That Greenwood-King “for sale” sign leaning casually against the front of the art-deco Heights Theater on 19th St. is legit, the proprietor of the Bunny Bungalow assures us. And she sends us the listing to prove it.
Asking price: $1.3 million. Maybe whoever buys it will restore the theater’s original Alamo-style facade!
After the jump: A few more pics, showing the sign and the scene.
All hail MainPlace! All hail mighty MainPlace! Your towerishness is so . . . smooth and strong!
Videos of Hines’s new office tower at Main and Walker Downtown and its 10 lower molar-and-bicuspid trees are out. If you can’t hear the John-Williams-for-Real-Estate soundtrack, you’re missing half the fun.
When you’re done munching on popcorn and watching the movie above, be sure to catch the slightly more sober second feature, which includes actual information about the building.
The Willowisp Country Club is being transformed — from not-loved-enough golf course . . . to tilt-wall paradise! First, the clubhouse was clubbed. Then somebody probably had to go around and remove all those holes. Now the first three buildings of Trammell Crow’s new 168-acre Lakeview Business Park are under construction, reports Amy Wolff Sorter in Globe St. They’ll be complete next year, and total 240,000 sq. ft.
Whether the remainder of the park goes spec, build to suit or a combination of both depends on the market. “We’re offering the buildings for sale or for lease, which is a little different from our typical program,” says James Casey, TCC’s managing director in Houston. TCC’s more traditional MO is to keep and lease what it builds.
“This method offers us greater flexibility since we have a lot of land for the business park,” Casey tells GlobeSt.com. “We’d like to get this park developed as quickly as we can and think offering these for sale will accelerate velocity of bringing users to the park.”
After the jump: a site plan, plus public-transit-friendly views of the first three buildings!
LATEST ON THE LATE LATE NIGHT PIE LOCATION HAIF rumor alert: The owners of the Crome nightclub on Shepherd have purchased the former Humble service station on the corner of Elgin and Brazos in Midtown, until recently the location of PM pizza joint Late Night Pie. The Crome owners’ alleged plans for the site: a 2 or 3-story building, which may include a new nightclub. (Late Night Pie has moved on to 302 Tuam.) [HAIF]
The new MainPlace website features a bunch of snazzy new and revised rendered views of Hines’s 46-story Downtown office tower. Also included: plans of the building showing 2 street-level retail spaces — big enough maybe for a sushi restaurant plus a small postcard shop for tourists.
Promised to come soon on that website: videos. We hope they’ll play up some of the 1950s-era Japanese horror movie theming going on in a few of the new images.
After the jump: Plans! Sky Gardens! Shiny Glass! Run for your lives!
Lou Minatti notes that the construction crane parked on the site of the Park 8 condo tower project on the west side of Beltway 8 between Bellaire and Beechnut has at long last been dismantled and removed. Is it time to say goodbye to the Land of Oz?
More bad news for fans of the 3-tower (plus hospital and strip center) project: The video originally embedded in our story about the project from last year is down too. But don’t worry . . . YouTube has a copy! See it again — and relive some of that Oz highrise magic — after the jump.
“A group of doctors and entrepreneurs” calling itself New Era Hospitality is the mystery buyer of the long-abandoned 31-story former Days Inn-former Holiday Inn-former Heaven on Earth Plaza Hotel on St. Joseph Parkway between Travis and Milam, reports Nancy Sarnoff in the Chronicle:
. . . demolition has already started on the interiors, which are being gutted and will be replaced with 340 modern suites, 60 standard guest rooms, 32,000 square feet of meeting space and a swimming pool and bar on top of the attached garage.
That’s down from 600 rooms in the original structure. New Era is hoping either Sheraton, Marriott, or . . . Holiday Inn (again!) will operate the property when it’s finished, in January 2010.
Photo: arch-ive.org
Medistar’s brand-new River Oaks Physician Plaza adjacent to the just-shuttered River Oaks Hospital has just one tenant, reports Monica Perin in today’s Houston Business Journal:
The 105,000-square-foot, five-story River Oaks Physician Plaza was intended to house offices for River Oaks Hospital physicians as well as a sports medicine center, sleep lab and an endoscopy and pain management center, all operated by River Oaks Hospital, which was originally set to lease space in the building. . . .
But, according to Dr. Leroy Sterling, a physician investor in River Oaks Hospital, there is currently only one tenant — a physician — in the building.
Colliers is now trying to lease the building to commercial tenants. Space is listed at $21 a square foot, triple net. The building has been renamed River Oaks Plaza.
Photo of River Oaks Physician Plaza: River Oaks Hospital
A post offering “a few notes of clarification” appears on the HAIF thread discussing the new sign on the property next to the Onion Creek Coffee House on White Oak:
a. The structure, as currently envisioned, will include first floor retail and parking, probably two floors of parking and six to seven floors of office/studio lease space. The top floor of the garage will be designed for an art gallery, or similar space, with the roof of the garage as outdoor terrace areas.
b. The project is in a very, very early design stage and will be a Class-A “green” structure with early 20th-century details. Equivalent-scaled structures might be the Lancaster downtown or The Plaza in Montrose.
c. Target tenants will be neighborhood small businesses and individuals currently doing business in homes, garages, guest rooms, etc…within walking or biking distance and not wanting a heavy commute routine.
d. Project is in commercial district and would only “border” the residential district of the Heights.
e. Since it is primarily an office building there are considerations for the parking to be utilized after-hours by the nighttime oriented buinesses nearby for off-street parking which would limit the intrusion of parking into residential areas.
f. This is the only information available at this time. Further postings will come in the near future.
Thank you for your interest.
Photo: HAIF user tmariar
This hazy image of a new office tower planned for the northwest corner of Downtown, unveiled from the depths of the interwebs by HAIF user nate, is apparently meant to be the new Five Allen Center. It’s listed as a 1.2-million-sq.-ft. “near-term future development” in a Brookfield Properties document from this month.
A Brookfield executive described the project at a panel discussion on Downtown development earlier this year, according to a Houston Business Journal article by Jennifer Dawson a tipster alerted us to:
Brookfield is planning a 50-story office building on a 2.5-acre site west of 3 Allen Center, but will not begin construction until it is at least 50 percent leased, said Paul Layne, Brookfield’s executive vice president over the Houston region.
Layne predicted that by the time Brookfield’s all-glass, planned LEED Gold-certified building is finished, Class A rental rates downtown will be roughly $50 per square foot on a 10-year lease.
The project is referred to as the “Gateway Site” on Brookfield’s website:
A 2.5 acre parcel, the Gateway site would have a sky bridge connection to the Allen Center and unobstructed views to the west. The Gateway site is surrounded by historical parkland to the north, low-rise residential to the west and the Metropolitan Racquet Club garage to the south.
That looks like the northeast corner of Houston Ave. (the I-45 northbound feeder, at that point) and West Dallas.
Image: Brookfield Properties
New drawings and details appear of Discovery Tower, the 30-story office building now under construction at the northwest corner of Discovery Green Downtown.
The wind turbines at the top of the building are still there. The brochure also mentions solar panels on the south face of the building, a green roof on top of the entrance pavilion, 2 stories of retail, as well as some old Houston favorites: 2 floors of underground parking (151 cars), and a 10-story, 1,350-space parking garage one block north, connected by . . . . an air-conditioned (phew!) skybridge!
After the jump, more green-hot Downtown tower architectural rendering porn!
A reader points us to the latest rumor swirling around HAIF: The long-vacant, 31-story shuttered hotel on St. Joseph Pkwy. between Travis and Milam downtown finally sold . . . 3 weeks ago! To . . . somebody!
The hotel was built in 1971 as a Holiday Inn and later converted to a Days Inn. In 1992 an organization affiliated with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (yes, the one the Beatles consulted) purchased the by-then-rather-shabby structure for $2 million and renamed it the “Heaven on Earth Plaza Hotel.” The irony was not lost on city officials, who shut the building down in 1998; it’s remained (at least officially) vacant since.
If news of a sale sounds familiar, it should be. As Houston Press reporter Craig Malisow wrote last year in a feature on the Holiday Inn and two other vacant properties downtown, the hotel sold in 2004:
The Maharishi people sold it for $8.5 million to a group of investors that included a Colorado Springs outfit called LandCo. Michael Raider, a Houston native who works for LandCo, told the Houston Business Journal in 2005 that the property would be slated for apartments or condos.
Another LandCo guy, Don Nicholas, told the Houston Chronicle in 2004: “An ugly duckling downtown will become a swan.”
Unfortunately, the swan kicked the bucket when the investors defaulted on the $8.5 mill, and the hotel went back to the yogis.
Better luck this time?
Photo: arch-ive.org
A reader who lives near the Highland Village Shopping Center reports that work on “the structure being built (so slowly) on top of Waterworks” at the corner of Drexel and Westheimer appears to have started up again, after a long period of nothing-going-on. Plus: he hears it’s going to be a French restaurant. Wasn’t last year’s rumor that it was going to be a wine bar?
And speaking of rumors, the same reader wants to know what’s going to happen on the opposite corner of the same intersection, where the Gap used to be:
I have hear that it will be either a 5 story boutique hotel or 2 story retail, and, as of a few weeks ago, that they would be deciding between retail vs hotel by mid May.
And here it is: Weingarten’s two-story replacement for the northwesternmost River Oaks Shopping Center building at West Gray and Shepherd the company tore down last year.
One goal of this design seems pretty clear: Build a wedge building that helps forge a split between the two tiny groups that might otherwise join together to raise a stink about Weingarten’s larger redevelopment plans for that shopping center, the River Oaks Theater across the street, and the Alabama Theater Shopping Center further south on Shepherd. Preservation-preferring sentimentalists, ready to grumble that this isn’t the curve you expected or the black-and-white Art Deco-ish look you wanted, say hello to your design-elite friends, who are already breathing a sigh of relief that the new building at least isn’t going to be fakey retro. No, it’s not the cleanest Modern thing they’ve seen, but they know it’s the closest they’re likely to get from Heights Venture Architects. Look, Ma! No cornice!
There’s no sense catering to that second group too much though, because Weingarten will need them to be somewhat dispirited so the rest of the strategy can work. No, this wasn’t the wedge we expected, but hey, it’ll do! And it’s sure to draw attention away from the parking garage. Now remind us why we wanted to save that theater again?
After the jump: Close-ups! Site plans! Come back, Jamba Juice — all is forgiven!
Hines has “finalized the acquisition” of the Main Street block between Texas and Capitol Downtown, Nancy Sarnoff reports. That’s the site of the secret new 742,000-sq.-ft. office tower reported here a week and a half ago.
