The asking price for the Heights Theater on bustling 19th St. in Houston Heights in today’s live-or-work listing is $1.9 million. The owners last toe-tested the reel deal in 2008, at $1.3 million. In the interim, surrounding neighborhoods have tipped even more hip. Though the future of the historic (but not protected) property is up for grabs, its past scrolls like an old film roll, with scenes of early prosperity, seedy decline, suspected arson, and restoration.
The exterior’s revamp earned the current owners a Good Brick Award 20-ish years ago. The interior, a shell space since its near destruction by fire in 1969, has been used for live theater, retail, events, and galleries. In the former lobby’s crossroads sits an original projector (top), a sculpture standing as both a testament and witness to passing eras.
What kind of revelry has Montrose been missing since the end of April, when the Starving Artist Gallery at 2037 West Alabama St. closed up shop? No need to try to imagine, because owner William Loyd and his 
Looks like 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. 
“Tina McPherson, whose day job is as the supervisor of the William R. Jenkins Art and Architecture Library at U.H., . . . conducted interviews of arriving guests (pretty much anyone who came through) similar to those red-carpet interviews one might see on awards shows or celebrity-oriented shows. I’ve always thought it was weird how the backdrop to these interviews would be wallpaper printed with copies of corporate and/or product logos. iPageant parodied this tendency by putting up Tyvek, the super-strong water-proof paper that home builders use to cover the wooden balloon framing of modern houses. 
