
Did you know Macy’s had a store Downtown? Well, not for much longer. Macy’s announced this morning that its 1110 Main St. location will be shuttered this spring. Clearance sales will start January 7 and continue for up to 11 weeks. The store debuted in 1947 as the Foley’s flagship (at right) in a 791,000-sq.-ft. Kenneth Franzheim building. The company will close 5 Macy’s and one Bloomingdale’s in other cities as well.
- Macy’s Outlines Normal-Course Adjustments to Stores Portfolio [Business Wire]
- Previously on Swamplot: The Mostly Glass Building That Won’t Be Replacing the Downtown Macy’s
Photos: jaraylee182004 (Macy’s), Jim Parsons (Foley’s)

Going, going . . . gone?: The company auctioning off the contents of the Houston Club ahead of its move to the 49th floor of One Shell Plaza gleefully reports on its website that 




A reader figures all the Houston Fire Department units and ambulances gathered downtown around the long-vacant former Holiday Inn at 801 St. Joseph Pkwy. at Travis St. on Sunday morning were there for some training exercises: “There was no incident active on the HFD Active Incidents web site, which is just a dump from their dispatch system. I monitored their radio traffic related to it as well. . . . I assume they had permission from the owner. Interesting to see this building getting some attention. I don’t think they were setting it on fire, though.” The 31-story 1971 building was also, for a time, a Days Inn; it was last known as the Heaven on Earth Plaza Hotel, operated through most of the nineties by an organization affiliated with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, though many residents and neighbors referred to it more affectionately as the
Wrapping up last weekend’s seat-of-the-pants Pan Art Fair, held in a third-floor hotel suite across the street from the massive Texas Contemporary Art Fair at the George R. Brown Convention Center, blogger and fair impresario Robert Boyd notes some successes. Among the sales: A piece from artist Jim Nolan’s drawers-in-a-drawer installation, the process of failure/it’s better to regret something you have done, also known as a pair of underwear displayed prominently in one of the bedside-table drawers. Also, Boyd sold out of the small run of T-shirts he had made to commemorate the event. And he’s glad a number of local artists helped push the exhibition space into some
Having now sold out all remaining
Blogger Robert Boyd’s upstart Pan Art Fair — now touting itself as “Houston’s smallest art fair” — has been digging deep into the furniture of its Embassy Suites hotel room venue (Suite 307) to find space for more exhibitors. Added to the showing space for the fair, which runs at the same time as the much larger Texas Contemporary Art Fair across Discovery Green in the GRB beginning this Thursday: exhibits in the end-table and dresser drawers. 
Peeking through darkened windows into the former Strip House steakhouse on McKinney St. in Houston Center, which abruptly shuttered over the summer,