MAIN OFFICE TOWER AT BP ENERGY CORRIDOR CAMPUS WILL REMAIN EMPTY FOR MONTHS 
Major flooding after Hurricane Harvey knocked BP’s Westlake Campus out of commission for 3 weeks. Employees began moving back to their workspaces just south of I-10 between Eldridge and Hwy. 6 over the last few days, reports Collin Eaton — but only about a third of them: “BP executives still don’t know the full extent of the damage to its Westlake One tower, and they’re not sure exactly when it will reopen — although they expect that early next year. Floodwaters had risen to the top of the turnstiles in the lobby of the office building, filling the basement and bringing down the electrical systems. Contract workers piled thousands of sandbags around the building so they could start pumping out the rushing water.” [Houston Chronicle ($)] Photo of Westlake One, 501 Westlake Park Blvd.: Glassdoor
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Tag: Office Buildings
Something you might not have noticed about Houston’s iconic Bank of America Center (top) at 700 Louisiana St. Downtown: There’s an entire unused building hidden inside. The thrice-renamed spiky Dutch-ish PoMo tower complex, designed by architect Philip Johnson in 1982, sits across the street from his other famous Downtown Houston office building, Pennzoil Place. It’s not obvious from the exterior or interior, but the 2-story former Western Union building on the corner of Louisiana and Capitol streets (pictured above in a photo from 1957) takes up almost a quarter of the block Bank of America Center sits on. This was Western Union’s longtime regional switching center; Johnson was asked to design his building around it because the cable and electrical connections maintained within it were deemed cost-prohibitive to relocate.
Thirty-five years later, it’s the building’s anchor tenant that’s relocating: Bank of America, which now occupies 165,000 sq. ft., will move to Skanska’s Capitol Tower in a couple years. As part of a new set of renovations to the structure the bank is leaving behind, owner M-M Properties plans to completely dismantle what remains of the Western Union building, recapturing 35,000 sq. ft. of space without expanding the building’s footprint. Among the plans for the resulting space: A “reconfiguration” of the lobby and the addition of a “white tablecloth restaurant.”
The secret Western Union void is well disguised. It isn’t in the lobby of the 56-story tower but in the 12-story adjacent bank-lobby building fronting Louisiana St., more formally known as the the Banking Hall when the building first opened in 1983 as RepublicBank Center. It takes up the entire northern half of that structure: It’s beyond the colonnaded-but-blank wall on your right as you enter the lobby from Louisiana (on the left in this photo):
Tales from the Vault
The multi-level steel antenna-support tower that’s long stood on top of the window-deficient AT&T building at 3303 Weslayan St. just north of Greenway Plaza was removed by crane over the last week, a reader reports. At least, that’s what appears to be the case from the ground: The Beck Group construction firm received permits for a partial demolition of the building’s cell tower in June. Also permitted by the city that same month: a Beck Group office remodel of the structure, which is referred to in the permit as the AT&T Weslayan Toll Building.
Here’s a view of the now-dismantled tower from a couple of years ago, as it loomed poolside at the neighboring 3333 Weslayan apartments:
Hats Off
The final portion of the 6-story former Town & Country V office building at 908 Town & Country Blvd., including its elevator shaft, came down in an awkward curtsy yesterday, leaving workers in the lower floors of the neighboring 15-story CityCentre Five with nothing left to block their views of the Katy Fwy. Demolitions of the adjacent Town & Country III and Town & Country IV office buildings preceded it.
The unobstructed freeway view won’t last forever: Developer Midway is planning 2 new office buildings — as well as a residential highrise — for the cleared site.
- Previously on Swamplot: How To Pull Down an I-10 Office Building, Town & Country Style;Â Taking the Edge off Town & Country V;Â Underground Parking Garage near CityCentre Replaced with Garage-Shaped Lake;Â How To Topple That Last Bit of Seventies Mod Office Building Without Letting It Topple You;Â Smashing Views of a Half-Eaten Katy Fwy. Office Building from CityCentre Five;Â Midway Fences In Empty 1970s Office Park Where 3 More CityCentre Towers Might Sprout
Last Fall at I-10 and Beltway 8
Wrecking balls may have gone out of style, but cable hookups still put on a good Houston show. A reader with a front-row view of the soon-to-be north end of CityCentre shows us how, in videos and a photo showing the continuing section-by-section disappearance of the 1977 office building at 908 Town & Country Blvd. known as Town & Country V.
First, demolition workers weaken some of the building’s steel support beams by heating them with torches and making a few strategic snips. Then they attach one end of a cable to the beam:
Cable Hookups and Yanks
Here’s an interrupted last look at the Town & Country V office building at 908 Town & Country Blvd., which is clearly in the way of the CityCentre expansion.
The 6-story building is the last of a group of 4 being removed from the growing mixed-use district’s northern border. Earlier last month, crews were eating at the structure from the I-10 side:
Now You See It
Following that recent gentle but firm excavator tipover of the last bits of the Town & Country III mod office midrise near CityCentre, demo work on the broader office complex has moved underground — apparently far enough underground to puncture a water main, a camera wielder on the scene speculates this afternoon. As of 2pm, word from the reader was that water was still flowing, “and has made a nice-sized pool,” filling up the footprint of a mid-demo former underground parking garage structure (and providing lakeside views to parts of Trammell Crow’s CityCentre branch of its Alexan apartment chain.)
A fuller sequence of garage take-apart and fill-up over the last few days is laid out below, starting with a rainy Tax Day shot facing the Alexan and the I-10-Beltway-8 tangle:
Lakes of I-10
Friday’s knockout of the last walls standing of the Town & Country III office building by CityCentre can now be added to Swamplot’s small but smashing video collection of doomed structures taking a light swing at their demo crew on the way down. To be fair, the semi-controlled collapse of the midrise’s final walls looks to have been much less of a surprise than last fall’s award-winning Corporate Plaza parking garage acceleration incident: while footage of the Town & Country toppling does show the cloud of dust stirred up by the pullover, it captures no contemporaneous cloud of suspense regarding the fate of the operator and nearby construction workers. (The video above also captures commentary from some onlookers in CityCentre Five, who’ll likely have a similarly clear view of the next few teardowns on the docket.)
- Previously on Swamplot: Smashing Views of a Half-Eaten Katy Fwy. Office Building from CityCentre Five;Â Midway Fences In Empty 1970s Office Park Where 3 More CityCentre Towers Might Sprout
Video: Swamplot inbox
CityCentre Grab and Smash
THE CONTINUING UNTOLD STORY OF WHAT HAPPENED WHEN EXXONMOBIL MOVED NORTH 
We’ve been following the separate stories of various former ExxonMobil facilities around Houston individually after the company moved operations to its massive new North Houston campus. But if you want a good, quick rundown of the resulting real-estate fallout, take a look at this summary by veteran reporter Ralph Bivins, who chronicles the current status of the oil giant’s abandoned outposts Downtown, in Greenspoint, and elsewhere around town. The former upstream research campus on Buffalo Speedway between West U and River Oaks (pictured here), Bivins declares, “is expected to be transformed into a major mixed-use development.” The 24-acre Brookhollow campus near Hwy. 290 and Dacoma, which he notes is “not far” from the proposed terminal site for the Texas Central Houston-to-Dallas bullet train, “may be redeveloped for retail use.” The 35-acre former ExxonMobil Chemical facility at 13501 Katy Fwy. in the Energy Corridor, now called Republic Square, is the site of a proposed 2.6-million-sq.-ft. mixed-use project that might include a beer garden and art studios. But until that happens, owner Third Palm is “doing something very un-Exxon like — allowing the public to venture onto the grounds.” [Realty News Report; previously on Swamplot] Photo of demolition of former ExxonMobil facility on Buffalo Spdwy. and West Alabama: MontroseResident
A perch in one of the upper floors of CityCentre Five affords views of the dramatic exits of Town & Country III, IV, and V, 3 seventies-era office buildings fronting I-10 at Beltway 8 — which began last Friday. First to go is the 4-story Town & Country III at 10565 Katy Fwy., shown disappearing above. Next on the list (and cordoned off by the perimeter fence that went up earlier this month): Town & Country V at 908 Town & Country Blvd. (the 6-story structure on the left) and Town & Country IV at 10575 Katy Fwy. (4 stories, and hiding behind it).
The Taking of Town & Country III, IV, V
The 10-story tower segment of the Americana building at 811 Dallas St. is now undergoing disassembly, Nancy Sarnoff confirms this afternoon. A few folks caught sight of the tell-tale orange barricades and fencing around the base of the tower over the weekend; the view above was captured from Milam St. and shows the defunct former Subway on the Dallas corner of the block. Hilcorp, which owns the site (and also wrapped up its new tower across Travis St. on the site of the Foley’s blowup early last year), hasn’t yet announced further-down-the-line plans for the block. No explosives are part of the plan for this demo, however — the tower will be taken apart piece by piece, leaving the parking garage intact.
- Downtown Americana Building To Be Demolished [Houston Chronicle]
- Previously on Swamplot: Mayor Parker Announces the Death Sentence for Downtown Macy’s Building; Zeroing Out the Americana Building
Photo: ThaChadwick
Laid Low Downtown
BP MOVING ONSHORE HQ OUT OF HOUSTON, WAY FURTHER ONSHORE 
BP announced today that it plans to move the main office for its onshore oil and gas branch to Denver at the start of 2018, starting with about 200 employees (compared to about 450 currently in the Houston office). The company announced late this summer that it was pulling its employees out of the WestLake 4 tower (about 7 years before that lease would’ve been up); that news was followed up a few days later with an announcement that BP would also sell off its LEED-platinum Helios Plaza building (pictured above), which it built in 2010 as a trading office. The plan at the time was to lease back space in Helios from the new owner; the rest of the company’s Energy Corridor employees will stay in the WestLake 1 office tower, which BP also owns. [BP Media Affairs via Houston Chronicle; previously on Swamplot] Photo of Helios Plaza at 201 Helios Way: BP
As the walls crumble and the last days unfold for the city’s old code enforcement office in Midtown, a hidden stained-glass window has been uncovered — as seen here in a shot taken by a reader yesterday evening from across the light-rail tracks. Once the structure is fully deconstructed, the way will be open for that planned mixed-use-skyscraper from PM Realty to rise toward the heavens. In front of the window is the long-since-de-greened greenscreen trellis installed to dress up the main Main entrance of the concrete structure, back in the late aughts:Â
Preparing To Rise in Midtown
A few readers note that work is underway on the site of the new parking garage planned next to music-themed office highrise Lyric Centre at the corner of Louisiana and Preston streets (catty-corner from Market Square Tower’s newly-filled sky-high resident display tank). The top photo above shows the crews digging around on the former surface parking lot as of yesterday afternoon; the city issued a permit for work on the building-to-be’s exterior shell earlier this month.  A glass-skinned design for the structure can be seen in the rendering above, which peers at the site from the north along Smith St., looking past the skybridge between the Wortham Theater and the Houston Ballet’s Center for Dance. The drawing shows folks making use of the ground floor of the structure, which is intended to house retail (in contrast to the garage going up a few blocks north at Milam and Franklin streets, which is intended to look like it could house retail).
The floorplan included with the listing for that 41,000 sq. ft. of space shows a ramp for the garage hitting Smith St.:
Sowing Downtown Parking Space
A reader sends a shot of the roof of the last of the 4 former BMC Software campus parking garages to get put on the parking-space straight-and-narrow. Last Friday the angled stripes got powerwashed off of the top floor of the turn-of-the-millenium structure, which sits along CityWest Blvd. north of the new Phillips 66 campus just outside Beltway 8. All of the remaining garages on the site appear to have been restriped one at a time over the past decade or so with 90-degree parking spots (as can be seen on the roof of another of the garages in the upper right, further north along CityWest). The office complex goes by CityWestPlace these days; the complex is one of the properties held by new Houston-only REIT (New) Parkway, which was formed earlier this month when old Parkway and Cousins Properties merged then dumped all of their Houston holdings into a new, separate REIT.
Perpendicular spaces will better fit in with the campus’s general rectilinear motifs — for example, with this series of narrow rectangular water features on the other side of that northern parking garage:
CityWestParkingPlaces
