COMMENT OF THE DAY: IT’S DRIVE-THRUS, NOT APARTMENTS, THAT ARE THE REAL TRAFFIC-CAUSING MENACE 
“Feared traffic density related to construction of highrise apt/condo buildings is severely overestimated. Traffic flow in and out of the garages is spread out throughout the course of the day, so the increased number of cars will be mostly unnoticed at any point in time on any given day. There are more traffic concerns associated with a drive thru at Starbucks when the line backs up onto the street, thereby interfering with cars which are trying to get around the line. People do crazy things with their cars when trying to get in line for their coffee.” [Escout, commenting on Construction Work Has Begun on the Ashby Highrise] Illustration: Lulu
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Tag: Apartments
After hearing news that a homebuilder bought the 8-unit 1939 brick-and-glass-block Josephine Apartments 2 blocks north of Rice University in Boulevard Oaks, it may not come as much of a surprise to learn that the building’s new owner plans to tear them down. But today a source provides confirmation that demolition and new construction is in the cards: Tricon Homes has informed residents that they will need to vacate the property by mid July.
Tricon Conquers Boulevard Oaks
What? No friendly neighborhood groundbreaking celebration? No pics of developers and local politicos wearing hard hats and wielding pointless shovels? A mere 7 years after Buckhead Investment Partners first quietly upgraded utility service, prepared traffic-impact studies, and replatted the property of the former Maryland Manor Apartments hoping no one would notice, some sort of construction work appears to have begun on the 21-story apartment tower planned for 1717 Bissonnet St. At least that’s what this photo, taken at the scene and sent this afternoon to Swamplot by a reader, appears to show. Last week, a district court judge refused to grant an injunction that would have blocked the building’s construction.
- Ashby Highrise coverage [Swamplot]
Photo: Swamplot inbox
Moving Dirt
Alliance Residential hasn’t even finished construction on the 203-unit Broadstone apartment complex at 3800 Main, on the southwest corner of Main St. and Alabama in Midtown — but already equipment crews are tearing up a neighboring 1.03-acre lot across Travis St. for a second phase of the development. Last week a Swamplot reader sent in this photo of the scene, looking east from Milam St. south of Alabama, showing earthwork on the vacant lot, for a Broadstone Midtown Phase II. The 3800 Main building is under construction in the background; the Spur is directly behind the camera.
- Broadstone Midtown — Apartment building at 3800 Main Street (Main and Alabama) [HAIF]
- 3800 Main – A Broadstone Community [Facebook]
- Previously on Swamplot: A Midrise Coming Soon to Alabama and Main St.
Photo: Swamplot inbox
Broadstone Midtown Part Deux
The 75-year-old Josephine Apartments just north of Rice University have been sold — to homebuilder Tricon Homes. The distinctive two-tone-brick Art Deco structure was built in 1939 from a design by architect F. Perry Johnston. It sits at the corner of Bolsover and Ashby St., a block north of Rice University, just east of Southampton Place, and 3 blocks south of the site of the planned Ashby Highrise. The U-shaped 2-story building with glass block and steel windows consists of 8 single-bedroom units, some of them with sunrooms.
Good Night, Josephine
Chain-link fencing has gone up around the warehouse buildings at 2401 Nicholson St. in the Heights, a reader reports. There’s a total 139,126 sq. ft. of building space on the large alley-divided block surrounded by Nicholson, 24th, 25th, and Lawrence St., on 3.6 acres. JLB Partners doesn’t appear to have announced the new apartment building it’s planning for the site, but its builders received a couple of permits for a parking garage and an apartment building at 525 W. 24th St. late last year. And a TCEQ notice for the construction — identified as the Heights Block 39 Apartments, at 525 W. 25th St. — has gone up at the site as well. The block is catty-corner to the cleared National Flame & Forge site on the other side of Nicholson.
Photo: Swamplot inbox
Block 39
Here’s the scene at the northeast corner of Washington Ave and T.C. Jester this weekend (the view is from Schuler St., to the north), where lots are being cleared for a new apartment complex. It’ll be called the Pearl Washington Ave, after the other Pearl-brand apartments the Morgan Group has developed around town, but not necessarily after Washington Ave’s Pearl Bar. Permits filed with the city don’t yet indicate the size of the project, but the newly assembled parcel at 5424 Washington Ave measures 3.1 acres and extends all the way to Detering St. And commenters on HAIF are noting that it’s expected to be 8 stories tall — and may include some sort of retail space. Buildings currently on the site, including Gary Fruge Automotive, are being removed.
Photo: Swamplot inbox
8 Story Apartments, with Retail?
It looks like engineers have begun soil testing the thin strip of land left along Crawford St. downtown between the Hess Tower parking garage and the surface parking lot where the new Marriott Marquis hotel is about to go up. Conveniently for the rendering above showing Ziegler Cooper Architects’ design for a 39-story residential tower on that 72-ft.-wide site, there’s nothing there yet to block the view of the building’s lower portions from Discovery Green — but without the hotel in place the skybridge drawn in at the second level connecting across Crawford to the nonexistent second story of a parking lot does look a little strange.
The new apartments are being developed by Trammell Crow. They’ll sit on a 12-story garage podium. Some of its 314 units will have views of the Texas-shaped “lazy river” on the Marriott Marquis’s upper deck, but they’ll also have their own pool piece above the garage, with this view of Discovery Green and the George R. Brown:
Trammell Crow Downtown
Update, 9:30 pm: It appears the new hotel tower will fit entirely on the lot directly to the south of the Best Western Plaza Hotel at 6700 S. Main St. We’ve updated this story accordingly.
Medistar and an affiliate of the Redstone Companies are out today with this rendering of the 22-story hotel and apartment tower the firms are planning together for the west side of S. Main St. across the street from the western campus boundary of the Texas Medical Center. Unlike the 40-story hotel and condo tower Medistar had proposed for S. Main across the street from the Texas Medical Center back in 2008 — which stirred up a bit of a fuss with neighbors in neighboring Southgate — this new building, designed by HOK’s Roger Soto, will be set away from the neighborhood’s entrance. It’ll sit next to the Best Western Plaza Hotel, on the 1.35-acre lot at 6750 S. Main St., on the southern end of the block bounded by S. Main, Old Main St., and Travis St. The taller tower Medistar planned in 2008 was intended for a site one block to the north, at the corner of S. Main St. and Dryden.
The Latest Medical Tourism Hotspot
Here’s a drawing of the new apartment block Dallas architecture firm Hensley Lamkin Rachel is designing for a Dallas developer on the block surrounded by Caroline, Austin, Pease, and Jefferson streets downtown, a few blocks southwest of the Toyota Center. There’s a surface parking lot with a few shade structures on the lot now. Leon Capital Group is hoping to get a piece of the city’s $15,000-per-unit tax rebate program for the 220 units in the 6-story structure. A note on the company’s website says the project “is planned to begin” at the end of this year.
- Block 365 – Downtown Houston Multifamily Development [Leon Capital Group, via HAIF]
Rendering: Hensley Lamkin Rachel
Block 365
WHAT A PLACE AT THE SOVEREIGN WILL COST YOU 
A couple of readers have written in noting their own sticker shock at the pricing announced for the 290 apartments at the still-under-construction 21-story Sovereign at Regent Square tower. One bedrooms will start at $2070 a month, two bedrooms at $3070, and studios at $1615. A temporary leasing office run by Boston-based Windsor Communities will open in a couple of weeks; the first units at 3233 West Dallas St. should be ready for occupancy by July 15th, the company says. [Swamplot inbox; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Alonso Ortega
What do you say when the apartment complex you’re featured on teevee news complaining is being built too close to gravesites bursts into flames the very next day? “I don’t think anything I said was incendiary,” feng-shui expert and holistic-life-coaching grad student Trisha Keel tells Houston Chronicle columnist Lisa Falkenberg, the day after the 368-unit Axis Apartments burned to the ground. “Although I’m a passionate person about this city,” she adds.
Keel, who runs a blog featuring feng-shui no-nos she encounters around town, had posted pics showing graves in the Magnolia Cemetery just steps away from north-facing ground-floor patios of the complex at 2400 West Dallas St. Among the dead: members of the Bammel, Wortham, and Halliburton families. “The dead are NOT good neighbors!” she wrote on her blog and Tumblr underneath the photo reproduced at top. “Their decaying energy feeds off your vital life force. Do not live among the dead.” Then she brought her complaints to the  mayor’s office to complain. And a reporter at TV station KHOU.
Words That Burn
A reader reports this morning on the aftermath of the blaze yesterday that destroyed the Axis Apartments — from a balcony perch west of Montrose Blvd.: “The firemen are packing up this morning on West Dallas after continuing to fight the fire through the night. I live in one of the townhouses across the street from the fire yesterday. I got home from work in the evening to find my house in good shape, a little smokey and singed and a broken window but otherwise fine. The firemen sprayed down the fronts of the houses to keep them cool.”
Here’s an amazing sequence of views of the same section of the 5-story apartments JLB Partners was building at 2400 West Dallas, from before the fire:
Pictures of a Disappearance
This video uploaded to YouTube by Karen Jones shows a construction worker seemingly trapped on a fourth-floor balcony of the blazing Axis Apartments in North Montrose yesterday afternoon. According to a construction supervisor working on the neighboring Finger Properties apartment complex who spoke to a Houston Chronicle reporter, the fire started on the northeast corner of the L-shaped structure’s roof. Jones doesn’t identify her filming location in the video, but it appears to be taken from an upper floor of a low-rise office building along Rylis St. in the American General complex. That would mean the imperiled worker was on a balcony facing north, and that the rescuing fire worker was on a ladder truck in the parking lot immediately west of the Magnolia Cemetery.
Jumping from the Flames
Those giant plumes of smoke billowing above North Montrose are coming from what were supposed to be the future Axis Apartments at the corner of West Dallas and Montrose Blvd. The 5-story, 368-unit apartment block under construction at 2400 West Dallas scoots up super close to the edge of Magnolia Cemetery — maybe a little too close? And the whole thing caught on fire earlier today, sending flames and dark clouds streaming southwestward. The wood-frame construction should provide plenty of fodder. The America General complex building has been evacuated, KHOU reports.
Developer JLB Partners bought the land from AIG in 2012.
- Montrose complex built feet away from century-old headstones [KHOU]
- BREAKING: Massive 5-alarm apartment fire burning in Montrose [KHOU]
- Massive fire reduces luxury apartment building to rubble in Montrose area [abc13]
- 5-alarm fire burns 368 unit apartment complex near downtown Houston [Houston Chronicle]
- Previously on Swamplot:Â The Apartments Behind the Finger Apartments Behind the Montrose Whole Foods
Photos: Judith (top); Bill Bishop/KHOU
Flames in North Montrose
