Swamplot Archives by Tag: 77061

Monday, August 3, 2009

Swamplot Price Adjuster: Glenbrook Valley High?

The Swamplot Price Adjuster needs your nominations! Found a property you think is poorly priced? Send an email to Swamplot, and be sure to include a link to the listing or photos. Tell us about the property, and explain why you think it deserves a price adjustment. Then tell us what you think a better price would be. Unless requested otherwise, all submissions to the Swamplot Price Adjuster will be kept anonymous.

Location: 8107 Glen Dell Ct.
Details: 3 bedrooms, 2 baths; 2,757 sq. ft. on an 11,307-sq.-ft. lot
Price: $245,000
History: On the market almost continuously from March 2005 to February 2006, then again from March to September 2006, and after a couple of weeks’ rest back on again until March 2007. Returned to the market from February to August of last year. Listed again since July 3rd of this year. Price reduced from $259K.

Here’s our reader’s nomination:

The home has a lot of good bones, flagstone exterior & some flagstone floors, big windows, angled rooms, pool. But the things done in the name of updating haven’t helped it. Lots of cheap ugly ceramic tile, Home Depot pedestal sinks, overdone moldings, and the original flagstone posts were taken down in favor of plain square wooden ones. There is no landscaping to speak of, and the pool is drained, now that will show well.

So, then . . . what might be a better price?

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Thursday, May 21, 2009

Video Surveillance on the Fly: Here’s Looking at You!

Note: Story updated below.

Smile! Urine candid camera!

Acute airport-urinal observer and SnapStream CEO Rakesh Agrawal catches this unlikely warning posted in a men’s restroom at the newish Southwest Airlines terminal at Hobby. The text below the Dept. of Homeland Security logo at the top of the urinal reads:

Automatic infrared flush sensors also provide video monitoring for security purposes.

Hey, you’ll probably want to make sure you . . . uh, “look your best” before you step away then, no? Reports  the high-tech exec:

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Tuesday, February 24, 2009

HISD Neighborhood Lunch Program: The Eating of Glenbrook Valley

In a letter demonstrating the virtues of direct and forthright language, HISD has notified the owners of 8 homes on Glenloch St. in Glenbrook Valley that the new Lewis Elementary School will eat up their property:

This letter is to inform you that growth in Houston has created a serious shortage of permanent space within the Houston Independent School District (”HISD”). In a response to this need for space necessary to provide the best education for our children in your area, HISD will be replacing the Lewis Elementary School facility and it will be necessary to expand the existing school site.

The Superintendent of Schools has recommended, and the HISD Board of Education has designated, a tract of land for this expansion. This tract includes property you may own (see attached map).

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Monday, October 20, 2008

Glenbrook Valley’s Battle of the Halloween Lawn Decorations

Halloween Tombstones in Glenbrook Valley

Glenbrook Valley’s not-so-neighborly Battle of the Flags moves on to a new set of weapons: Halloween tombstones! In advance of the holiday, neighbors put up this frightening display, apparently for the benefit of longtime Confederate-flag-fan T.C. Burton, who lives across the street: Individual tombstones for Bigotry, Racism, Discrimination, Cruelty, Intolerance, Prejudice, Hate, Violence, and a few other demons.

“Sparks should start flying soon,” commented one chronicler of the display in an email to friends.

And sure enough, Burton has unleashed a marked grave of his own:

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Monday, July 14, 2008

Two Flags Over Glenbrook Valley

Rainbow Flag and Car in Glenbrook Valley, Houston

Driving around Glenbrook Valley for this past weekend’s open houses, Mr. Kimberly finds two very different home flag displays. Here’s his photo of one. The other is below:

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Friday, July 11, 2008

Weekend Open House Tour: Glenbrook Valley

If you’re looking for a cool, low-hanging Modern home, Glenbrook Valley is your best bet! This week: Glenbrook Valley’s “Mod-palooza,” courtesy of broker Robert Searcy. Three of the homes below are listed as Houston Mod’s Mods of the Month.

8119 Stony Dell Ct., Glenbrook Valley, Houston

Location: 8119 Stony Dell Ct.
Details: 3 bedrooms, 2 baths; 2,665 sq. ft.
Price: $199,900
The Scoop: 1954 brick L-shaped ranch on actual Houston hill at end of cul-de-sac. Carpet and tile floors; stone patio in back. Wood paneling in Den. Listed for just under 2 months.
Open House: Sunday, 2-4 pm

More moderately Mod-ish moments as the tour continues . . .

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Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Last of the Harold Farb Signs: It’s a Wrap

Sign at Broadway Square Apartments, north of Hobby Airport, for Harold Farb Apartment Homes

A reader tells us that the Harold Farb Apartment Homes sign at the Broadway Square Apartments hasn’t been taken down yet, but it has been hooded — with a new temporary fabric covering identifying the apartments and new property manager Pinnacle.

Photo: David Beebe

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Thursday, March 20, 2008

Farb Gone: Will the Signs Go Down on Broadway?

Sign at Broadway Square Apartments, north of Hobby Airport, for Harold Farb Apartment Homes

The last of the Harold Farb apartment complexes has been sold. Cypress Real Estate Advisors, an Austin firm, bought the Nob Hill Apartments on North Braeswood and the West Point Apartments on Woodway last December. And Post Investment Group, an LLC out of LA with some NYC backing, just closed on Farb’s Broadway Square Apartments just north of Hobby Airport.

David Beebe, who’s just posted his own account of the southeast-side walking tour he took with John Lomax last month, has a few comments about his stroll along Broadway:

The [trees] throughout this neighborhood are mature and beautiful. They are, for the most part, oaks. This is a big difference between the Harold Farb pioneered Hobby Airport area and the Frank Sharp designed Sharpstown. If [Sharp] had been as pro-active about tree planting his nighborhood would look more like this. The architecture and age is about the same.

. . . and on the Broadway Square Apartments, which Farb built in 1975:

His apartments here on Broadway are still the best looking of the entire area’s- French Victorian style, but without falling off shutters and with better built and ornate wrought iron railings and kempt landscaping.

There’s been no announcement about it, but the iconic signs along Broadway showing a silhouetted Farb wielding what appears to be a roll of blueprints are likely to be replaced. Globe St.’s Amy Wolff Sorter reports that Post Investments is planning a $2.5-million renovation:

Work will begin in two months on the 182-building complex and take 1.5 years to complete, according to Jack R. Ehrman, Post’s acquisitions director. The lion’s share of the tab will be used to replace 90% of the roofs.

Photo of sign at Broadway Square Apartments: David Beebe

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Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Southeast Side: A Tour of the Houston Heartland

El Torito Lounge, Harrisburg Blvd., Houston

Houston’s lone professional tourists, John Nova Lomax and David Beebe, stop off at the Brady’s Island in the Ship Channel midway into their latest day-long stroll . . . through this city’s southeastern stretches:

The air is foul here, and the eastern view is little more than a forest of tall crackers and satanic fume-belching smokestacks, sending clouds of roasted-cabbage-smelling incense skyward to Mammon, all bisected by the amazingly tall East Loop Ship Channel Bridge, its pillars standing in the toxic bilge where Brays Bayou dumps its effluent into the great pot of greenish-brown petro-gumbo.

While Brady’s Landing today seems to survive as a function room – a sort of Rainbow Lodge for the Ship Channel, with manicured grounds that reminded Beebe of Astroworld — decades ago, people came here to eat and to take in the view. This was progress to them, this horrifically awesome vista showed how we beat the Nazis and Japanese and how we were gonna stave off them godless Commies. As for me, it made me think of Beebe’s maxim: “Chicken and gasoline don’t mix.”

More from the duo’s march through “Deep Harrisburg”: Flag-waving Gulf Freeway auto dealerships, an early-morning ice house near the Almeda Mall, a razorwire-fenced artist compound in Garden Villas, Harold Farb’s last stand, colorful Broadway muffler joints, the hidden gardens of Thai Xuan, and — yes, gas-station chicken.

“There is nothing else like the Southeast side,” Lomax adds in a comment:

I see it as the true heart of Houston. Without the port and the refineries we are nothing. The prosperous West Side could be Anywhere, USA, but the Southeast Side could only be here.

Photo of El Torito Lounge on Harrisburg: John Nova Lomax and David Beebe

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Wednesday, December 5, 2007

Where To Pick Up Travel Gifts on the Way Back from Hobby, Cheap

99 Cents Only Store Under Construction on Broadway near Bellfort, Houston

Landed back in town, only to realize you’d forgotten to buy something for the kids on your trip? Well, if you’re headed north to I-45 from Hobby Airport, you’re in luck . . . or at least you will be once the new 99 Cents Only Store about to go up on Broadway (just south of Bellfort) is finished. Hey, most of those doodads are made in China anyway, and they’ll be even cheaper here!

A reader sends in this photo, and says it’s on the site of an old office building that had been demo’ed about a year ago.

Guess we’ll have to wait even longer for a 99 Cents Only store inside the terminal.

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Monday, September 24, 2007

Daily Demolition Report: Beneath the Roses

4422 N. Roseneath Dr., Houston

Another day, another round of Houston demolitions. Find out where the action is in our list of structures approved for destruction—after the jump.

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Monday, July 16, 2007

Daily Demolition Report: Clearing Sherwood Forest

843 Friar Tuck Lane

A modernist classic gets its dust-conversion approval. That and other building-retirement news in today’s report, which begins after the jump.

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