11/08/11 10:55am

The Trader Joe’s market in The Woodlands looks like dirt. For now, at least. Yesterday, the company finally admitted that this tree-stripped site in the under-construction Woodlands Crossing Shopping Center at the corner of Kuykendahl Rd. and Woodlands Parkway will be the first Houston-area store to open (even though the other potential TJ’s location on the horizon — in-town, inside the former Alabama Theater — appears to be in the moving-dirt-around stages as well). Swamplot broke the news of The Woodlands store’s location last week — then asked readers to send in pics showing how far construction has progressed. And our Woodlands-area readers came through with these photos from yesterday and over the weekend, showing just how a baby shopping-center TJ’s is born:

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11/07/11 10:35am

Yes, ExxonMobil “values the environment.” That’s why the company is building this 385-acre pedestrian-friendly campus with an “urban vibe” — in the middle of the forest 20 miles north of Houston.

Video: ExxonMobil, via Loren Steffy

11/02/11 1:39pm

The big new Asia Society Texas building designed by Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi along Southmore Blvd. in the Museum District won’t officially open until next April, but a new slideshow featured on the organization’s website provides early peeks into some of the 38,000-sq.-ft. structure’s ultra-spare interiors. Included in Paul Hester’s photos: Views of the 280-Poltrona-Frau-seat Brown Foundation Performing Arts Theater, meeting spaces with carefully framed garden perches, and closeups of several sleek staircases. The AsiaStore Texas gift shop will probably look a little different from this once it gets loaded up with stuff to sell:

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10/28/11 9:12pm

Going up in place of those 2 mod office buildings at 3210 and 3310 Eastside St. east of Greenway Plaza that were scraped earlier this week: this 2-story, $6.3 million home for Houston’s branch of Dress for Success, a national charity that provides support services, career help, and a free store of interview-appropriate attire for women in need of a working-world boost. Once it’s complete, the Houston Dress for Success will be the first of the organization’s 80 U.S. affiliates to own its own land and building. Included in the upgrade from the current leased warehouse at 3915 Dacoma St.: a larger store and dressing-room area, more clothing storage and sorting space, more meeting space, a babysitting area, and much better access to public transportation. Crews demolishing the 2 existing buildings took a break for Tuesday’s groundbreaking ceremony, where fundraisers announced that pledges covering 97 percent of the cost of the Ziegler Cooper-designed structure have already received.

Rendering: Ziegler Cooper Architects

10/28/11 11:09am

From those rockin’ dudes at Metro, moving to their own beat: a timelapse view of last weekend’s marathon Friday night to Monday morning East End Line construction project at the intersection of Harrisburg and Lockwood. (Traffic lanes and utilities had already been installed.) The beat goes on. . . .

Video: Metro

10/19/11 3:52pm

From photographer Candace Garcia: recent construction pix of the Montrose H-E-BMarket, designed by San Antonio’s Lake Flato Architects (with a little local help on the roof design), and going up at the corner of Dunlavy and West Alabama, across from Fiesta. Scheduled completion date: uh, sometime soon?

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10/17/11 1:56pm

What large-scale construction project is that about to go up on the north side of the Katy Freeway opposite the 35-story spike-headed Memorial Hermann Tower, a reader wants to know. A sign for MetroNational contractor Anslow Bryant recently went up on the Gessner Rd. site, which was until last year the home of the Gessner Place Shopping Center and Korean grocery store Komart. “It appears that a portion of it (the immediate corner) has been fenced off & the construction signs have gone up,” asks the reader, who also sent in these photos. “My guess is whatever goes here will be vertical.”

A bit east of the tower, and on the opposite side of I-10, Anslow Bryant is currently constructing a 14-story tower for future MetroNational tenant Nexen Petroleum.

Photos: Swamplot inbox

10/07/11 12:45pm

The tilt walls are already up! Those of you who’ve been eagerly awaiting the strip-center-themed revival of Yale and Heights Blvd. south of I-10: here are your signs of progress, snapped just yesterday by a Swamplot reader. No, this isn’t the new Walmart — or the Washington Heights District strip centers promised to go with them. It’s Orr Commercial‘s Heights Marketplace, a separate development facing Yale St. at Koehler — and the Walmart site across the street — beating everyone to the punch. Opening dates for Lovett Dental, Wahoo Fish Tacos, the Loan Depot, and more: next March.

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10/05/11 3:29pm

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.

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10/05/11 12:50pm

A reader sends in this photo showing the results of a recent heavy metal delivery to the median of Fulton St. across from Moody Park: Rails, for the coming 5.3-mile North Line extension to Lindale Park. Swamplot’s Northside construction correspondent reports the street appears paved and ready for the tracks to be installed.

Photo: Swamplot inbox

09/26/11 11:05am

And now another Swamplot reader sends in this curious photo from this morning, showing the collapsed box formerly known as the Central Presbyterian Church on Richmond Ave. between Cummins and Timmons — and demonstrating to those of you who might have worried that the collapse of the 1962 building’s modern steeple could pose some threat to Richmond Ave. traffic that there was never anything to worry about. Everyone is safe. The congregation has decamped for the St. Philip Presbyterian Church just outside the Loop on San Felipe; the land is being cleared for apartments; the giant cross is at rest.

Photo: Eric Nordstrom

09/12/11 9:49am

Tuesday morning, not far from the former grounds of Forbidden Gardens, its now-ransacked replica gravesite of Emperor Qin, and his army of one-third-scale terracotta soldiers at the stub-end of Hwy. 99 and Franz Rd., TxDOT and a contingent of public officials will gather to celebrate the groundbreaking of a notable project for Houston: the paving of a $350 million four-lane toll highway with “intermittent” development-ready access roads across an expanse of largely uninhabited prairie land that stretches between Katy and Cypress. When it’s complete, the 180-mile-long Grand Parkway will be Houston’s fourth ring road, cutting through 7 different counties. But none of the planned segments will forge so dramatic a path through undeveloped land as this particular north-south stretch, called Segment E.

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09/07/11 4:52pm

A reader sends in a drawing showing MetroNational’s long term plans to develop the “Lifestyle Tract” at Memorial City — on I-10 west of Bunker Hill Rd. That new office building going up at 945 Gaylord is the 14-story tower the company is developing for Nexen Petroleum, which is moving its headquarters here from Plano. The Houston Business Journal reported the company would be leasing 250,000 sq. ft. from MetroNational — and that the building would be a mirror image of the Cemex tower to the west.

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09/06/11 9:39am

Construction fencing has already gone up around the Central Presbyterian Church at 3788 Richmond near Greenway Plaza, a reader reports. The Modern church campus was designed in 1962 by Wilson, Morris, Crain and Anderson — just a few years before the same local architecture firm set to work on a small project called the Astrodome. Two years ago the congregation moved a couple miles northwest to merge with the St. Philip Presbyterian Church, just outside the Loop on San Felipe. Houston Mod fans have been trying to save the vacant church from demolition ever since.

But the church buildings won’t be sticking around for long.

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