COMMENT OF THE DAY: FREEWAY TRAFFIC BACKUPS BRING THE CUSTOMERS “I visited the store the first weekend it was open, and overheard the general manager talking about how much more foot traffic the store is getting. He stated the obvious, which I’m surprised no one has commented on yet–think of the hundreds of thousands of people who are stuck in traffic every day on the elevated portion of 59 across from the store. The store’s sign is eye-level to those commuters (whereas it’s actually harder to see the stores on ground level), and you gotta think at least some of them are going to be interested in the store’s wares. Compare that to a low-profile location on Portwest that probably gets 1/10000th the traffic of 59. This is a rare case where being on the second floor of a strip center actually helps a company in Houston.” [Triprotic, commenting on The Finest Strip-Center Recital Hall in Houston]
Sign up for the Newsletter
Tag: 77098
Sales have been “a little slow” at that 2727 Kirby condo tower, the developer tells the Chronicle‘s Nancy Sarnoff. The 30-story tower across from West Ave near Westheimer should be complete by mid-September. Only 8 out of 78 units have closed so far.
Jerry Brown of MDA Holdings tells Sarnoff that “all but 18 units in the building have been sold” — but that “just a few units have fallen out of contract.” The wording makes it a little difficult to determine how many more than those 18 units have no deposits on them.
- Tower nears completion [Houston Chronicle]
Photo of 2727 Kirby: Ziegler Cooper
Hidden upstairs in that new double-decker strip center on the south side of 59 between the Kirby CVS and the feeder-road Chick-Fil-A, nestled between a hair salon and a spa, is a brand-new recital hall, outfitted with a 7-foot-5 Hamburg Steinway Model C grand piano and room for up to 100 fans of fine classical music. Leave the curtains on the back wall open, and performers can appreciate a sweeping view of the freeway traffic as they play.
The hall is inside the brand-new Dowling Music, a gifts-and-sheet-music store run by concert pianist Richard Dowling, who recently returned to his hometown and bought the Houston branch of Pender’s Music (which Pender’s had bought from the local Wadler-Kaplan Music Shop in 2000).
The strip center and its neighbors were built on the former Kirby Dr. site of Westheimer Transfer & Storage, which former Rockets star Hakeem Olajuwon bought in 2002. Olajuwon demolished the building and flipped the land, parceling it out in pieces to suburban-style developers.
Dowling, who performs about 60 concerts a year around the world, can’t have expected much walk-in business from visitors patronizing other establishments in the strip center. Downstairs from his store is the Methodist Breast Imaging Center; an Israeli martial arts studio, a weight-loss clinic, a GolfTEC indoor golf clinic, and the Pasha Snoring & Sinus Center round out the second floor. But Dowling tells the West University Examiner‘s Steve Mark that traffic has doubled since he moved the store from its Portwest Dr. location:
Why hasn’t this cute little cottage on South Blvd. in Boulevard Oaks been snapped up yet?
Location: 1930 South Blvd., Boulevard Oaks
Details: 5 bedrooms, 6 full and 4 half-baths; 7,863 sq. ft. on a 10,140-sq.-ft. lot
Price: $2,450,000
History: Original home on property torn down in fall of 2007. Listed for $2.6 million during construction; price cut $150K last Halloween.
Our nominator writes in:
I’ve walked through this home. It’s a vacuous monument to the “price per square foot” itch that’s infected so many builders trying to make a buck in fancier neighborhoods. If you can get $300 a square foot for a 3,000 square foot house, why not build a 6,000 square foot house and double the take? And think of the bonus you could get for 7,863!
So the design becomes a ridiculous exercise in racking up square footage for no useful reason. Most of the experience of this house consists of walking down long, built-to-impress but useless hallways. The master bedroom is big enough to skate in.
This place only looks like a great deal on paper. I hope studying this home will make realtors and builders and buyers and appraisers think twice about applying mindless per-square foot pricing formulas.
Because this is what you end up with.
So . . . how should you price it?
Fenced and forlorn, the Wilshire Village Apartments at West Alabama and Dunlavy are ready for the wrecking. But . . . not yet. Swamplot reader Robert Boyd sends a few pics of the lonely scene from this weekend:
Vacant home for sale, in need of staging. Antique dealer from out of town, needs showroom space. Idea?
Joni Webb reports on Cote de Texas that New Orleans antique dealer Mignon Favrot Topping has gone into the business of staging for-sale homes. But: She leaves the price tags on.
What better way to show off the brand-new 4-bedroom, 5,822-s.-ft. fantasy home designed by Robert Dame at 3015 Virginia, which has been listed for almost 3 months. The price was cut $100K in April, leaving an asking price of $1.875 million.
If that’s still too much, now you can walk away with a piece of it for maybe a little less.
The listing photos still show an empty house:
COMMENT OF THE DAY: BOOKSTOP FULL STOP “A few comments from a reliable source who actually knows a few things about River Oaks SC and Alabama Theater. 1. Barnes and Noble owns Bookstop. They are closing it to move to the new location at ROSC. 2. Weingarten has no intent of demolishing the Alabama Theater. They have been marketing the space for re-use. They intend to restore the facade when a new tenant signs on. 3. The new portion of ROSC was designed by Altoon + Porter (of the Fashion Show flying saucer mall in Vegas fame) out of Los Angeles. Weingarten did not want the usual EIFS crap that the Houston architects do. 4. Weingarten’s long term interest in ROSC is to achieve the highest and best use for this property. They want to bring a higher density to the center that they feel is appropriate for its location. 5. Before the crash last fall they were working on a plan to improve the walk-a-bility of the ROSC through landscaping and art. I believe the project is on hold right now. Its interesting how everyone is in favor of density (less driving and more walking) except when it affects something in your backyard. If you don’t like the scale of the building or the lack of protection of historic structures in the city, call the mayor and the planning department. Disclosure: I do not work for Weingarten and don’t always agree with their decisions, but thought that this info would be useful. Flame on everyone!” [mt, commenting on Coming Soon to the River Oaks Shopping Center]
Armed with a camera, two enterprising Swamplot readers set out to document the retail carnage along South Shepherd, between 59 and the Shepherd Curve:
The sheer number of businesses that have disappeared along Shepherd in 4 months has been stupefying. This is with a large, new, empty Weingarten development at one end …and the chronically empty Shepherd Plaza at the other. Hell, we have gone from 4 Starbucks to 3!!
That’s a 25 percent reduction in mocha lattes alone. How about in some of the other sectors?
Granted, there have been some new businesses, a Hallmark store, a dance studio, and something seems to have filled the lingerie place at Welch and Shepherd, but the vacancy rate now stands at 22%!!! We counted 172 retail “units†and found 37 of them to be empty. As recently as February, I remember only about a dozen vacancies.
What are the sights?
As noted in today’s Daily Demolition Report below, 20 structures of the Wilshire Village garden apartments at the corner of Alabama and Dunlavy received demolition permits yesterday.
Aren’t there only 17 buildings in the complex? Maybe everyone’s just trying to be extra sure to get them all.
If you’re coming late to this story — or if you just feel the need to relive all the excitement, mystery, and wackiness surrounding the long decline, eventual abandonment, and destruction of a 69-year-old Montrose icon — you can read all of Swamplot’s posts on the topic here. For full effect, start at the earliest story, at the bottom of the last page, and work your way backwards. And don’t miss the many entertaining and informative comments contributed by Swamplot readers along the way.
- Daily Demolition Report: The One with Wilshire Village in It [Swamplot]
- Wilshire Village coverage [Swamplot]
Photo of Wilshire Village Apartments, 1701 W. Alabama St.: Jim Parsons, from GHPA’s Houston Deco
A reader sends in a pic of the action at the renovated but long-suffering strip center at the southwest corner of Kirby and Richmond, which looked to be getting awfully lonely again after the departure of its lone tenant, Hue Vietnamese restaurant, in March.
But Hue is back as Kata Robata Sushi and Grill, and that white banner on the opposite leg indicates that the Dessert Gallery has moved in. Off camera, to the right, signs announce that the endcap is slated for a Texas Community Bank, but our reader reports seeing no sign of any money inside.
- Hue Gone Away [Swamplot]
Photo: Swamplot inbox
COMMENT OF THE DAY: WHICH WILL ROLL FIRST? “Speaking of demolition, the Chicken ‘n’ Egg Roll building is still standing. On the day of the supposed demo, there was a little Bobcat or mini-dozer in the parking lot. A couple days later I noticed a CoH red tag in the window. But the building is still there. Wilshire Village is still standing, too, for the most part. The windows are gone, gaping, and empty, meaning that the interiors have been exposed to the weather (such as it is these days). Some of the buildings have been tagged. The complex used to just look old, but inhabited. Now it looks vacant and sad, very sad.” [GoogleMaster, commenting on Daily Demolition Report: Meat Beater]
From the Village News:
“Johns” may be sad to see the Southampton brothel close, but the neighborhood is glad to see the nuisance gone.
The location of Asian Massage Villa, 2401 Sunset at Morningside, appeared vacant after a notice of eviction was served by the property owner. . . .
“Their little driveway was always full at night and people were parking wherever they could. HPD and the city attorney’s office really did a fabulous job with this,” said [Southampton Extension Civic Association President Ann] Hightower. . . .
[The establishment’s] little door was around the side and towards the back on Morningside. There was no sign, just a lighted doorway and some stickers indicating donations to emergency responders.
- Morningside Brothel Is History [Village News]
Photo of 2401 Sunset Blvd.: LoopNet
RESTAURANT ROW Six-month-old, heavy-tweeting, “new world creole” Richmond Ave. restaurant Sauté announces it has closed . . . on Twitter: “I guess this weekend saw three inside-the-loop restaurants close: us, Rickshaw, and Cafe La Jadeite. Sigh.” [Twitter; more on the other restaurants at Eating Our Words]
Too hot for the squirrels, apparently.
This latest edition of Seen on the Street sticks close to the pavement. First up: Artist David Cook snaps this hot photo of . . . no, that’s not an egg frying on Kirby. Just a street button with . . . culinary aspirations?
What’s more to see around town when you keep your head down?
THE NEW LEVY OFFICE PARK An office building next to the doomed Wakeforest Apartments will soon find itself in a new, almost park-like setting: “Bulldozers razed two old office buildings on Richmond at Wakeforest this week and will tackle apartments nearby later this year. Nothing is planned at this point for what amounts to about 4 acres that were purchased within the past six months by the Upper Kirby Redevelopment Authority’s TIRZ 19, said its chairman, Buddy Bailey. ‘We didn’t want empty structures,’ he said of the razing. The property, meanwhile, is ‘more than we could have hoped for.’ Immediate plans are to level and sod the estimated 1.2- and 2.8-acre lots, which are adjacent to the five-acre Levy Park. . . . Purchased for a total of $9.7 million, the office and apartment properties are not contiguous. A small office building separates them and remains.” [West University Examiner; previously on Swamplot]