PRESERVATION TEXAS DECLARES GERMANTOWN “SAVED” 
Remember that City Council approved the historic designation of the former Grota Homestead Neighborhood on December 5, naming the area northwest of Downtown just between Houston Ave. and I-45 the Germantown Historic District? First placed in 2006 on Preservation Texas’s list of Most Endangered Historic Places, says a press release, Germantown was declared by the organization in a ceremony yesterday — or Preservation Day, as it was called in Austin — to be “a saved site.” [Preservation Texas] Photo of Germantown bungalows: David Bush
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Tag: Historic Preservation
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.
A City of Houston rep tells Swamplot that 3 of the 10 Freedman’s Town shotgun houses on Victor St. between Gillette and Bailey will be relocated in the Fourth Ward. (The photo shows a shingle-stripped one up on a trailer and ready to go.) A permit to demolish them was granted in 2011, but the city rep says that the owners have since agreed to donate some of the houses to the Fourth Ward Redevelopment Authority, which says it has plans to move them to a lot they own at 1414 Robin and rehab them into low-income housing. Swamplot reported this morning that the West Gray lot where the rowhouses are now located has been pegged for a 5-story mixed-use midrise called Dolce Living.
- Previously on Swamplot: Apartments Moving In on Freedman’s Town Rowhouse Lot, Daily Demolition Report: The Spoils of Victor
Photo:Â Chris C
COMMENT OF THE DAY: HOUSTON’S MISSING DISTRICT OF GOOD-ENOUGH OLD BUILDINGS “I think the general feeling on this one from historically/architecturally sensitive people like myself is that while it’s not the greatest building ever built in Houston, it’s a lot greater than what is on at least 100 of the blocks downtown. This is where you get to the difference between Houston and a city like San Antonio, which still has a significant historical flavor in its downtown. Most historic buildings are not great, they’re average. If you only preserve the landmarks, most of your historic stock gets wiped out and you lose that historic dimension in your city. San Antonio does not allow its historic buildings to be torn down, and thus maintains a vibrant historical (and walkable) downtown core, while leaving plenty of room for new buildings. Houston started out with roughly as many early 20th century buildings as San Antonio had, it just didn’t preserve them.” [Mike, commenting on Houston Club Building Will Be Demolished, Say Auctioneers]
The 1955 building Houston architects MacKie and Kamrath designed (along with several later additions) for the University of Texas Dental Branch will be removed from its home at the corner of MD Anderson Blvd. and Moursund in the Med Center, according to the Texas Historical Commission. The UT School of Dentistry abandoned the 5-story, granite-faced building earlier this year for a new 300,000-sq.-ft. facility in the new UT Health Science Center Research Park south of the Med Center proper (and OST) at 7500 Cambridge St. UT’s M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, which owns the Med Center site, hasn’t yet announced a schedule for the demolition.
Some sort of work has begun on the remains of the Bethel Missionary Baptist Church on the corner of Andrews St. and Crosby in the Fourth Ward, a reader reports: “About a week ago someone put up new fencing around it, and in the past few days construction crews have started doing something to it (not sure what). . . . It used to be that the church itself was fenced off and the grassy area behind it (where the trucks are now) was open (lots of people . . . used it as an impromptu dog park). Then they pushed the fence back to cover the whole block and the trucks came in. Most mornings this week workers are dumping a bunch of stone into a waste bin that’s hauled off. I can only assume the stone is coming from the church (I don’t see where else its coming from), but I couldn’t swear to it.”
COMMENT OF THE DAY: KEEPING PRESERVATION UP TO DATE “I’m glad to see it’s still standing, glad the wiring and plumbing have been upgraded so that it won’t burn down or rot in place. The rest is just personal taste, and fleeting. In other words, I’m delighted. I just visited San Antonio, where every other building dated back to the 1800s or early 1900s. A lot of them had been reno’d over and over again, at least on the inside. Some had kept a lot of period detail; some hadn’t. This made them alive, much in the same way that the English language lives by constantly changing. One of my tour guides had been born in a hospital building on the riverwalk. The place had long ago been converted to an office building with tchochke shops in front, but the guide was proud that the building was still standing after being the birthplace of a century of San Antonians. If we in Houston make our buildings stay vital, useful, desireable and, most of all, sound, they will live on and make Houston a place we’ll be happy to show to our grandkids.” [Sihaya, commenting on The Plan To Flip Houston’s LBJ House]
The latest creation of Julia Gabriel, Houston’s favorite doomed-building-backpack artist, focuses on the long-vacant Ben Milam Hotel at the corner of Crawford and Texas downtown, left alone as a long-foul-ball target outside Minute Maid Park since — well, at least since the days of Enron Field. Before then, Gabriel notes, it was Houston’s first-ever fully air-conditioned hotel, the first in the city to have a TeeVee in every room, and the first to feature a rooftop swimming pool.
The artist’s rendition of a now-vanished Westheimer duplex-turned-antique store (featured on Swamplot last month) required just a single bag with straps. But to capture the ghostly spirit of the Ben Milam at 1717 Texas Ave., she needed 13 separate packs, bags, totes, and purses. Pinned to a wall, they follow the contours of a photo Gabriel snapped of the structure’s north face back in March (at top). Attached to the backs of you and your dozen-closest friends, though, who could figure out that secret history? Here’s a video of Gabriel foreshadowing the inevitable demolition of architect Joseph Finger’s 1928 creation, by showing how her own assemblage comes apart, bag by bag:
A bit more detail on those new Downtown apartments developer Marvy Finger wants to build on the site of the Ben Milam Hotel designed in 1929 by architect Joseph Finger, a block beyond the leftfield fence of Minute Maid Park. The long-vacant hotel, which sits past the foul line at the corner of Texas and Crawford, is toast, Finger tells the Chronicle‘s Nancy Sarnoff. But the demo site will make up only a portion of the property.
COMMENT OF THE DAY: CHOOSING WHICH HISTORY TO PRESERVE “I don’t understand how we’re supposed to decide which moment of time in history we are all supposed to value more than all the other moments in history. A vacant lot is actually much closer to the historical use of this site. It was vacant for millions of years before someone built a farm there. Many decades later someone decided the farm had to go to make room for a house. Several more decades pass and someone else wants to use the site for a bigger house. To argue over the type of house best suited for this lot seems silly. I propose that we use eminent domain to condemn every non-agricultural structure that currently exists more than one mile from Allen’s Landing. Let’s bulldoze them all and write zoning laws that allow only farm, ranch or wildlife use for everything else within the city limits. We can all move into downtown high rises that are super duper dense, walkable and mixed use. And we’ll have a choo choo train on every street and ban cars. Yippeee!!!!!!!!!!” [Bernard, commenting on A Brief Illustrated Guide to Bungalow Removal]
WEINGARTEN: WE’RE SAVING THE ALABAMA LETTERS 
Weingarten Realty is preparing reporters for a photo op in front of the Alabama Theater at 2922 S. Shepherd Dr. now being outfitted for a Trader Joe’s. The letters spelling “Alabama” that the company had removed earlier this week from the original tall totem sign in front of the 1939 Art Deco theater that the company recently gutted and leveled will soon be returned intact and unscrambled, a spokesperson promises. The letters are being painted and the neon lighting hidden inside them is being replaced. Expected homecoming date for the letters: sometime between June 13th and June 16th. [Previously on Swamplot] Photo: Jay Rascoe
Houston’s 13th annual “What Shall We Do with the Astrodome?” media season kicked off yesterday with a tour of the shuttered facility open to local reporters and photographers willing to sweat a little in the no-longer-air-conditioned space, sign a release, and hold their noses. What was that offending scent? Teevee news reporters politely referred to it in their reports as “mildew” or a “musty” odor, but Swamplot photographer Candace Garcia calls it as she sniffed it: “The smell of mold was overwhelming,” she reports.
COMMENT OF THE DAY: THE BEST IDEAS FOR REINVENTING THE ASTRODOME WILL COME AFTER IT’S DEMOLISHED “. . . Yes, it’s hard to find a profitable idea for it now, but if we tear it down, we could spend hundreds of years saying ‘Oh, why didn’t we just think to do this?’ Most buildings that we think of now as grand and historic went through a long time when people thought they were worthless. They came close to tearing down Notre Dame cathedral and Grand Central Station . . . and they actually did tear down Penn Station and the Abbey of Cluny. And looking back you say, ‘How was it possible?’ But almost all great buildings go through phases where it’s not obvious why it should remain standing. Better to hold off on the trigger finger.” [Mike, commenting on How Harris County Has Been Letting the Astrodome Rot]
Teevee reporter Courtney Zubowski follows up on questions raised by some recent photos published on Swamplot: Just how badly trashed is the Astrodome? The county claims to be spending $2 to $3 million a year to maintain the vacant structure, but apparently that amount isn’t enough to keep the place presentable. A burst 8th-floor pipe has drenched the Astroturf, seats are caked with dust, pipe insulation is frayed, and hung ceilings have collapsed on office space:
Update: Olajuwon’s DR34M store is now open.
Hakeem Olajuwon hasn’t officially announced what he plans to do with Clear Lake’s landmarked Jim West Mansion, which he bought along with the surrounding 41-acre property at 3303 NASA Pkwy. in 2006. But a teaser website suggests that the former Houston Rockets center intends to transform the oil and cattle baron’s former estate — which served for a time as NASA’s Lunar Science Institute — into a flagship store for DR34M, the clothing line he introduced before a New Year’s Eve Rockets game in 2010, but that hasn’t drawn much attention since.
“The DR34M Spring 2012 Collection will launch online and in our new Houston flagship store,” announces the website at Dr34m.com. It’s illustrated with a photo of the 17,000-sq.-ft. Italianate mansion, which was designed by Houston city hall architect Joseph Finger and completed in 1930 not far from the current site of Houston’s Johnson Space Center. “We are busy designing a new line of clothing, collaborating on a collection of leather bags and accessories and sourcing modern furniture,” reads the brief copy, which is accompanied by Olajuwon’s signature.
