HOUSING, RETAIL, RAMP TO 59 PLANNED FOR I-45 AT CULLEN BLVD. 
New housing geared toward University of Houston and Texas Southern University students is planned near the U of H Main Campus’s main entrance on Cullen Blvd., according to PRNewswire. Plans for the Gateway at Cullen development include 531 beds (in single, double, quadruple, and quintuple groupings), mostly in townhome-esque 2-story configurations, which will contrast with most of Fountain Residential’s previous campus-geared housing projects in the area. PRNewswire also reports that plans are in the works to replace the nearby Bestway Motor Inn with a new on-ramp to 59, and that the former Fingers Furniture warehouse will be turning into a retail center anchored by a grocery store. [PRNewswire, previously on Swamplot] Rendering: Fountain Residential
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Tag: New Construction
A pile of dirt is heaped up at the northeast corner of N. Braeswood Blvd and the West Loop feeder road this afternoon, next to a sign announcing the upcoming arrival of a Starbucks to the site. The lot held a Citgo station before demolition in mid-2013; a reader notes that construction crews have been poking around at the site for at least the past 3 weeks.
The blocky facade of the Halstead apartment complex can been seen in the background of the above snapshot — down the street to the east, the Halstead and next-door Meritage complex are slowly being joined by a midrise residential development going up at the corner of N. Braeswood and Frankway. East of that is a Proguard Storage facility and the Southwest Wastewater Treatment Plant.
Coffee on 610
While you’re waiting for that Galleria redo to wrap up, renderings have been released of the new home of 51Fifteen, the upscale bistro tucked into the existing Saks Fifth Avenue location along with its sister bar Bar 12 (currently located “amidst the men’s fashion selections”). The restaurant will follow Saks 5th Avenue to its new home, landing in its own swanky new space designed by the Contour Interior Design folks. The restaurant’s website is now booking events at the new location for dates as soon as April 2016.
Here’s a rendering from Beck Architecture of the new Saks building’s boxy exterior, slated for the spot where the Galleria III used to be:
51Fifteen at 5115
Down the street from Lamar High School, the would-have-been-Little-Woodrow’s now going instead by Kirby Ice House (“A Neighborhood Pearl”) is setting up shop at 3333 Eastside St., between the parking lot used for the weekly Urban Harvest Farmer’s Market and the Bammel Park townhomes. A post to the establishment’s Facebook page earlier this week shows that the under-construction building has just finished turning an icy blue, and the accompanying caption says that work is moving into “the detail phase”.
The bar’s across-the-street neighbors include nonprofit women’s career services center Dress for Success and the main building of the Islamic Society of Greater Houston — both groups expressed concern about the bar’s location in 2014 after the president of the Bammel Park Homeowner’s Association sounded a neighborhood-wide email alarm. Dress for Success filed a protest of the ice house’s TABC license that July; the license was issued in December of that same year.
A rendering of the building’s exterior shows the ice house standing next to a townhouse-free field:
Ice on Upper Kirby
The tearing down is done — the old parking garage at the Children’s Assessment Center on Bolsover St. in the Rice Village is gone, following the completion of the facility’s new garage (a sliver of which can be seen peeking into the right of the frame in the shot above from Dustan St. along the northern edge of the property). A furtive glance through the back gate of the construction site reveals that the freshly cleared field between the the new garage and the Center’s original 1998 building (on the left) is already being overgrown by forms and thin PVC pipes, sprouting in advance of the 4-story 89,000-sq.-ft. facility expansion that will rise in the newly-vacated gap over the coming months. The Center, which provides free care and services for sexually abused children and their families, put its new garage’s 420-space foot down on the former Village Plaza Shopping Center, kicking the leftover bit of the block to the Frost Bank now fronting Kirby.
The rendering of the completed project from Gensler has taken on more concrete definition since it initially surfaced several years ago:
Down and Up on Kirby
A reader snapped a few shots of construction over at 8877 Frankway Dr.: a midrise apartment complex taking shape in a long-vacant strip of land next door to the Houston Orthodontics building and a ProGuard public storage facility, just west of where S. Braeswood jumps across Brays Bayou to become N. Braeswood. The project will fall into a row with the next-door Meritage and freeway-adjacent Halstead apartment complexes to the west, both on N. Braeswood between Frankway and the West Loop. Just east of the Proguard facility is the Southwest Wastewater Treatment Plant, which accidentally released nearly 100,000 gallons of raw sewage into Brays Bayou and the surrounding area during this year’s Memorial Day flooding.
A crane is on the scene, and some preformed concrete segments have been trucked in:
Meyer Park
Just in time for the holiday season, the residential floors of the Elan Heights midrise apartments (officially located at 825 Usener St.) have been packaged up in a shiny new layer of building wrap. A sign outside the construction site announces an early 2016 opening for the 327-unit complex, nestled in next to Mango Beach snowcone shop and Little Buddy gas station and convenience store on White Oak Dr. (bottom left in the aerial photo below):
Wrapping Up in Woodland Heights
An excavator and friends were spotted on Westheimer this week having a go at the long-empty lot directly next to upscale Indian-fusion spot Indika. Also on the agenda were the freshly-empty and moderate-length-of-empty lots next door — all three spaces (520, 524, and 528 Westheimer) are currently held by Rok Bros Holdings.
The central lot, at 524 Westheimer, was demolished shortly after mid-2011; the more recently demolished house on the westernmost lot (528 Westheimer) held LV Massage and a psychic, after the 524 house crossed over into the great beyond. A request to merge the 3 lots was approved at a Houston Planning Commission meeting on July 10, 2014; the request refers to the space as Rok Bros Westheimer Plaza, and was filed in conjunction with Houston-based Momentum Engineering.
Swamplot reader sfalumberjack sends the twilight snapshot above, along with a few others of equipment on the site (bounded on the other side by The Cat Doctor):
Plaza Predictions for Avondale
Direct flights to Cuba from the US are back on the table (probably, eventually) per last week’s agreement between Havana and the State Department — and whenever that happens, Southwest Airlines is looking to get in on the action from its newly-minted international concourse at Hobby Airport. The concourse has been launching passengers to Central America and the Caribbean since its mid-October opening, which marked the airport’s return to the international game for the first time since IAH opened in 1969.
Other major additions to Hobby include a 3,000-spot parking garage (shown above) still partially under construction on one of the former EcoPark lots, just west of the original garage (now labeled the Red Garage). The new structure (known as the Blue Garage) is rising in phases: Phase I opened just in time for Thanksgiving, and the rest of the structure should be ready to receive rather less anxious travelers some time next year. The pedestrian bridge shown in the photo above connects Level 3 of the new garage to the newly-expanded Terminal area:
Park and Fly
 Hobby Airport... "Pin It")
Currently rising behind Lee Senior High School: Lee Senior High School. The new building is going up on the south side of the block east of Hillcroft between Beverly Hill St. and Skyline Dr., 1 block south of Richmond Ave. The first foundation slab was poured last Friday, and steel has been going up this week— pictured above are the servery, kitchen, and utility areas, according to the Twitter narration of Brent Oldbury. (The distant Williams Tower can be seen peeking through the steel on the right.)
A north-facing entrance is planned, allowing the school to hold on to the current Beverly Hill St. address despite shifting to the Skyline side of the block. The old building (behind the steel to the left, in the photo above) will watch its younger, prettier replacement going up next door until demolition in early 2017 makes way for sports facilities and parking.
A few renderings were presented at an October 2014 community meeting about the new building’s construction and timeline:
Second Secondary on Hillcroft
No need to evacuate the area, but aerial footage from the developers shows the Typhoon Texas waterpark currently brewing at 555 Katy Fort Bend Rd, just south of I-10 on 43 acres of Katy Mills Mall-adjacent land. Ground was broken on August 20, and the park (pictured conceptually above) is slated to make landfall on May 27, just before the start of Atlantic hurricane season.
Aquatic amusements will include a 1,500-ft. lazy river, facilities for slideboarding (which turns going down a waterslide into a competitive sport), facilities for regular sliding, a 48-foot-tall play structure, and a 27,000-sq.-ft. wave pool. (That’s larger than the one at the New Braunfels Schlitterbahn, for those of you keeping score.) Typhoon backers hope that the park will become a regional draw along the lines of the 3 Schlitterbahns, Spring’s Splashtown, and Astroworld (RIP).
This oddly-soothing drone video captures the sense of calm over the developing theme park:
Suburban Hurricane Hunting
The new CVS Pharmacy that’s replacing a couple of former veterinary clinics on W. Alabama — as well as the Shepherd Corner shopping center that until late last year housed Roeder’s Pub, Ruchi’s Taqueria, and Oaks Cleaners — is almost ready to show off the 40 shiny new parking spaces that will front the S. Shepherd Dr. corner a block south from the Trader Joe’s-ified Alabama Theater.
Don’t worry that parking will be scarce, though — more spaces will be available along the side and back of the new building, which faces S. Shepherd Dr. behind 2 full parking lanes. If you’re looking for a development that might be a little more street-fronting, you’ll have to wait: Construction hasn’t even begun yet on the fast-food drive-thru planned for the adjacent former site of jewelry store Fly High Little Bunny; it’ll go in where the big pile of dirt is, at the left of this photo:
From the street, a Swamplot reader notes, the roll-on vehicle pictured here looks just like your typical construction trailer. But come around the side you can see the banner pinned to it, announcing a new Freddy’s Frozen Custard and Steakburgers. The latest link in the growing fast-food chain is about to arrive on the former site of the Lucky Village Chinese Buffet that was torn down at 1111 N. Dairy Ashford last year. The new Freddy’s between St. Mary’s Ln. and Barryknoll will join a parade of beef purveyors (Sam’s Burgers, Lynn’s Steakhouse, Hebert’s Specialty Meats) and fast-food joints (Jack-in-the-Box, Sonic, and the Raising Cane’s right next door) lining the west side of Dairy Ashford, roughly opposite Spring Branch ISD’s AstroTurf-lined Darrell Tully Stadium.
Photo: Brian Walz
Steakburgers
COMMENT OF THE DAY: THE BUFFALO BAYOU PARK PINCH 
“When I see the improvements come on line at Buffalo Bayou, I keep thinking to myself ‘what’s the catch? Are these on loan from another city? Will Culberson make us take them down so he can build a new highway?’ But it is really happening. Buffalo Bayou is really turning into Houston’s Central Park (NY’s version does have a private restaurant right in the middle of it–Tavern on the Green). The nature playground on the east end is getting finishing touches as well as the performance space and snack bar over the old waterworks. The only problem I have encountered is the mud that slides down the banks and accumulates on the trails after a heavy rain. But it is much better than it used to be. Who knows. Maybe this is for real. And maybe people will actually start moving to Houston because it is a nice place to live.” [Old School, commenting on Finding Buffalo Bayou’s Lost Lake and Its ‘Morning Glory’ Hole, Almost Ready for Business] Illustration: Lulu
A reader sends pics of 3 notable new features near the western end of Buffalo Bayou Park that appear to be just about complete: The multi-purpose private event space known as The Dunlavy, overlooking a restored and upgraded pond now called Lost Lake — and its signature central feature, a bell-mouth spillway to suck up the overflow, referred to more commonly as a morning glory. That’s the hole in the middle of the water feature; if you look closely at the photos of it below you can see the odd sight of the tip of a construction ladder peeking out at the top:
And the Dunlavy, Almost Done
