ANVIL STRIKES THE DAIQUIRI FACTORY Beaver’s barkeeps Bobby Heugel and Kevin Floyd will be opening their own place in the former Daiquiri Factory on the Westheimer Curve: “Our new bar, Anvil, located at 1424 Westheimer, will be opening in mid-November. Beneath the decades of former bar structure and traffic, lies a beautiful building with priceless windows, historic brick, and exciting features that are certain to make Anvil a site to see.” [Drink Dogma]
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Tag: Nightlife
The Downtown music venue is giving it a rest on Pease St., according to the club’s official MySpace page:
Hey everyone Yes the Engine Room is closed down now. All dates have been canceled. We know it’s frustarting to some but we are doing our best to let everyone know who has a date booked with us. We are having a hard time getting a hold of everyone who has a date booked here so please spread the word. We apologize for the inconvenience and any confusion this may have caused anyone. The Jet Lounge will remain open. Once again the Engine Room has been closed down and ALL DATES HAVE BEEN CANCELED!!!
- Engine Room is closed down ALL DATES ARE CANCELED!! [MySpace, via HandStamp, via mikemcguff.com]
Photo: Flickr user Stacy Davidson
Pedestrian scribe John Lomax and Marfa City Council candidate David Beebe have, by this time, earned the right to make a few sweeping statements about various Houston neighborhoods. And Lomax exercises that right in his chronicle of the pair’s latest adventure on foot, along Richmond Avenue from Mission Bend to Midtown:
. . . the epicenter of H-Town cheese is the corner of Fountainview and Richmond. A four-story, day-glo, red, white, turquoise, and tan building looms over the southeastern corner there, and it houses a Sprint shop, a little downstairs bar with the godawful name Identity, a scalper’s office, a massage therapist, and a huge Darque Tan outlet.
Sure, Westheimer’s got some cheese, and is a little tattered around the edges in spots, but there’s a veneer of gentility as expressed by old-line businesses like Christie’s Seafood. Richmond, by contrast, used to have that sub-Landry’s fried seafood emporium King Fish Market, which despite the incessant awful commercials that polluted local airwaves circa 1999, is now out of business and practically in ruins. The whole lot of it is a great vat of rancid Velveeta.
As is much of the Richmond Strip. That giant sax outside of Billy Blues is looking more and more like the torch sticking out of the sand at the end of Planet of the Apes.
After the jump: how’s the nightlife?
In an extensive interview with Houston Press music blog Houstoned Rocks, Proletariat owner Denise Ramos explains she isn’t shutting down her Richmond Ave. bar and music venue in February because she’s afraid upcoming University Line construction on the street will hurt her business. She’s shutting the club down because Metro has told her exactly where the Montrose light-rail station is going to go:
I started going to all these meetings Metro had put together, and in one of the meetings they had the proposed design for the rail, and I noticed that our building was nowhere in the design . . .
Right in front of where our building is, that’s where they [plan to] have the station . . .
We know for sure they plan to demolish our building. That’s a given; we know that. But I just don’t know when that’s going to be.
Guess that means Metro won’t be sliding that station to the west of Montrose . . .
If you’re curious why the developers of Houston Pavilions, the $70 million mixed-use development under construction downtown, decided not to mix anything other than office space with their 360,000 square feet of retail and “entertainment” space, you’ll be interested to read the comments L.A. developer Bill Denton made to the CoStar Group:
[Entertainment Development Group] put the site under contract in January 2004, then three surface parking lots and a multi-level parking garage sitting on just over 4 acres, and the project has evolved ever since. “We originally planned for a hotel/condo component, but at the time, the city was just finishing off convention center hotels and hotel occupancy was only 52%; now its difficult to find a hotel room in Downtown Houston. So, we changed the plan into two residential towers, which stuck until 12 months ago. Demand on the residential was tremendous, but because of the mixed-use and density, we would have had to do subterranean parking, which blew the economics of the residences out of the water. So now its 200,000 square feet of office space, and based on demand for that so far, I wish we could do 400,000 square feet.”
Tourists complain that Houston is too spread out and goes to bed too early.