Carolyn’s, the dive bar at the corner of Craighead and Willowbend Blvd. across the train tracks from the Willowbend subdivision closed sometime around the end of last month, a reader notes. Back in 2008, the bar at 10711 Craighead Dr. won the Houston Press award for Best Hidden Bar. For years, Carolyn’s (pictured at right, behind the “canopy”) was the sole remaining tenant in the dilapidated but once-stylin’ classic 1959 strip center with vintage details stretched along that corner. Now, reports the reader, it appears the 18,600-sq.-ft. center is entirely empty — despite the remaining sign facing Willowbend for the Fruit of the Spirit Community Church (“Developing Fruitful Lives,” above).
Everybody Out of the Strip Center
The shuttered Arby’s waving to I-10 eastbound feeder road drivers exiting at Taylor has been gutted, there’s a hole in the outside wall, and the drive-thru window is being filled in. All in service of transforming the Sawyer Heights shopping center slot at 2423 Katy Fwy., next to Vitamin Shoppe, into a La Madeleine, notes reader Christopher Andrews. Included in his 
Contractor-turned-Realtor-turned-fraud investigator-turned-restaurateur Randy Bower and the team behind 
Craig Hlavaty’s writeup on the abrupt closing of the Midtown Community Garden has a few additional details about the fate of the 3-and-a-half-year-old garden space at the corner of Baldwin and Drew, in amongst his chronicling of the efforts of member gardeners to yank out their tubers before the property was shuttered: The 13,000-sq.-ft. vacant-but-for-vegetables lot that Swamplot reported on earlier in the week was 
