a corner lot hidden behind bushes and trees (above) at the head of one of the neighborhood’s access streets from the Southwest Fwy. feeder. Asking $170,000, the new listing includes the aquarium. With hearth.
The windows on this 1964 Sharpstown Country Club Estates property showcase a variety of ways of admitting light while altering views in or out. But the windows looking into the back yard are different: The stretch of sound barrier across the back of the lot, blocking the Southwest Fwy., is just a blank canvas. A really big one.
Here’s the kind of campaign true fans of demolition can get behind: That’s Houston’s Mayor Annise Parker in the driver’s seat, about to trash a balcony at the Winfield I Condominiums at 10110 Forum West Dr., near the intersection of the Southwest Fwy. and Beltway 8. In taking the ceremonial first whack at a derelict complex, the city’s honorary demolisher-in-chief is campaigning in favor of a city bond issue on the November ballot that would generate $15 million to remove “blighted properties” like the Winfield. Though Proposition E is listed as a measure for housing bonds, the mayor’s office notes, the funds would “all go toward demolishing dangerous and abandoned buildings to make way for future affordable housing.”
Photo: Jessica Michan
Residents of the Cambridge Court Apartments at 6500 S. Gessner will get to stay until the end of their leases, but after that they’ll need to find new homes. That’s the word from the complex’s neighbor and new owner, Strake Jesuit. The Catholic boys’ high school is also the property’s old owner; the 7.55 acres the apartments sit on is a portion of the land Strake Jesuit lost as a result of a 1971 bankruptcy. Developer Harold Farb built what was then called the Newport Apartments on the site 6 years later.
School officials plan to tear down the complex “at the earliest possible date” and use the land, which sits just north of the school’s Gessner driveway, for parking and athletic fields. The acquisition will also allow planners to “re-examine where it will construct its new Science and Engineering Building on the campus without a net loss of parking or green space,” the school announced.
Photos: Strake Jesuit (aerial), Apartments.com (Cambridge Court Apartments)
COMMENT OF THE DAY: WHEN THE BULLDOZERS HEAD FOR SHARPSTOWN “. . . The Heights used to be pretty shady too. Times change. Neighborhoods change. Sharpstown’s day in the sun is coming, but it’s still a ways off. It’s not hard to look at the wave of redevelopment that has poured out from the center of Houston and realize Sharpstown is the path of growth. Back in the 80′s West U houses were being bulldozed by the dozen. Soon lots of folks were priced out of West U and the bulldozers turned to Bellaire. Now they are turning south all the way to the South Loop. Meyerland is in play too. Right now the primary western barrier is the edge of the Bellaire HS zoning map. As Meyerland continues to improve though, the childless pioneers who don’t care about school zones will be the first to start the gentrification process in Sharpstown. Eventually . . . critical mass. If the neighborhood associations were smart, they’d start their own tax district and ear mark all the proceeds for demolition of the junkiest properties. Demo some junk. Demo some more junk. Hold the land as it appreciates. Sell it to a developer who has a plan to build that you like (not just the highest bidder). Pour the land sale money into more demolition. Rinse. Repeat.” [Bernard, commenting on Headlines: Selling the Astrodome in Pieces; Felix Mexican Restaurant Sign Mystery]
The upstairs-downstairs elevation of this new listing only hints at the similarly stacked interior.
One of the most regal furniture store larks in southwest Houston: this 9-ft.-high plush red, gold-trim throne outside Queens Furniture (selling the “Antiques of Tomorrowâ€) at 7426 Harwin. Asking price: about $3,000. Just part of its pedigree: It’s been taken out to the store’s grassy streetside front yard every dry day for about 10 years (though the store moved a few blocks to its current location about a year ago, so it’s had a slight change of scenery). Also, claims a store rep: the sit piece has starred in some of the ceremonies at the PGA’s Shell Houston Open in the Woodlands. Inside Queens Furniture: an entire set of gold 6-ft.-tall versions with accompanying table, for north of $6,000.
Photo: Aaron Carpenter
Here they are: the latest views from the scene on Fondren just north of Harwin, where cleaning chemicals and hair sprays likely accelerated an early-morning strip-center blaze. The exploding cans were locked inside M Trading Company, a wholesale business that supplies local dollar stores, at 5710 Fondren. Also consumed by flames: Jessie’s Hair Salon, and the better portion of blossoms in Floreria Lee. A&C Tires and Star Karaoke appear to have made it through mostly unharmed.
A closer look at Greater Sharpstown’s latest strip-center-arcade fire:
CAN’T EVICT THEM BEFORE THEY LEAVE District F city council member Al Hoang failed in his bid yesterday to have a justice of the peace evict an organization calling itself Vietnamese Community Services from the Vietnamese Community of Houston and Vicinities building across the street from Plazamericas in Sharpstown. In a hearing the Chronicle‘s Moises Mendoza describes as “bizarre,” Hoang told Judge Russ Ridgway the Vietnamese Community Services name sounds too much like that of the building’s owners, and that the result was “too confusing.” Hoang is a former president of the Vietnamese Community of Houston and Vicinities, which also goes by the acronym VNCH. In May, he helped the organization win city council approval of a $400,000 community development block grant — to renovate the VNCH building. “Although Vietnamese Community Services has been in the building for 18 months, Hoang said he only recently discovered it’s not calling itself Vietnamese Elders Association, as he believed it had been since the group first moved into the building at 7100 Clarewood Drive. Vietnamese Community Services offers hot meals and English classes, among other things, to elderly community members. Hoang has been demanding that Vietnamese Community Services change its name or move elsewhere for the last few months, but the executive director of the organization refuses to do that.” Earlier this week, that organization’s executive director, Kim Nguyen, told Chronicle columnist Lisa Falkenberg that her group had already planned to move to a new location next month, so that the building could be renovated. [Houston Chronicle; Falkenberg column]
University of Houston architecture professor Susan Rogers explores the Bellaire-Holcombe corridor from Highway 6 to the Med Center and finds a donut in her path.
For each census tract that intersects Holcombe or Bellaire Blvd., Rogers tallied the total number of residents born outside the United States and those residents’ country of origin, using 2000 Census data. The results surprised her:
Most of the action is in the zone between the Loop and the Beltway. “The diversity drops steeply inside 610,” she notes:
I had graphed the street from just 610 to Hwy. 6 for a talk on the links between Asia and Houston and then decided to add the rest as a potential “contrast†– what I found when I completed it absolutely astounded me – the absolute drop is so stark – and of course the income graph is nearly the exact opposite . . .
That graph showing median household income in the same census tracts:
 in Sharpstown Country Club Estates... "Pin It")
