Swamplot Archives by Tag: Park Place

Monday, June 8, 2009

Introducing the Swamplot Price Adjuster

Are you getting the sense that some properties on the market in the greater Houston area are priced a little . . . inappropriately? Then you’ll enjoy the brand new feature Swamplot is trying out. We’re calling it the Swamplot Price Adjuster.

Which properties will Price Adjuster feature? Ones you send in!

Here’s how it works: Send your nominations to Swamplot in an email. Make sure to include a link to the listing or photos. Tell us about the property, and explain why you think it’s worthy of a price adjustment. Then tell us what you think a better price would be. (Unless you request otherwise, all submissions will be anonymous.)

Swamplot Price Adjuster will feature the best submissions, and allow readers to comment on and quibble with the property’s pricing.

Does this sound like an interesting idea? Good, because we’ve already received our first Swamplot Price Adjuster submission, and it’s waiting for your proposed adjustments:

Continue Reading This Story >

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Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Last of the Harold Farb Signs: It’s a Wrap

Sign at Broadway Square Apartments, north of Hobby Airport, for Harold Farb Apartment Homes

A reader tells us that the Harold Farb Apartment Homes sign at the Broadway Square Apartments hasn’t been taken down yet, but it has been hooded — with a new temporary fabric covering identifying the apartments and new property manager Pinnacle.

Photo: David Beebe

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Thursday, March 20, 2008

Farb Gone: Will the Signs Go Down on Broadway?

Sign at Broadway Square Apartments, north of Hobby Airport, for Harold Farb Apartment Homes

The last of the Harold Farb apartment complexes has been sold. Cypress Real Estate Advisors, an Austin firm, bought the Nob Hill Apartments on North Braeswood and the West Point Apartments on Woodway last December. And Post Investment Group, an LLC out of LA with some NYC backing, just closed on Farb’s Broadway Square Apartments just north of Hobby Airport.

David Beebe, who’s just posted his own account of the southeast-side walking tour he took with John Lomax last month, has a few comments about his stroll along Broadway:

The [trees] throughout this neighborhood are mature and beautiful. They are, for the most part, oaks. This is a big difference between the Harold Farb pioneered Hobby Airport area and the Frank Sharp designed Sharpstown. If [Sharp] had been as pro-active about tree planting his nighborhood would look more like this. The architecture and age is about the same.

. . . and on the Broadway Square Apartments, which Farb built in 1975:

His apartments here on Broadway are still the best looking of the entire area’s- French Victorian style, but without falling off shutters and with better built and ornate wrought iron railings and kempt landscaping.

There’s been no announcement about it, but the iconic signs along Broadway showing a silhouetted Farb wielding what appears to be a roll of blueprints are likely to be replaced. Globe St.’s Amy Wolff Sorter reports that Post Investments is planning a $2.5-million renovation:

Work will begin in two months on the 182-building complex and take 1.5 years to complete, according to Jack R. Ehrman, Post’s acquisitions director. The lion’s share of the tab will be used to replace 90% of the roofs.

Photo of sign at Broadway Square Apartments: David Beebe

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Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Southeast Side: A Tour of the Houston Heartland

El Torito Lounge, Harrisburg Blvd., Houston

Houston’s lone professional tourists, John Nova Lomax and David Beebe, stop off at the Brady’s Island in the Ship Channel midway into their latest day-long stroll . . . through this city’s southeastern stretches:

The air is foul here, and the eastern view is little more than a forest of tall crackers and satanic fume-belching smokestacks, sending clouds of roasted-cabbage-smelling incense skyward to Mammon, all bisected by the amazingly tall East Loop Ship Channel Bridge, its pillars standing in the toxic bilge where Brays Bayou dumps its effluent into the great pot of greenish-brown petro-gumbo.

While Brady’s Landing today seems to survive as a function room – a sort of Rainbow Lodge for the Ship Channel, with manicured grounds that reminded Beebe of Astroworld — decades ago, people came here to eat and to take in the view. This was progress to them, this horrifically awesome vista showed how we beat the Nazis and Japanese and how we were gonna stave off them godless Commies. As for me, it made me think of Beebe’s maxim: “Chicken and gasoline don’t mix.”

More from the duo’s march through “Deep Harrisburg”: Flag-waving Gulf Freeway auto dealerships, an early-morning ice house near the Almeda Mall, a razorwire-fenced artist compound in Garden Villas, Harold Farb’s last stand, colorful Broadway muffler joints, the hidden gardens of Thai Xuan, and — yes, gas-station chicken.

“There is nothing else like the Southeast side,” Lomax adds in a comment:

I see it as the true heart of Houston. Without the port and the refineries we are nothing. The prosperous West Side could be Anywhere, USA, but the Southeast Side could only be here.

Photo of El Torito Lounge on Harrisburg: John Nova Lomax and David Beebe

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