WILL SKANSKA KNOCK DOWN THE HOUSTON CLUB? 
A source tells Nancy Sarnoff that Swedish construction firm Skanska, which has the Houston Club Building at 811 Rusk under contract, may tear down the 1948 downtown building and build an office tower in its place. A couple of clues: the closing of the building’s ground-floor Hunan Downtown restaurant and the “Closed for Cleaning” sign posted in the window of the Travis St. Burger King. The Houston Club’s lease on 4 floors of the 18-floor building doesn’t expire for another 4 years, though. The building’s previous owner, a limited partnership controlled by Cameron Management, gave up the property to its lender last September after declaring bankruptcy a few months earlier. [Houston Chronicle; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Silberman Properties
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Tag: Downtown
Got an answer to any of these reader questions? Or just want to be a sleuth for Swamplot? Here’s your chance! Add your report in a comment, or send a note to our tipline.
- Melrose Place: Waiting in line at the Starbucks drive-thru south of Westheimer, a reader snaps this photo of the former Crome Lounge at 2815 South Shepherd next door, and reports: “It has been vacant as far as I can tell for months if not a year. Now there is renovation going on.” What’s next for the former Fox Diner and Monarch Cleaners building?
Galleria: The HBJ‘s Jennifer Dawson reports that ahem, “distracting food smells” from “a fragrant cafeteria” that recently moved onto the same floor as the Houston CPA Society in the office building at 1700 West Loop South are what drove the professional association to leave its offices of 33 years for new digs on Post Oak Blvd. Sadly, the article doesn’t identify the cafeteria or the exact nature of the wafting “spicy aromas” that sent all those accountants packing. Any guesses?
SEAN PENNZOIL PLACE 
ZOMG! Actual footage of actual Houston locations occupied by actual movie stars shows up in short B-roll segments of Terrence Malick’s new square-jaw feature, The Tree of Life. Sorry, no Brad Pitt here, but Sean Penn plays a pensive Houston-ish designer type who mopes around an unattributed Downtown: “A location where the crew spent considerable time was the PageSoutherlandPage office at 1100 Louisiana. ‘Our office is very cool. It’s an old banking lobby about eight stories high, so it’s a pretty dramatic space,’ says Nancy Fleshman, the engineering and architecture firm’s director of research. ‘They made Penn an architect and he’s interacting with people in our office, going over drawings, talking with them. At one point Malick’s assistant asked me to go show Penn how to be an architect, what to do. I thought, “Well, I’m not an architect, but I can do that.”’” [Houston Chronicle] Image: Fox Searchlight
Ah, the life of a roadie/curator on a little Houston showboat. . . . Squeezed into this short video: the weeklong White Oak and Buffalo Bayou popup cinema debuts of the good barge Tex Hex from late last month, documenting the rides and drifts of Houston’s first and only solar-powered waterborne movie projection system.
- Previously on Swamplot: Banks Report: Tex Hex Graduates from Buffalo Bayou Movie Scene, Gets Ready for Official White Oak Bayou Premiere, Bayou Theater: Houston Research Boat Will Have Movies on Sail
Video: Be Johnny
The streetclothes are already being shed from the recently vacated office building at the corner of Main St. and Rusk downtown where a Fort Worth development and hospitality company is planning its next hotel project. Pearl Real Estate announced plans to gut and renovate the 22-story building at 806 Main St. early last year. And now, a reader reports, permits are posted in the window and the paneling and windows in a single column have been removed.
Underneath the white-marble and brown-glass slipcover — installed about 30 years ago — is a stone, terra cotta, and brick building built about 100 years ago and expanded 10 stories skyward in the 1920s. The building is directly across the street from the brand-new BG Group Place.
- Upcoming Projects [Pearl Real Estate]
- Previously on Swamplot: Slipping a Hotel Under the Slipcover: Plans from the New Owner of 806 Main
Photos: Swamplot inbox
A narrow 3-story restaurant space is planned for this long-vacant lot on Travis St. between Prairie and Preston, right next to Frank’s Pizza and Cabo’s. Plans submitted with a variance application for “Milli Place” show most of the seating would be on the second and third floors, each of which would have outdoor patio space. Why the variance? So the building can take advantage of an extra foot of width, and spread a full 31 feet along Travis St. We’ve squeezed in those narrow floor plans below:
On Tuesday night, Houston’s first and only bayou movie barge docked at Guadalupe Park off Navigation for the first of 2 “sneak peek” video performances on the banks of Buffalo Bayou. On the opposite shoreline, a few cargo trains and a motorcade of dirt bikes rumbled past, but the night was clear and mosquito-free, show and boat organizer Bree Edwards claims. Plus, she says: The solar-powered cinema setup on the Tex Hex worked flawlessly. Her pix of the scene:
Is this unassuming building on the same block as Irma’s Restaurant downtown Andy Fastow’s new Houston hangout? Federal prison officials wouldn’t confirm it to him, but Chron energy reporter Tom Fowler figures Fastow’s not-entirely-disclosed location has gotta be the Leidel Comprehensive Sanctions Center at 1819 Commerce St., 3 blocks north of the baseball stadium formerly known as Enron Field. Other recent Enronian visitors to the same facility: former chief accounting officer Richard Causey, who went home Tuesday; Enron Broadband’s Rex Shelby, who’s been there for about a week; and Fastow’s wife Lea, who visited for a month in 2005. Fastow may not stay long, though — Fowler reports he should be eligible for some form of in-home confinement as early as a month from now.
- Fastow could be home soon [Houston Chronicle]
- Leidel Comprehensive Sanctions Center [The GEO Group]
- Previously on Swamplot: Andy Fastow Comes Halfway Home
Photo: GEO Care
THE TOP-SECRET DOWNTOWN LOCATION OF HOUSTON’S NEW FREETAIL BREWPUB The Freetail Brewing Co.’s second-ever brewpub will go into 20,000 sq. ft. of “a historic building in downtown Houston,” the company announced today. What’s the address? “Out of respect to the developer, the exact location cannot be named at this time,” reads the press release. Respect! Oh, yeah, and a few details are still to be worked out, including some financing that’ll need to be complete within 90 days. The $4.2 million facility will span 3 floors of the mystery building and include a company store, plus restaurant and bar space. It appears the Houstonification of the San Antonio company has already begun: “Unlike Freetail’s original location, which is primarily one big room with a patio overlooking the Texas hill country, Freetail Houston will feature traditional restaurant seating, private dining space, and a “game room†with pool tables, shuffleboard, darts and numerous televisions.” We’re guessing that downtown building isn’t on a pad site by the freeway, though. [Beer, TX]
Texas Watchdog crunched 2009 car-crash data from TXDOT to find the parts of town where wrecks were concentrated. The heatmap above resulted from plotting location information from almost 100,000 Harris County incidents, most of which included exact coordinates. The winners? Two separate sections of Downtown and the intersection of FM 1960 and Hwy. 59 north, near Deerbrook Mall. (One of those Downtown hotspots, centered on Metro’s Main St. headquarters, includes the Pierce Elevated.) Also noteworthy spots for wreckage buffs: 2 sections of the Southwest Freeway — one at the West Loop and the other at Hillcroft.
Downtown also topped Texas Watchdog’s separate breakdowns for accidents involving road rage and collisions involving cellphones. But second- and third-place winners in these categories produced more local champions: Westheimer at Hillcroft, the Galleria area, and 59 at Kirby all ranked highly as sites for road-rage incidents. For cellphone-related accidents, the top areas were Montrose, an area just south of the Galleria and southwest of the 610-59 interchange; and the route from the Johnson Space Center to I-45. The northeastern corner of the 610 Loop at Liberty Rd. won the fatality division outright.
Map showing wreck concentrations: Jennifer Peebles/Texas Watchdog
The demo-photo tag team of Joe Lex and Kerwin McKenzie have more pics to share of the ongoing destruction at 1600 Louisiana St. downtown. But there’s more to their latest images than your run-of-the-mill demolition porn. Hidden behind the racquetball courts already pulled down on the southwest end of the former YMCA building, they claim: What looks to be the building’s original brick facade, before the courts were added. You can see what sure looks like an original exterior wall on the far left side of the image above, which shows the view from along Pease St.: Look for the lighter-colored brick structure with the engaged arches.
JUST HOW LONELY IS IT DOWNTOWN? Reporter Yang Wang’s weekend survey of forlorn and empty buildings hanging around Houston’s Downtown includes this little tidbit: “The recently released 2010 census results show one out of four buildings in Houston downtown’s two census tracts is vacant, higher than the city’s average vacancy rate of 12 percent.” [Houston Chronicle]
COVERING HOUSTON’S INSIDE STORIES Stick ’Em Up! filmmaker Alex Luster tells the Houston Press’s John Nova Lomax a few of the things he learned from mentor and former KTRK reporter Carlos Aguilar in the mid-1990s, when they both worked at Spanish-language news station Noticiero 48: “‘He said, “Most of your news stories are gonna be in the Inner Loop.” I asked why and he told me it was easier for a TV station to get [those stories], and also the ones in Southwest Houston. Most of the stations didn’t want to waste the gas or time to cover things outside the loop,’ Luster remembers. ‘And he taught me how not to get lost without reading a map or pulling over to get your bearings — to just head for the buildings. He said to learn downtown and then everything else I could figure out from there. That’s another reason I’ve come to love the Inner Loop — the buildings signified home and safety.'” [Houston Press; previously on Swamplot]
GETTING CASH OUT OF THE HOUSTON PAVILIONS 
The Downtown Redevelopment Authority this week approved a loan of $3.3 million to the developers of the Houston Pavilions. But the mall’s developers likely won’t need to pay it back. According to a 2006 agreement that included a promised $14.3 million of TIRZ reimbursements and grants for the sleepy downtown redevelopment project, the developers would only receive the last $3.3 million payment once the retail portion of the project was 70 percent leased. At the moment — thanks in part to efforts by management earlier this year to prevent Books-A-Million from closing up shop there — the retail spaces are 62 percent full. Not a problem: The interest-only loan will tide the developers over until they can get their numbers up. Also coming to Houston Pavilions, as part of the deal: new outdoor eating areas and an HPD “special operations” storefront. [Houston Chronicle; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Flickr user Scott DeW
After weeks of prep work, the bricks have at last begun coming down from the old YMCA building at 1600 Louisiana St. downtown. From his vantage point on the 18th floor of the office tower at 1600 Smith St., reader Joe Lex reports that major demolition started this morning — on the walls of the racquetball courts on the south-southwest side of the building.
- Previously on Swamplot: Starting Now: Downtown YMCA Is Coming Down, Early Exit: The Fire at the Downtown Y, Downtown YMCA To Self-Destruct, Finally
Photos: Joe Lex (from above) and Kerwin McKenzie
