AMAZON WILL NOT BE DELIVERING HQ2 TO HOUSTON 
Despite campaigns that included coordinated office light displays and banner flybys over the company’s current headquarters in Seattle, none of the Houston proposals to house Amazon’s new campus made it past the first round. The company announced this morning that 17 U.S. cities plus northern Virginia, Toronto, and Montgomery County, Maryland would be finalists for the new HQ2. Among those that did make the cut: Dallas and Austin. [USA Today; map; previously on Swamplot] Photo of former KBR Building 3: Swamplot inbox
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Tag: Proposed Develoments
The deconstruction crew that brought Meteor Lounge to the ground at Fairview and Genesee streets last week got in a last round of crushing digs at the fallen structure over the weekend, a reader reports: “They piled up all the bricks and ran over them with the huge excavator, crushing them. They then moved the debris and spread it over the dirt in the ‘parking’ lot across the street from Max’s Wine Dive.” The obliterated former club’s corner property is planned as the location of a proposed 5-story parking garage for the Fairview District redevelopment; here’s the view from Fairview of the rearranged structure itself, facing southeast toward the CenterPoint electrical substation on Genesee:
Fairview Impacts
Urban cowboys, hold your horses: A Gilley’s rebirth is in the works near the Ship Channel, but it will be neither as rootin’ nor as tootin’ as its world-famous Pasadena ancestor. Last month La Porte’s city council approved a proposed general plan for the La Porte Town Center, a $55-million mixed-residential-and-retail-and-sports-and-entertainment district anchored by a Mickey Gilley’s Family Entertainment Center.
Modern-day Wes Hightowers would best look elsewhere to shoot mezcal and brawl — a floorplan for the dancehall shows that the 50,000-sq.-ft. facility is geared towards more wholesome pastimes, offering “Branston-type stage performances”, roller skating, laser tag, billiards, video games, boutique bowling, bumper cars, a Western duds shop and a cafe. The inevitable mechanical bull is located by the entrance to the restrooms:
East Side Town Center
Wholesale changes could be coming to East Montrose next summer, if all goes according to the grand lower-Fairview plans of restaurateur-turned-developer Fred Sharifi. The stated goal for his latest development — planned along 3 blocks of Fairview stretching from Taft to Genesee — is to bring a little more diurnal activity to the area, better known for its narrow, potholed streets and vibrant nightlife. That nightlife seems likely to dim, as the new plans call for the eventual extinguishing of Meteor, a mainstay of Houston’s drag community.
“We are not going to have any bars in the neighborhood,” Sharifi recently told Mark Boyle of KPRC, apparently classifying his own Max’s Wine Dive on Fairview at Taft as either beyond the neighborhood or not a bar. Sharifi’s other nearby holdings on Fairview include Gratifi and Cuchara, the Mexico City-style restaurant with rule cards for kiddos.
A 5- or 6-story parking garage perched atop 10,000 sq. ft. of office and retail space (labeled “E” in the rendering below), is proposed for the Meteor site at 2302-2308 Genesee St.:
East Montrose Overhaul
Chomp goes the excavator on a portion of the 3 adjacent 1950s and ’60s-era complexes at 1920 W. Alabama St., 1924 Marshall St. (pictured at left), and 2810 McDuffie St., right across the street from the Alabama Icehouse and just south of Admiral Linens.
In late July residents of the 3 complexes were told to move out by September 1, so that new owners City Centre at Midtown, an affiliate of developers Dolce Living, could be begin tearing down the 2-story buildings to clear the 1.58 acre parcel for one 6-story, 258-unit luxury apartment building.
Though it will be situated in the western edge of Montrose’s Winlow Place area, the building will be named City Centre at Midtown.
Here is a rendering released to the media in the days after the 35-day eviction notices went out:
Making Way For Montrose’s CityCentre At Midtown
As of December 10 heavy equipment was already on site at the southwest corner of W. Alabama St. and S. Shepherd Dr., where a bevy of venerable-by-Houston-standards small businesses — including quirky jewelers Fly High Little Bunny, laid-back Roeder’s Pub, a cat clinic and stray adoption center, and late-night hang Ruchi’s Taqueria — are eating it to make way for a CVS and a roughly 24,000 sq.-ft. pad site.
Back when news of the development broke, some Swamplot commenters criticized it, site-plan unseen, as overly suburban-looking for its location, just across W. Alabama from the old theater and adjoining strip mall that now houses Trader Joe’s.
And now developers Read-King have released the site plans:
Shepherding In A Katyville Corner
An excavator yesterday was hard at work scraping the 3300 block of the west side of Kirby clean.
Bounded by West Main St. and Colquitt St. and Lake St. to the rear, this block was long the site of a Settegast-Kopf funeral home, but like that seemingly straitlaced great-aunt with the closet full of empty gin bottles, the staid mortuary and adjacent buildings descended into drink, spending their final years as taverns Roak, Hendricks Pub, and the OTC Patio Bar.
Here’s what the Kirby frontage looked like in both its sober and lush incarnations:
Cremation By Excavator
A reader sends in a pic of this variance request sign and vacant lot, possibly heralding the advent of another apartment complex in the Brunner Addition block bounded by N. Durham Dr. and Sandman St. and Center St. and Nett St., in the immediate environs of Soma Sushi, Bethel Church, Woodrow’s Heights and the Esperanza School.
Proposed land use? Mixed-use, multifamily and commercial.
Center Of The Nett
Over the weekend Surge Homes removed the sign promising “future development” along the Heights Hike-and-Bike Trail. Workers took the recently-installed bike-scaled billboard Saturday morning. It appears that the sign had been squatting on a public right-of-way.
Around the same time, the newly-created Surge Homes released lots of new information for the trailside colony. Surge is run by the same principals involved with Canada’s Group LSR who closed on the property in 2004. Sporadic attempts to develop the site have so far borne no fruit.
Aerial views show that the project would take quite a bite out of the pocket forest currently on the site; access would come via a lengthened E. 5th St., not a trail-crossing extension of Frasier St., as in an earlier proposal.
Surge Homes Pullback
A longtime resident of The Woodlands has been piecing together clues from online sources about the very quiet plans for the development of Mitchell Island — the only island in Lake Woodlands: “When East Shore was first announced in the 2000s, developers planned to turn the island into a clubhouse for East Shore residents to enjoy and maybe put a few commerical office buildings in there too. In recent years that plan has clearly shifted. With Hughes Landing a couple hundred yards down the lake housing many office buildings and the East Shore Clubhouse already constructed and recently opened this summer at a different location in East Shore, it is clear plans for the Mitchell Island are different.”
So, what’s going in there?
