The lights are coming back on inside the old Huston’s Drugs at 2119 Washington Ave.: Long for sale, the stout mid-century building was purchased at the end of December by Houston-based artist Chris Bramel, who tells Swamplot he is renovating the interior that’s still partially stocked with apothecary bottles and swivel-stools lined up in front of an old soda fountain into an art gallery, shared studio space, and apartment for himself.
At 2020 Hardy St., this building dates to 1900. Previous owners the Espinosa family managed rental properties from here; it’s also been home to the Monte Carlo Lounge and pool hall and a grocery. The 5,000-sq.-ft. building, lying about 2 miles north of Downtown in the Fifth Ward, was bought in early January by 2011 Good Brick Award winners David and Bennie Flores Ansell, who have spent the past month sweeping and clearing out the interior — which came to them unbidden with cases of unopened tostadas, garbage bags of discarded mail, shelves stocked with ’80s perfume, sunglasses, and self-help videos, broken billiards trophies with tattered replica baize, etc. They hope to have the building transformed into offices and apartments by this summer.
Facing Kelvin St., this franchise of Alabama-based Zoës Kitchen is shaping up to open soon in Hanover at Rice Village, the mixed-use apartments bound by Kelvin, Dunstan, and Morningside (shown at left). The fast-casual restaurant is now hiring, says the vinyl sign hanging from the street-level patio railing. Besides this one at 5215 Kelvin, Zoës Kitchen has 7 other locations in Houston. (Swamplot reported in January that Chris Leung’s dessert shop, Cloud 10, is expected to go in on Kelvin St. as well sometime this spring.)
Photos: Allyn West;Â Chris Litherland (Hanover)
A tipster tells Swamplot that a parcel of the Memorial Club Apartments property at 904 Westcott  is “confirmed” as the future site of Houston’s fourth Trader Joe’s. Organized around the Rice Military roundabout near Memorial Park, the apartments are split down the middle by Westcott; the photo above shows a view from the roundabout looking east toward Washington.
It could become much trickier for vandals defacing murals of presidents to remain undetected, what with all these windows: Real Estate Bisnow‘s Catie Dixon reports that Alliance Residential has closed a financing deal on Broadstone 3800, a 203-unit apartment building planned for a 1.6-acre lot just across West Alabama from the yellow-brick former campaign headquarters where Reginald James’s mural of President Obama was given a rather sloppy second coat this week. The proposed site, at 3808 Main St. on the southwest side of the intersection, is home now to a surface parking lot; it’s bound by Travis, Truxillo, and West Alabama — where, Dixon reports, $8 million is expected to be spent on street improvements. This rendering shows how light rail might be incorporated into the 6-story project; the nearest Red Line stop along Main St. is Ensemble/HCC, where shops and eateries like Natachee’s and Double Trouble have congregated.
Rendering: EDI Architects
A pair of West Gray lots — nearly vacant save their seen-better-days Freedman’s Town rowhouses in the back — have been put on notice as the proposed site for Dolce Living: that’s 5 stories and 176,344 sq. ft. of 1- and 2-bedroom apartments, with some street-level retail to sweeten the deal.
The sporty midsize sedans are probably not included, but this rendering — included in a replat application to be voted on Thursday by the city planning commission — does give us a clue about what Dallas-based developer Trammell Crow might be considering for the 3.5-acre Heights lot between Yale and Allston that Swamplot reported on last week.
They’re both Pearls. But one of these Morgan Group renderings is destined for a lot in Midtown; the other for Greenway Plaza. Can you tell which is going where?
COMMENT OF THE DAY: WHAT’S IN THAT WONTON? “. . . The gates these days on apartment complexes are an elaborate way to keep the Chinese restaurant menus off the door handles. However, the Chinese restaurants are getting more crafty, employing some Ninja tactics and Trojan Horse ploys. The war goes on.” [commonsense, commenting on Hanover Reaping More Rice Village Property, Garden Gate Shutting]
Adjacent properties sharing a driveway in the Houston Heights near the North Loop are also linking their fates: The separate listings stipulate a single buyer for the mismatched 1940-built pair (top). One building is a fairly straightforward cottage, with a covered porch and small front room addition (middle, at right). Next door, an add-on warehouse fronts a structure converted into apartments (bottom, at right). Newer townhomes on the street-in-transition sandwich the up-for-grabs duo. Each seeks $250,000 — this time.
This drawing shows the proposed replat of a 3.5-acre lot in the Heights. It appears that Dallas-based Trammell Crow is planning to build apartments on the property bound by Allston, Yale, 6th, and 7th, about half a mile from I-10. Terra Associates, identified on City of Houston paperwork as the replatting applicant, tells Swamplot that the development will be 4 stories of apartments atop 2 levels of parking, one of which will be underground. There are no plans for retail. Seventh St. dead-ends here; the Heights hike and bike trail runs past the lot on the north. The replat is slated to be presented at a public hearing on Jan. 17.
Images: Swamplot inbox
CLOUD 10 HITTING SWEET SPOT IN THE VILLAGE We’re guessing Chris Leung will be keeping his ice cream below 273 Kelvin in the shop and open kitchen he’ll be launching this spring at 5711 Kelvin in Rice Village. Cloud 10 Creamery will be one of the street-level shops in the new Hanover apartments set to open next month. This’ll be Cloud 10’s first storefront; Leung’s ice creams have been available since last summer at a few restaurants and food trucks around town. [Houston Press; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Chris Litherland
More details are out on the plans to pile taller buildings onto the southeast corner of Richmond and Buffalo Speedway that Swamplot reported on last week: PM Realty, which earlier this month bought the 5-acre site and the 5-story Solvay America office building that sits on the southern portion of it, plans to build the 18-story office tower pictured above on the park-like portion at the north end of the property — leaving in place a bank of oaks facing Richmond, as shown in this view, from the northwest:
Spooked former residents looking for some sort of larger, more mystical explanation for the disastrous end of the Park Memorial Condos at 5292 Memorial Dr. now have confirmation of a first-class backstory to hang their storytelling hats on. A little late for Halloween, a medical examiner has determined that the human remains discovered this summer during the condos’ demolition — and the preparation of the site for its replacement, the Park Memorial Apartments — belong to bodies interred at a cemetery that once graced the site. That would be the Crooms Cemetery, Preservation Houston’s David Bush tells teevee reporter Deborah Wrigley. The African-American burial ground was named after Felix Crooms (who scored nearby Crooms St. as well), was in operation from approximately 1917 to 1937, and also served as the final resting place for members of St. Luke’s Missionary Baptist Church.
About a year after snatching up the Penguin Arms building at 2902 Revere St., Dan Linscomb and Pam Kuhl-Linscomb announce to the Chronicle‘s Lisa Gray their plans to incorporate Arthur Moss’s pedigreed 1950 Googie-style apartment building into the multi-building streetside campus of their Upper Kirby home-furnishings-and-knick-knacks empire: “In about a year, after a round of renovation and restoration, they plan to open the Penguin Arms as a showroom,” Gray writes. “Maybe, Dan says, they’ll reserve a little piece as an apartment, so they can literally live above the shop.”
