Ah, Friday: Why not take a stroll down Binz St. in the Museum District and have a look at what’s going on? Let’s head east from here: the corner of La Branch and Binz, near the Children’s Museum.
Our guide, Swamplot reader David Hollas, provides the photos and the observations:
One-stop shopping: you can see the signage and new (and presumably sterile) cabinetry through the second-floor windows of The Centre at River Oaks (in Upper Kirby, in fact), where a 25,000-sq.-ft. branch of Texas Children’s Hospital and Pediatric Associates is expected to open in March; the makeover of the shopping center at West Alabama and Kirby began last summer; Ainbinder announced that Ulta Beauty would be operating out of the first floor of the bankrupt Borders; Texas Children’s will sit atop both Ulta Beauty and Brio Tuscan Grille.
Photo: Swamplot inbox
It turns out the construction work Swamplot readers noted last week on the vacant lot at 1401 Binz St., catty-corner from the Children’s Museum, is for a 4-story structure combining ground-floor shops, 2 floors of medical office space, and a top-floor residence — all in less than 30,000 sq. ft. A small courtyard will separate the building from a linked multilevel 160-car parking garage. Half the office space, reports the Chronicle‘s Nancy Sarnoff, will be taken up by medical clinics operated by UT dermatologist Stephen Tyring; he also owns the property and is an owner of the development firm, Dermedica Property Group. Bailey Architects notes on its website that the building “will reflect the architectural fabric of Houston’s premier museum district buildings.” Sarnoff’s translation: It’ll look Modern. Contractor Arch-Con expects construction to be complete early next year.
Rendering: Bailey Architects
UT’s M.D. Anderson Cancer Center plans to build this 8-ish story pavilion, called The Pavilion, in front of the Alkek hospital at the corner of Bertner and Bates streets in the Med Center — replacing the pavilion-like rotunda that stands there now. The new building will house the center’s interventional radiology department (on its third floor) as well as 11 new operating rooms. The 185,000-sq.-ft. structure, designed by Dallas’s HKS, includes 2 partial-height floors for maintenance above the operating rooms plus a mechanical floor at the top. Construction is expected to cost $102 million, and be complete by the end of 2015. An accompanying $96 million renovation of the adjacent Alkek hospital will extend into 2019.
Rendering: HKS, via M.D. Anderson
Turns out this “mysterious construction” going up on the corner of Technology Forest Blvd. and Research Forest Dr. in The Woodlands isn’t meant to house some company’s secret R&D project — instead, it’ll house investigations of a more familiar technology. No name has been announced, but the operator of 2 Sakekawa Japanese Steak House & Sushi Bars (there’s another one Indian Springs Village already) bought the 1.21-acre pad site last year. These photos came from a Swamplot reader who was curious about the unidentified project — but then answered her own question by uncovering the secret sushi plot for us:
Yesterday a few technical glitches got in the way of Swamplot’s plans to post videos showing the last moments of the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center’s Houston Main Building, the iconic 18-story limestone-clad building at 1100 Holcombe Blvd. once known as the Prudential Tower, which was demolished over the weekend. But they’re here now. Enjoy!
Jarringly, the official video below tacks an animated version of M.D. Anderson’s “Making Cancer History” tagline onto the end of the well-documented urban rupture — allowing us to imagine that this violent implosion is merely the urban expression of the institution’s core cancer-eradicating mission. Cancer be gone! in 10 . . . 9 . . .
There are no good accessible viewing areas for this weekend’s scheduled implosion of the Houston Main Building at 1100 Holcombe, the folks at M.D. Anderson insist. (That space they’re squeezing media reps into to watch the big bang? Too small.) But why get up so early on a Sunday morning just to catch a few lungfuls of white powder anyway? Instead, you can watch the festive destruction of the iconic former Prudential Building live on the web from this link. The dynamite is scheduled to go off January 8th at 7:52 am (unless, of course, one of those Life Flight helicopters is coming in). And there’ll be higher-res video available later.
Photo: Candace Garcia
Walking by the vacant site on the corner of Binz and Chenevert on the way to Hermann Park, reader David Hollas notes that the large sign advertising a 75,000-sq.-ft. medical-offices-and-retail development planned for the site has been taken down. Meanwhile, the surrounding neighborhood has been peppered with Ashby-Highrise-style signs protesting Balcor Commercial’s planned 6-story Parc Binz building and parking garage at 1800 Binz St— and “hi-rise buildings” in general. Opposition to the development got some media attention last year, but Hollas has seen sign changes on the property before: “About 2 years ago, the signs offered the sale of townhomes that were to be built imminently, but never materialized. After a period of inactivity and weed growth, the city came and decked out the site with code violation placards. Eventually the site was mowed and trash removed, and the city signs and townhome signs disappeared.”
An M.D. Anderson Cancer Center official tells the HBJ‘s Jennifer Dawson that the UT institution will likely wait 3 to 10 years before putting any new structure on the site of the former Prudential Tower it’s been working diligently all year to knock down. Workers were moved out of the 18-story structure — renamed the Houston Main Building — last year. The hulking remains of the iconic 1952 Kenneth Franzheim building at 1100 Holcombe Blvd. will come down in a cloud of dust after several rounds of dynamite blasts on January 8th.
M.D. Anderson senior VP Dan Fontaine says the Med Center institution doesn’t even have a design yet for the 2 new structures — likely for outpatient care — that will eventually be built in that location. Until the institution finds a better use for it, the demo site will be turned into a “park-like setting.”
Photo: Karen Lantz
The folks charged with blowing up old buildings at UT’s M.D. Anderson Cancer Center have set a January 8th date for the big dynamite surgical event meant to knock down what’s left of the institution’s Houston Main Building. The hulking 18-story tower at 1100 Holcombe Blvd. was built in 1952 for Prudential Life Insurance as part of Houston’s first-ever suburban office campus, designed by architect Kenneth Franzheim. The Med Center institution bought the building in 1975, but began the long demo process early this year.
Independent grocery store Klein’s Super Market closed down in April, after doing business in Tomball for 89 years — almost half of them at the corner of West Main St. and Buvinghausen. Next up for the 31,628-sq.-ft. vacant space at 1200 West Main: New life as a “community-based outpatient clinic” for the Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center. The Veterans Administration has signed a 20-year lease for the property, Congressman Michael McCaul announced today. Renovations are expected to be completed next summer; the clinic should open to patients next fall. Also announced: a similar clinic at 750 Westgreen Blvd. in Katy, in an existing medical building.
Photo: Jesse Smith
Legacy Community Health Services’ Montrose Clinic building opened last month at 1415 California St., consolidating in its new site the operations of 3 previous locations. The 40,000-sq.-ft. facility provides primary health care services, as well as a dental clinic, pediatric care, optometrists, adult behavior health services, HIV and AIDS treatment facilities, a gym, and — yes — a ground-floor Walgreens pharmacy, all under one flat roof.
The facilities steering committee at UT’s M.D. Anderson Cancer Center has decided to demolish what’s left of the institution’s Houston Main Building at 1100 Holcombe Blvd. with several blasts of dynamite — before the end of the year. The announcement in an online employee-only newsletter cited safety concerns for the decision: “Manual demolition with jackhammers and blow torches would expose our employees, our patients, the public and dozens of construction workers to noise, dust and vibration for months. Implosion reduces that exposure to a matter of minutes.”
The 18-story Med Center structure was known as the Prudential Building before M.D. Anderson purchased it from the insurance company in 1975. It was vacated last year, and demo work on the building began this past April. The newsletter announcement also recaps the institution’s explanation for knocking down the structure, which was designed by Houston architect Kenneth Franzheim in 1952 as part of Houston’s first suburban office park:
Whatever happened to that Park 8 condo tower, hospital, and strip-mall development planned for Beltway 8 next to Arthur Storey Park, just south of Bellaire Blvd.? The Chronicle‘s Purva Patel surveys the wreckage of the self-styled “Land of Oz”: The highrise project has long been in bankruptcy, the contractor and lender are battling over ownership of the land in court, and 2 different groups of investors and condo buyers are suing developer David Wu for their investment losses (totaling more than $2 million), alleging he has or had no intention or ability to complete the project, and that he misled them about funding and leasing commitments. Neither Wu nor his attorney would respond to the reporter’s questions.
Here’s the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center’s massive new 1MC (for “Mid Campus Building 1”) at 7007 Bertner Ave., just a short hop into the medical frontier south of Brays Bayou. 25 stories, 1.4 million sq. ft., $350 million. All to consolidate various leasing tenants from 8 sites around the Med Center, plus get some space for future expansion. Swamplot reader Stephen J. Alexander hopped from parking garage to parking garage to capture these views:
