Chron columnist Lisa Gray takes note of the new UH East Parking Garage:
On the Spur 5 edge of campus, the University of Houston recently finished a garage that takes garage pride a step further. It’s trimmed in jazzy vertical strips of Cougar red and white — a parking pep rally, a garage that serves as a billboard promoting its institution. If Renu Khatour, UH’s chancellor and tireless promoter, were a parking garage, this is the garage she would be.
Oh, it gets better . . .
RESTAURANT-GARAGE COMBO ON WESTPARK PUT ON HOLD Some unspecified “complications” in continuing negotiations have stalled plans for a brand new 2-story Molina’s Restaurant and parking garage on a West U-owned lot on Westpark, between Wakeforest and Dincans streets, a city council member tells reporter Angela Grant. “The building would have included a parking garage for Goode Company Seafood, which currently leases the land for its parking lot. Goode Company pays West U. about $4,300 per month for rent. The agreement expires in just over three years. The terms of the agreement with [developer Mike] Gallagher provided for a 15-year primary lease, with options for five more 5-[year] renewals. The Molina’s rent would gradually increase from $7,000 per month to $15,373 per month.” [Instant News West U]
Blogging at NeoHouston, Andrew Burleson declares that the connections a building has to the world around it — what he calls its interface — have a big effect on value:
A house may be great, but if it doesn’t have a nice front yard it won’t be worth as much as the house next door that does. Likewise, homes in an area with lots of big trees tend to be valued higher than places without them. The interface is better.
Well, sure. Big trees is nice! But Burleson also claims that the value effects of interface success — and suckage — can travel:
Interfaces are highly radiant, they have a significant impact on the values of surrounding properties, and this value has a tendency to spread. If a street is truly beautiful, every adjacent property is likely to be highly valued. If a street is very ugly, every adjacent property is likely to be somewhat undervalued, even if some individual structures on that street are highly valued.
So why are we jumping over fences in Midtown? It’s all part of Burleson’s photo tour of the “interfaces” of 3 apartment complexes within a few blocks of each other: The Post Midtown Square (the good), the Camden Midtown Apartments (the bad), and 2222 Smith Street (the so-so).
To think, only a quarter-century ago here, wild Animals roamed the empty Downtown streets at night, and upstanding citizens settled their disputes with a joust.
Just how far have we come, Houston?
Schemers at over- capitalized WEDGE Group International appear to have hatched a complicated plot to cover up that 11-story blank parking-garage wall at the base of the company’s Downtown tower at 1415 Louisiana. The plan: slide a new building of equivalent height — say, a Hilton Garden Inn — right next to the tower’s north base, then add a suburban-style porte-cochere entrance along Clay St.
HAIF user lockmat unearthed this small rendering of the hotel (above), which was hiding in plain view on the WEDGE Real Estate Holdings website. It shows how the completed wallcovering would look from Louisiana St., just north of Clay — if WEDGE’s separate 12-story Clay Garage wasn’t there to block the view. The tall buildings shown in the background are the WEDGE tower and the ExxonMobil building just behind it to the left.
How far along are these plans?
Sharp-witted observers, start your metaphors! Residents of the Park Memorial condos — who’ve been racing to sell their condo complex before any of the units start dropping into the parking garage that sits beneath them — have a new problem. City officials, terrified of a not-merely-figurative condo-market collapse, slapped bright orange notices on all the doors of the Memorial Dr. complex yesterday, notifying all 108 residents that they will need to permanently vacate their homes by September 15th.
The order came after a city inspector and an independent inspector both confirmed that the concrete parking garage structure underneath some of the condo units is in immediate danger of collapse. In late July, the city had warned residents that the garage “may experience catastrophic failure at any time.â€
After the jump, a couple more photos of the condo campus . . . from the listing for a recent sale.
A reader sends photos of some recent construction on the garage podium beneath the Cosmopolitan tower and asks:
What are those three giant urinals affixed to the east exterior wall of Randall Davis’ latest glass-clad erection, the one on Post Oak where James Coney Island used to be? . . .
Where is the Colossal Statue of Constantine when you need him? (Well, he’s in Rome, but that’s no help to Post Oak Boulevard!)
Sure, there’s the vaguely Roman theming going on with the marketing for Davis’s next tower across the street, the Titan. But these new constructions might be something much more contemporary . . . think Marcel Duchamp by way of Claes Oldenburg: The big fountains!
Below: the Colossal Head of Constantine . . . and the Colossal Heads of the Cosmopolitan, on display!
Yesterday’s brief Uptown Whole Foods parking mystery has been solved by one of our most helpful tipsters . . . who points to an older but more complete set of Boulevard Place plans. Shoppers, there is no need to worry. You will be able to park above, below, near, or yes — right in front of Whole Foods . . . and you won’t get stuck having to sneak your whole-grain-laden shopping cart past Hermès. Just imagine what awkward social situations that would have caused!
Below: 5 levels of out-of-date Blvd Place site plans explain it all!
Those of you still wondering why Regent Square’s quaint crooked street was axed from the project’s most recent plan — along with a few lush-looking inner courtyards — will be interested to read this explanation unearthed from a variance request submitted to the Planning Commission for today’s hearing:
After careful value engineering, it was determined to eliminate the below grade parking and replace that parking in additional structured garage parking. In addition, the diagonal private street that bi-sected the site has been modified and now runs perpendicular to Dunlavy. This also provided for a more efficient design of the structured parking garages.
After the jump: The new plan. When . . . and what?
In case it hadn’t already become obvious from watching the construction, that uh . . . “stealth” four-level parking garage in back is the real game-changer for the River Oaks Shopping Center.
Clearly, what’s unfolding is a strategy even more ingenious than anyone could have imagined. With a new monster garage looming behind the next targeted would-be landmark, Weingarten will soon have people begging it to rip down more of the north side of the center and build something taller, just to screen those four stories of cars from West Gray. Meanwhile, focusing attention on the complaints of a few pesky neighbors in back is a classic outrage-bait move. Throw in a little hush money to make sure those protests aren’t too loud, but then make sure news of the offer gets leaked, so the decoy works. Send in the demo crews, redevelop, and repeat!
The site plan above comes from a Weingarten variance request that will go before the Planning Commission on Thursday. The city’s landscape ordinance apparently requires the new development to switch out some of those existing sickly-but-iconic palm trees for live oaks. Naturally, Weingarten wants to save the palms!
River Oaks Shopping Center landscape plan: Heights Venture Architects, via Houston Planning Commission
Interfin Companies president Giorgio Borlenghi, who developed Uptown Park and the Hotel Granduca, explains how it’s done:
. . . developers must not forget the principles we Houstonians like so much such as ease of access to the various components of the building and plentiful and readily available parking. As an example, when we planned Uptown Park, we decided to keep it exclusively retail to allow our patrons to park directly in front of the shops and restaurants without having to deal with multistory parking structures.
Keeping Uptown Park “exclusively retail,” of course, meant that his luxury hotel had to go across the street:
I created Hotel Granduca as a unique, elegant and extremely exclusive boutique hotel for the Uptown/Galleria area. I wanted it to be very different from all the other hotels: It had to feel very Italian, of course, and to have a true residential setting, so that it could be someone’s home away from home. What surprises me is that a number of people in Houston are still not understanding this very European concept and somehow think that Granduca is not a regular hotel, but some type of apartment building.
Photo of Arturo’s Uptown Italiano restaurant in Uptown Park: Flickr user heyjebbo
A reader directs our attention to this proposed 16-story office building facing the south side of the Katy Freeway, just outside the Loop — on the current site of a Houston’s First Baptist Church parking lot.
Hines plans to build the office building and an 11-level, 1,500-car parking garage on the lot, which the developer would lease from the church. The congregation has already voted to authorize church representatives to finalize and sign a 99-year ground lease for the property.
The garage would help solve the church’s chronic parking problems: According to the HFBC website, 300 cars currently park off-site on weekends. With the Hines development, the church would lose the 480 spaces in the lot now available during the week, but gain 1,500 spaces for church use on weekends and after office hours.
Below the fold, lots more images of the proposed office building and garage on HFBC property.
Didja know that the new Costco going up on the former site of the HISD headquarters building at the corner of Richmond and Weslayan . . . is gonna have its very own gas station right out front?
Costco liked the idea of coming inside the Loop so much . . . it decided to bring all its friends! The city just issued a building permit for the new Costco Fuel station. But that’s just the latest addition to Greenway Commons, which is turning out to be quite a mix: A 45,420-sq.-ft. LA Fitness is going above the Costco, next to a 4-story parking garage which is connected to a 2-story retail strip center. It’ll all be protected from the busy surrounding streets by more than 500 surface parking spaces and 2 corner pad sites slated for “banks.” In back: a 550-unit Morgan Group luxury apartment complex . . . with two more separate garages!
After the jump, more drawings and plans of this surprising development.
Looks like a lot of pedestrian action going on in these marketing drawings for Orr Commercial’s new Heights Village, a five-acre restaurant, retail, office, and “upscale housing” development slated for the current site of the Sons of Hermann hall just south of I-10, between Heights Blvd. and Yale St. and an adjacent parcel abutting railroad tracks to the south.
Why, with all those people in the drawings walking to and fro, it looks like this development will have all the charm of a small old-town Main Street . . . or at the very least all the charm of an old small town that decided to build a multi-level parking garage, but still turned its Main Street into a parking lot anyway, just to hedge its bets.
After the jump: more parking-lot pedestrians!
A new multistory parking structure is about to go up at the northeast edge of downtown, across the street from Heritage Plaza. A building permit for the parking garage at 1200 Bagby, which is classified as a “high rise” itself, was approved by the city yesterday.
“We’re going to offer suburban parking ratios in downtown Houston,” Russell F. Read, a principal at Goddard Investment Group, told the CoStar group two years ago. “That will be hard to beat.”
Photo: flickr user Corrine Martin
