Armed with your suggestions, roving Swamplot photographer Candace Garcia set out to document the smallest freestanding commercial buildings in Houston she could find. And here are the results! Above, “The Spot” hair salon at 1207 Westheimer in Montrose, at the corner of Commonwealth.
More tiny:
COMMENT OF THE DAY: A 3400 MONTROSE BLVD. INSPECTION REPORT “I did due diligence on this building a few years ago for the prior owners (The Ali Brothers). It was in pretty bad shape back then. The chilled water system was byzantine and the egress (especially from the Skybar) was not anywhere near complying with code. The garage needed work and had headroom problems on the ramps. For re-purposing, 3400 Montrose actually laid out well into residential or a hotel. I thought that given the limited parking situtation that they should give the Skybar the boot and convert the building to rental apartments. The structural bay depths and the continuous glazing on each floor laid out nicely, and the garage was almost the perfect size for this. Of course the entire building would have to be gutted in the process to accomplish any major update to the building. I swore I would never go into the Skybar again when I saw how unsafe the egress would be in a fire.” [mt, commenting on Why Scott Gertner’s Skybar Is Leaving the Montrose Sky]
Note: Story updated below.
News comes from a reader that Scott Gertner’s Skybar, on the top floor of 3400 Montrose, will be closing for good this Saturday — “due to the building closing its doors.” We don’t have further information about why the entire 10-story office building across Hawthorne from the Montrose Kroger might be shutting down, but a Twitter-fed rumor is that it’s for “safety concerns.”
Scott Gertner’s Sports Bar, safely ensconced on the ground- (and only) floor of a parking-lot site on Fountainview just north of Richmond, is apparently in no danger of collapse, and will remain open. The complete message passed onto us from Gertner after the jump:
The Triyar Cannon Group has been threatening to give shopworn Greenspoint Mall a $32 million makeover since 2006. Most of what appears to be planned shows up in this knock-’em-down video: a new outdoor plaza at the mall’s east entrance, and a connected 22-story office building off Greenspoint Dr., designed by Ziegler Cooper. Just last week, demolition began on the vacant JCPenney building, site of a proposed Premiere Cinema multiplex that’s supposed to share a new parking garage with the tower. Not in the plans, but already happened anyway: the closing of Sears.
When will the rest of this happen?
AT RISK ON RUSK 
Earlier this month Cameron Management lost the 2000 St. James Place office building to foreclosure; now CEO Dougal Cameron is trying hard not to lose the Houston Club Building Downtown. So the Cameron-controlled limited partnership that owns the 18-story 62-year-old office building at 811 Rusk is declaring bankruptcy. Cameron had visions of converting the building into a hotel or high-end apartments when his investment group bought it from JPMorgan Chase in 2007; more recently the company hired PageSoutherlandPage to plan an “educational facility” to take over several floors. The building has 5 levels of parking. The Houston Club, which counts George Bush as one of its members (and as the name of one of its rooms), has a low-cost lease on four floors that expires in five years. [Houston Chronicle] Photo: Silberman Properties
THANK YOU FOR LEAVING YOUR PLACE FOR THE BANK IN SUCH GOOD CONDITION 
“We mowed the lawn this weekend, so we’re giving it to them in nice shape.†— Dougal Cameron of Cameron Management, leader of an investment group that delivered the freshly LEED-certified and entirely vacant 12-story 2000 St. James Place office building just south of Tanglewood to Wachovia Bank (now a part of Wells Fargo) in a sparsely attended foreclosure ceremony earlier this month. Minute Maid moved out of the building in February 2009 — about a year and a half after Cameron’s investment group bought it; the building has had no tenants since then. [Houston Business Journal]
Playing around with a super-fun online tool that lets you superimpose the blobbish outline of the 2500-sq.-mile (and growing!) Gulf of Mexico oil slick from the Deepwater Horizon offshore-rig disaster onto various cities, Houstonist editor Marc Brubaker tries it on Houston — for size.
“It’s almost creepy how the slick follows I-10 out to Beaumont,” he comments. Of course, Brubaker should have nudged the oily blob a bit more to the east. Sure, he might have lost a few of those shiny exploration-company offices that have fled to the western stretches of Katy that way, but you’d be picking up lots of fun storage tanks and chug-chugging industrial plants at the northern reaches of Galveston Bay, and you’d get better coverage of Texas City, too.
Oh — but the outline is only up to date as of May 6th? Maybe we’ve got full coverage by now, then!
Image: Houstonist
A reader wants to nominate the tiny offices of Marine Offshore Electric Services, at 226 W. 18th St., just west of Yale, for . . . what?
It’s so cute! And really, this has got to be the smallest freestanding office structure in the Heights at least. What about a wider area? Bellaire, you got anything like this?
And what about retail? If someone will promise me there aren’t any old Fotomats or Fedex kiosks out there ready to trip me up, I’d like to nominate this place for smallest permanent freestanding non-foodservice commercial structure too. Is that category available?
Photo: Swamplot inbox
The Houston Business Journal‘s Jennifer Dawson is reporting that a hotel developer out of Fort Worth is purchasing the 22-story office building at 806 Main St. Downtown with plans to gut it, renovate it, and reopen it as a hotel. The building is approximately 100 years old, but its top 10 floors were added in the 1920s. The stone, terra cotta, and brick structure was dressed in a marble-and-glass slipcover about 60 years later. Directly across the street from the tower is the construction site of Hines’s MainPlace development.
The city has designated 806 Main as a landmark. It’s connected to the Downtown tunnel system, but has remained mostly empty in recent years. The last of 40 recent tenants is scheduled to move out this week. Building manager Betty Brown tells Dawson that only the Christian Science Reading Room and Domino’s Pizza on the ground floor will be left — their leases run out in 9 to 12 months.
With the exception of the Embassy Suites in downtown Fort Worth featured prominently on its website, Pearl Real Estate has built or redeveloped mostly suburban-style hotels. The 10-year-old company typically operates its own properties and serves as its own general contractor.
What kind of hotel is Pearl planning underneath this slipcover?
COMMENT OF THE DAY: INSIDE THE STANFORD FINANCIAL GROUP OFFICES AT 5050 WESTHEIMER “I have been through this building and it is decorated entirely in a (expensive) mahogany-green marble color scheme, put in place about 10 years ago. There is a large Palladian skylight with an ornate stair connecting the upper levels. Sir Allen’s office was huge with floor to ceiling wood paneling with some impressive wood coffers on the ceiling. Allen wanted all the offices around the world to look the same, so they all used this exact same color scheme. The furniture was of the not-so-inspiring big heavy mahagony type and the art on the walls were bad Audubon print reproductions. What was so wierd about the office was how empty it was. This was 2002 and there was almost noone in the building, despite the extreme amount of money that he spent renovating it. There were rows and rows of empty offices and the parking garage had the same empty feeling. There was a private dining room and a commercial kitchen in the building also, with a full time chef (food was great!). The whole building seemed as if it was supposed to present an image of old money grace and prestige, but somehow, it just wasn’t quite right.” [mt, commenting on Westheimer Office Building and All: Allen Stanford Says Sell!]
The 3-story, 62,000-sq.-ft. office building across from the Galleria that was once the headquarters for the Stanford Financial Group will at last go up for sale. Accused Ponzi schemer Robert Allen Stanford, awaiting his trial in a Conroe jail cell, had opposed the sale of any real estate owned by the corporations he controlled until 2 weeks ago, but subsequently changed his mind. A court ruling last week makes it official.
The office building at 5050 Westheimer sits on 1.6 acres and includes a 285-space parking garage. Also to be sold by Dallas court-appointed receiver Ralph Janvey in “stalking horse auctions”: Stanford’s Sugar Land airplane hangar, as well as other properties in Michigan, Tennessee, North Carolina, Mississippi, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
What about those condos in the Stanford Lofts Downtown?
An executive with Skanska USA tells the Houston Business Journal‘s Jennifer Dawson that the American subsidiary of the Swedish project development and construction company will build and finance this new freeway-side Galleria spec office building all by itself. Design work for the 14-story tower and 8-story parking garage, though, was farmed out to Kirksey.
Where will it go? The 2.3-acre former site of Tony’s Ballroom at 3009 Post Oak Blvd., across the street from the Water Wall Park. Metro will likely want a piece of that property too: A thin, mostly triangular sliver along the property’s western edge is needed to accommodate the new Uptown Line set to run down Post Oak.
At the end of a long article chewing over the possibility that Shell Oil might move out of its longtime Downtown office-tower home, real estate writer and promoter and longtime mustache-wearer Ralph Bivins finally reveals why he likes One Shell Plaza so much: Long ago, the 50-story concrete building with the travertine facing saved him and his brother-in-law from a possible night in the slammer.
A few decades ago, the Houston Police Department employed some officers who had a sore spot against guys with long hair and other suspected hippies. Anytime, you could get pulled over because having long hair and a mustache was “probable cause†for HPD to make a traffic stop. I was in the passenger seat late one night when my slightly shaggy brother-in-law got pulled over in the Montrose area. Even though we were doing nothing wrong, the policeman gave him general hassle, scrutiny and in-depth questioning.
COMMENT OF THE DAY: COMMODITY, FIRMNESS, AND NOTORIETY “The design can’t possibly be that bad. People are talking about it. When was the last time anybody remarked on the designs of Energy Tower III or Energy Crossing II?” [TheNiche, commenting on There Will Be No Tours of the Death Star, and Other Details About the Hospital in the Belly of the Memorial Hermann Tower]
Hospital executive Adam Lane tells the Houston Business Journal‘s Jennifer Dawson that the easiest patients to move into the new Memorial Hermann Tower on I-10 will be . . . the babies, “because they don’t know where they’re going.”
Also, it sounds like some of the interiors might prove a little disorienting for suburban kids:
A hospital floor dedicated to children has been elaborately designed as a town center. The hallway is made to look like a street with curbs, grass and storefronts.
Fortunately, more familiar surroundings will be nearby: the building is connected by skybridge to the Memorial City Mall.
