10/15/14 11:30am

Partially Demolished Houston Club Building, 811 Rusk St., Downtown HoustonThe denuded 18-story frame of the former Houston Club Building at 811 Rusk St. (pictured above before storms blew away much of its blue clothing early last week) will vibrate and then collapse after 520 lbs. of explosives detonate in and around the structure shortly after 7 am this Sunday, October 19th. If you’re a controlled-demolition gawker hunting for a spot to watch it all go down — and maybe take in all the dusty aftermath, you might want to note that streets will be shut down more than 2 blocks away in every direction before the blast. Although many nearby office buildings will close up late Saturday evening, they may not kick out all workers who have arrived earlier. “Project managers discourage anyone from coming down to see the implosion in person for safety reasons,” notes Click2Houston’s Syan Rhodes. Her station is promising to broadcast a livestream of the implosion on its website that morning.

Photo: Marc Longoria

Ka-Blooey
10/13/14 11:30am

Proposed Bridgeview Crossing, 4503 Montrose Blvd., Montrose, Houston

Here are a few views of the 11-story spec office building planned for the north side of the Montrose Blvd. bridge over the Southwest Fwy., across the street from Kam’s Fine Chinese Cuisine. And yes, it appears developers Griffin Partners really do intend to call the inside-the-Loop project Bridgeview Crossing. The design by Kirksey Architecture includes a single 1,500-sq.-ft. retail space facing Montrose, but the rest of the building at 4503 Montrose Blvd. is all business: 5 floors of office space sitting on top of a 6-level parking garage.

The design’s surface treatments, however, play down that simple offices-over-cars division, presenting instead a glassy-and-griddy front to Hwy. 59 on the south:

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Bridgeview Crossing
09/16/14 12:30pm

PENNZOIL PLACE’S STICKY DAMAGE CONTROL PLAN Yellow Stickers on Pennzoil Place, 711 Louisiana St., Downtown HoustonChronicle real-estate reporter Nancy Sarnoff has answers to a couple of questions Pennzoil Place tenants, visitors, and passers-by might be asking right about now: 1) Why is this iconic double-towered downtown office building at 711 Louisiana St. downtown now covered with small, round yellow stickers? and 2) If the building gets scuffed up during the implosion of the remaining hulk of the Houston Club Building across the street, how will property managers be able to distinguish new nicks and scrapes from all the old ones? [Prime Property; previously on Swamplot] Photos: Nancy Sarnoff

09/02/14 5:15pm

A CHICK-FIL-A IS GOING INSIDE PENNZOIL PLACE Pennzoil Place, 711 Louisiana St., Downtown HoustonIf there’s gonna be a downtown office building collecting a few fast-food drive-thru franchises in its basement — minus the drive-thru parts, that is — it might as well be one with some street cred, right? Last year, a Sonic moved into the basement of Pennzoil Place, the Philip Johnson-designed double-trapezoid building pair on the block bounded by Milam, Rusk, Capitol and Louisiana. The building’s owners are now about to carve out more space for retail on the building’s lower floors — though only one of the added slots (at the corner of Rusk and Louisiana) will actually have direct access to the street. Joining Sonic in the building’s underground tunnel zone — along with an expanded eating area, revamped escalators, and a few more lease spaces — will be downtown’s fourth Chick Fil A. But don’t line up quite yet: The projected $1.2 million in renovations necessary to create the new spaces won’t be complete until early next year. [Houston Business Journal; previously on Swamplot; more info (PDF)] Photo: Flickr user telwink [license]

08/22/14 4:30pm

Construction Site at 609 Main St., Downtown Houston

Rendering of Pickard Chilton Design for 609 Main St., Downtown HoustonUpdate, 8/26: The headline has been corrected.

If you’re wondering what the late-night traffic holdup is in and around Main St. and Texas Ave. over the weekend, here’s your explainer: 180 mixing trucks are going to be lining up to pour a continuous stream of concrete onto this site surrounded by Main, Texas, Fannin, and Capitol streets downtown, where D.E. Harvey builders is putting together a little office building — now slated to rise 48 stories — for the Hines CalPERS Green development fund. The action starts at 7 pm on Saturday and should finish up around 3 in the afternoon the next day.

In all, about 14,000 cubic yards of concrete will go into the mat foundation of the 609 Main St. building during those 17 hours. The Texas Tower, formerly known as the Sterling Building, was dismantled on a portion of the site earlier this year.

Photo: Hines. Rendering: Pickard Chilton

609 Main
08/13/14 12:30pm

Proposed Office Building and Parking Garage for Greater Houston Partnership, Avenida de las Americas at Capitol St., Downtown Houston

Proposed Office Building, Hotel, and Parking Garage for Greater Houston Partnership, Avenida de las Americas at Capitol St., Downtown Houston

Earlier this month, Houston First showed off renderings of the office building it’s planning to build for itself and 3 other Houston-boosting organizations (top), headlined by the Greater Houston Partnership, one block north of and linking to the George R. Brown Convention Center. (A massive attached 1,900-car parking garage would share the skybridge to the George R. Brown and fit between the building and the Hwy. 59 overpass.) Yesterday, the operator of the city’s performing arts and convention facilities pulled out an additional pic (above), highlighting another aspect of its plan, and showing how the same building would look with a 15-story add-on perched on top of it. The rendering of the tower portion by WHR Architects, the same firm that’s designing the office building and parking garage, is meant to be “conceptual”; Houston First announced it will begin taking proposals for the hotel from developers, who might choose a different design team.

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Launch Pad
08/06/14 11:00am

Proposed Greater Houston Partnership Building, Downtown Houston

The 10-story office building announced earlier this week for a site across the street from the George R. Brown Convention Center won’t just house the Greater Houston Partnership, for which the project is being named; it’ll also be home to a swell crowd of quasi-governmental city-boosting organizations, whose members will gladly walk you out onto the 2-story 2,000-sq.-ft. upper terrace at the corner of Rusk and Avenida de las Americas, slap you on the back, and point out all the new buildings and visitors and conventions swarming around Discovery Green.

If it isn’t too late in the afternoon (the deck faces west), a city scout needing a little convincing or glad-handling will have an eye-opening view of Houston to behold: A slice of Houston’s central, quasi-public park with its suggestively undeveloped surface parking lots and the rest of downtown beyond, bookended by the city’s 2 remaining non-acronymed sports facilities, Minute Maid Park and the Toyota Center. Kinda stepping in front of the center portion of that view will be the new Marriott Marquis currently under construction along the combined Walker and McKinney streets on Discovery Green’s eastern flank, but the hotel’s tower portion will be shifted a bit to leave room for a park overlook. In a nod to the marketing world’s recent fashion of mildly gritty cité-vérité, the new office building’s deck won’t be air-conditioned, but the nearby towers should generate a fair amount of breeze, and its height should put it safely above Houston’s 8-story mosquito line.

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Someday Near the Park and the George
07/21/14 11:15am

Rendering of 2229 San Felipe TowerA new lawsuit filed last week against the developers of the 2229 San Felipe office tower currently under construction between Shepherd and Kirby is a bit different from the one that a group of neighbors initiated against the same party back in February, a reader notes. The plaintiffs in the new lawsuit are the owners of a River Oaks home directly across the street from the construction site, and they appear to have studied the ruling issued in the Ashby Highrise lawsuit carefully. (Back in May, Judge Randy Wilson ordered the developers of that building to pay neighbors $1.2 million to compensate them for “lost market damages,” but denied their request to halt the building’s construction)

Unlike their neighbors who sued before them, the residents of 2237 Stanmore Dr. are not seeking to prevent or delay the construction of Hines’s neighborhood office tower. Instead, it appears they are only seeking compensation for both public and private “nuisances” created by the 17-story building, including pollution, noise, and ground vibration during its construction and the resulting loss of sunlight and rain on their property. The building’s vaunted peepage opportunities don’t please them either:

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Pay Up
07/08/14 10:15am

DE-MAD-MEN-IZED DOWNTOWN EXXONMOBIL TOWER REMINDS ME OF MY DOCTOR’S OFFICE, COMPLAINS CHRON COLUMNIST Lisa Gray, already on record as a non-fan of Shorenstein Realty’s plans to remove all the distinctive sun-shading fins from the soon-to-be-former ExxonMobil Tower at 800 Bell St. downtown (and incorporate all the space they occupied into the floor plates), says the sleek new video (with only semi-robotic, live-action scalies!) put out by the San Francisco real estate company (embedded at right; click in bottom right corner to see it full-screen) reveals that the renovation plans for the building are “even worse than I thought.” What’s the problem with removing what’s left of the building’s Mad Men-era accoutrements, and sheathing the recaptured space with shiny glass? The video shows that Downtown architecture firm Ziegler Cooper’s resulting design will be “a dead ringer,” she claims, for the Memorial Hermann Medical Plaza tower at the northern tip of the Med Center at 6200 Fannin. That building was designed by the firm’s Uptown-ish rival, Kirksey Architecture. [Houston Chronicle; previously on Swamplot] Video: Transwestern

07/07/14 1:00pm

Central Square Plaza Building, 2100 Travis St., Midtown, Houston

Central Square Plaza Building, 2100 Travis St., Midtown, HoustonThere’s been a bit of action in the ongoing demo-and-rehab of the long-vacant Central Square Plaza complex at 2100 Travis St. in Midtown. Roving photographer Marc Longoria catches the shot from the building’s backside above, showing where you can now see through portions of the 14-story complex, which was originally developed by Houston oil tycoon Glenn McCarthy (of Shamrock Hotel fame) and designed by architects Lars Bang and Lucian Hood. And from the Twitter account of the building’s owner, Claremont Property Company, this morning comes the scene portrayed at left, showing crane work on the north-facing Gray St. side of the building.

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Office Redo Doings
07/03/14 2:00pm

Aerial View of Hughes Landing Under Construction, The Woodlands, Texas

Real Estate Bisnow reporter Catie Dixon shows off this helicopter shot taken last week over Hughes Landing, the new mega-development overlooking Lake Woodlands where a whirlwind of construction is taking out a little more of those woods and putting in a whole lot more of those  . . . uh, concretes. And she’s been thoughtful enough to stick some big red numbers on it, so we can make out what’s what and where, and how it’s coming along:

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By the Numbers
06/27/14 12:15pm

A FOILED BIT OF ART THIEVERY DOWNTOWN Painting Recovered from JPMorgan Chase Tower, 600 Travis St., Downtown HoustonTwo men in casual business attire attempted to walk out of a basement service door of the JPMorgan Chase Tower at 600 Travis St. after midnight last night with the beach-scene painting pictured at right, which had been hanging in one of the building’s common areas. Police recovered the painting from a stairwell near the Alonti Cafe, where the pair appeared to have dropped it after hearing sirens. Suspects were arrested as they walked casually along the sidewalk in front of the building, and charged with felony theft. [News92FM] Photo: KHOU

05/07/14 10:30am

Demolition of 3400 Montrose Blvd., Montrose, Houston

Demolition of 3400 Montrose Blvd., Montrose, HoustonIs it Houston’s own temporary Flatiron building? Or just a bunch of soon-to-be-flattened steel? Readers passing by the continuing takedown of the 61-year-old 10-story office building across from Kroger at the corner of Montrose Blvd. and Hawthorne St. that used to house Scott Gertner’s Skybar have been sending Swamplot their photo impressions of the scene, which has been changing — and disappearing — daily.

Here’s a bit of what a few Swamplot readers have seen and captured over the past week or 2:

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Skybar Takeaway
04/16/14 4:45pm

ExxonMobil North Houston Campus Under Construction, Springwoods Village, HoustonExxonmobil began moving the first workers into its new campus south of The Woodlands last Friday, a source tells Swamplot. Among the first to make the trek to the former pine forest (pictured at left, with workers in formation, during construction last year) near the intersections of I-45, the Hardy Toll Road, and the latest segment of the Grand Parkway: employees of the ExxonMobil Development Company, who’ve been working in Greenspoint for more than a dozen years.

Photo: ExxonMobil

It’s Moving Month!
04/10/14 10:15am

Demolition of 3400 Montrose Blvd., Montrose, Houston

Demolition of 3400 Montrose Blvd., Montrose, HoustonThe top-down demo of the 10-story building at 3400 Montrose has reached its moment of smooth-jazzy truth. Having taken care of the parking garage in back, demo crews are now hard at work dismantling the 10th-floor portion of the building, which formerly housed Scott Gertner’s Skybar — and before that, Cody’s. These views from across Montrose Blvd. and Hawthorne St. taken yesterday by a Swamplot reader show the south and west portions of the top floor are already gone, and come-aparts are headed for the corner. Hanover is planning to build a significantly taller apartment tower on the site once the 1953 stone-clad structure is gone.

Photo: polyester

The Cody’s, Scott Gertner Liftoff