10/25/07 8:00am

Kirby Old Spanish Trail Apartments

Isn’t mixed use great? On Old Spanish Trail at Kirby, where Target and Garden Ridge used to be, Simmons Vedder is ready to go with this exciting version of a retail-and-residences mix. They company is leasing the land back from the Texas General Land Office.

Yes, that’s three stories of apartments above a brand new strip center facing O.S.T. No need for fake towers at the corners on this one!

Residents won’t have far to travel for shopping: just walk to your car in the seven-level garage, then pull out and park in front!

Not pictured: the drug store with drive-thru next door. See the full site plan after the jump.

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10/05/07 9:16am

The O’Quinn Medical Tower at St. Luke’sWhy did St. Luke’s decide to sell the Texas Medical Center’s most recognizable building?

Once the tower sale goes through, St. Luke’s — which plans to lease back its current space on floors nine through 12 for continued hospital operations — plans to extensively renovate and update the 27-story patient tower, which opened in 1971. The original seven-story hospital building, built in 1954 and now used for administrative functions, will be torn down, and new facilities will be built on that space as well as possibly on other nearby undeveloped land owned by St. Luke’s, according to [St. Luke’s senior vice president David] Koontz.

“That is the ‘why’ behind the move to sell this medical building,” he says.

For sale: The Madonna tower. Designed by Cesar Pelli. Officially named only a couple of years ago for donor and breast-implant litigator John O’Quinn.

After the jump, a picture-postcard-perfect view of the original 1954 St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital building, not long for this world.

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