Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
Expect demolitions and eat them for breakfast.
Sign up for the Newsletter
Tag: Demolitions
Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of demolition.
The sleepy 1.33-acre site at the eastern end of the Target parking lot on San Felipe just inside The Loop was rudely awakened from a long slumber last week with the action of some demolition equipment. A couple of structures that formerly housed Dream’s & Bros. Hand Car Wash and Lube, opened by former UTSA basketball player and brother-of-Hakeem Afis Olajuwon in 1998, had sat vacant on the lot at 4303 San Felipe St. since its closing in 2014.
Judging by the name given to the site in a replat document filed with the city in April of this year — “Bank of America River Oaks,” with the address taken down a couple notches to 4301 San Felipe — it’s likely a new bank branch will be going up in its place.
- Previously on Swamplot:Â The Dream’s Is Gone from San Felipe
Photos: Swamplot inbox
Sitewashing
Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
How much has to be demolished and discarded before reaching the naked flesh of feeling?
Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
We cannot control the demolitions of others; but a good life enables us to disregard them.
The 3 office buildings that stood on the block bounded Town & Country Blvd., Town & Country, Ln., Town & Country Way, and the Katy Fwy. eastbound feeder road just north of CityCentre are all cleared now, a reader reports. Except, that is, for the underground parking garage below the concrete — and its liquid contents. The closeup view above, taken from the office building known as CityCentre Five, shows the water level this week at the lower reaches of the entrance ramp. Think it’ll be easy to drain? Take a close look at the concrete surface and you’ll see evidence of previous efforts:
All Over, Except for the Garage Water
Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
Blessed is he who expects demolition, for he shall never be disappointed.
Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
The soul that sees demolition may sometimes walk alone.
If you’ve ever wished you could watch a wrecking ball go wild inside a convenience store, here’s your chance. A crowd gathered outside the former 4949 C-store at the corner of Bissonnet and Shepherd over the weekend to watch artist Trey Duvall’s kinetic demolition installation in action. The installation features wrecking balls connected to computer-controlled motors mounted on the ceiling wreaking havoc on what remains of the interior. Or, as Duvall puts it, “Two high-torque mechanized double pendulums . . . impact shelving systems, soda machines, retail racks, drink coolers, and walls to create an evolving and unpredictable landscape of detritus.”
If you can’t stop by for your own personal evening viewing of any portion of the 15-day-long endeavor (it’ll be in action through October 6), there’ll be live-streamed video of the action available online. You can watch nightly from 6 to 9 pm from a link on the project website.
This video by Duvall shows some of the first blows:
Watch the Wrecking Ball
Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
Hold please – we’ll return as soon as technical difficulties with the city’s permit reporting system are resolved.
Something you might not have noticed about Houston’s iconic Bank of America Center (top) at 700 Louisiana St. Downtown: There’s an entire unused building hidden inside. The thrice-renamed spiky Dutch-ish PoMo tower complex, designed by architect Philip Johnson in 1982, sits across the street from his other famous Downtown Houston office building, Pennzoil Place. It’s not obvious from the exterior or interior, but the 2-story former Western Union building on the corner of Louisiana and Capitol streets (pictured above in a photo from 1957) takes up almost a quarter of the block Bank of America Center sits on. This was Western Union’s longtime regional switching center; Johnson was asked to design his building around it because the cable and electrical connections maintained within it were deemed cost-prohibitive to relocate.
Thirty-five years later, it’s the building’s anchor tenant that’s relocating: Bank of America, which now occupies 165,000 sq. ft., will move to Skanska’s Capitol Tower in a couple years. As part of a new set of renovations to the structure the bank is leaving behind, owner M-M Properties plans to completely dismantle what remains of the Western Union building, recapturing 35,000 sq. ft. of space without expanding the building’s footprint. Among the plans for the resulting space: A “reconfiguration” of the lobby and the addition of a “white tablecloth restaurant.”
The secret Western Union void is well disguised. It isn’t in the lobby of the 56-story tower but in the 12-story adjacent bank-lobby building fronting Louisiana St., more formally known as the the Banking Hall when the building first opened in 1983 as RepublicBank Center. It takes up the entire northern half of that structure: It’s beyond the colonnaded-but-blank wall on your right as you enter the lobby from Louisiana (on the left in this photo):
Tales from the Vault
Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
Set out from any point. They are all alike. They all lead to a point of demolition.
Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
I have never known any distress that an hour’s demolition did not relieve.
Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
Man is not what he thinks he is, he is what he demolishes.
Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
For those who demolish with heart and soul there is no such thing as separation.
