The pale yellow former house at 223 Westheimer is now sitting quietly behind bars and in several piles. The 1910 Avondale home was sold last March to a corporate entity tied to down-the-road upscale tex-mex restaurant El Tiempo, and a demolition warrant was issued back in July. A reader notes that the bulldozers finally caught up to the 6-bedroom 5-bathroom structure last week, and the house was rearranged into a few ready-to-remove mounds at the last sighting.
The recently dumped Heights Finance Station post office at Yale and 11th streets was treated to a makeover this month, as demolition looms on the horizon. If all goes as planned, the building will eventually be brushed aside to make way for the younger-and-likely-prettier Heights Central Station mixed-use shopping center headed for the site; until then, it’s playing canvas for some Houston graffiti artists, including Wiley Robertson (one of the usual suspects behind giant love notes spotted around town).
A reader sends a fresh batch of lunchtime snapshots of the mural, which seems to have been wrapped up in the last few days:
A reader sends this fresh snap of the in-progress tower towering at 3773 Richmond Ave, where a glass skin is now growing on the northern facade. Those top stories now getting glassed in will be occupied by out-of-the-region Regions Bank; the compound will be named Regions Financial Center to match.
The 11-story office tower just west of Timmons Ln. has been working on looming dramatically over next-door single-story hand carwash Soap since December of 2014, and is expected to wrap up some time next quarter. In the meanwhile, here’s a video tour of what the whole thing could look like — including a cameo appearance by a Jenni’s Noodle Shop in a ground-floor retail spot (around 30 seconds in):
The past caught up with Houston Cafe & Bakery’s former location at the corner of Tackaberry and Quitman streets last week. The Mexican cafe and panaderia departed to a more northern, more strip-center location at 2435 Fulton St. back in 2015, when Houston ISD bought the Quitman property. A demo permit for the site was issued last Thursday, and by Friday the scene above was already playing out.
Across Tackaberry, soon-t0-be-renamed Jefferson Davis High School is in the early stages of a redo that will upgrade its 1926 building and add some new facilities for the school’s culinary arts and hotel management specialization. Finalized designs from Bay-IBI aren’t out yet, but a community meeting is planned for Thursday of this week, and demo work on some nearby houses has already been going on to make room for expansion.
Here’s a peek at a preliminary site plan from back in 2014, which shows the campus expanding across Tackaberry all the way to Fulton St.:
COMMENT OF THE DAY: WHERE TO GO TO AVOID A BAR FIGHT IN THE HEIGHTS 
“I remember well the battles between restaurants/bars and residents as the Montrose started to gentrify in the late 1990s. It never ceased to amaze me that someone would buy a pricey townhome right next to a long-established ice house, and then complain vociferously and try to run the business off. Mark my words, the Heights will reach that same tipping point, if it hasn’t already. As SuperDave said, those who fail to check out their prospective neighborhood at all times of day and night have only themselves to blame. But of course, they’d rather blame the business and try to turn the Heights into some ridiculous suburban ‘paradise.’ That’s what Katy is for, people!” [roadchick, commenting on Jilted Heights Post Office Spot To Move On as a New Mixed-Use Lowrise Complex] Illustration: Lulu
Remodeling is underway at the former Primary Purpose Alcoholics Anonymous meeting space, as Suite D of the strip center at 1203 W. 34th St. is converted into Slowpokes wine, beer, and coffee bar. The new business is busy building its digital presence as it rehabs its physical space just south of the corner with Alba Rd.
The bar’s Instagram page shows the above photo of a screenshot of a rendering of the suite under renovation, which depicts a large patio spreading out into what is currently the strip center’s parking lot. Photos of carpet removal and wishful floor-taping have also been posted as interior construction begins:
Defunct 1970’s burger chain Hamburgers By Gourmet appears to be readying for a new takeoff at 1360 NASA 1 Pwky., across the street from the Space Center Houston visitors center parking lot at the junction with King’s Park Ln. A corporate entity connected to a Nassau Bay real estate agent was registered under the Hamburgers By Gourmet name 2 Octobers ago; the new storefront bearing the chain’s old burger-slash-mushroom-reminiscent logo was spotted last week by a keen-eyed user on HAIF.
The newly rebranded building, shown above from the west side, was formerly a Kentucky Fried Chicken prior to its turn-of-the-decade conversion to a Premium Title Lending.
A brand new multi-building mixed-use development is planned for the site of the former Heights Finance Station post office, which shut down at the end of last year after being declared “no longer necessary” by USPS. The land on 11th St. between Heights Blvd. and Yale St. will move on, change its name to a less-stodgy Heights Central Station, and start a new life as the site of multiple 2-story lowrises housing ground-floor retail and restaurants with office spaces on top.
A dotted line runs right along the inside edge of the Cheek-Neal Coffee Company’s former roasting plant at 2017 Preston St. at the corner with St. Emanuel St., which was declared a protected city landmark today after starts to the building’s redevelopment by new owners last year. The line marks the proposed right-of-way for TxDOT’s plans to reroute I-45 alongside 59 and send the Pierce Elevated out to pasture, as shown in update documents released in September. The 1917 building shows up as a beige box at the corner of Preston and St. Emanuel in the above capture from the project’s interactive online map system, and the seafoam green highlighting to the left indicates the newly planned frontage roads that would run to the west of it.
But the Cheek-Neal building itself actually doesn’t appear to be on the chopping block. The blue highlighting indicating the future path of freeway lanes skirt the western edge of the structure (though they appear to engulf the Loaves and Fishes soup kitchen across Congress St. to the north). Moreover, a cross-section through the I-45-59 bundle specifically shows the building in place, with the frontage road to the east and the freeways tucked out of sight below ground level:
A reportedly sober driver crashed into the strip center at the southeast corner of S. Shepherd Dr. and W. Alabama St. in the early hours of Sunday morning, according to KPRC. The unplanned beer run left the Jugs Draft storefront shattered open, and gave the Shepherd branch of Jenni’s Noodle House a new side entrance. Strip center neighbors Burn Smoke Shop, Mega DJ, and Mattress 1 are seemingly undamaged;Â all involved humans are reportedly undamaged as well.
Rare beers, however, were a major casualty of the event: The SUV crunched into Jugs’s bottle coolers, prompting the craft beer shop to liquidate what was salvaged of its chilled inventory in a $2 firesale yesterday. (Jugs is named for its 64-oz. growlers-to-go of draft beer, but also sells bottles and kegs.)
Down in Galveston, seafood-slash-southern-focused Harborside Mercantile is opening up for a preview this evening, after clearing some liquor licensing hurdles that set back the planned December startup. The restaurant, located at 2021 Strand St., is a collaboration between Richard Craig (whose 3-wheeled Hubcap Grill will be getting a 4th location inside IAH) and Joshua Martinez (owner of The Modular foodtruck and the former Chicken Ranch).
The Strand, buoyantly styled as the “Wall Street of the South” in the 19th century, was battered by fires, the Civil War, and numerous destructive hurricanes before sinking out of prominence and settling into life as a warehouse district; historical restorations in the 1960s paved the way for the district’s eventual resurgence as a tourist destination.
Photos: Harborside Mercantile
A NOW OPEN sign is the newest addition to the metal-skinned Rice Village strip center at 2365 Rice Blvd., where Little Liberty’s neon blue label has been glowing atop a muted prison-stripe awning for several months. A reader notes that the banner takes the place of the NOW HIRING sign previously on display in the storefront, which held a branch of Ruggles Cafe & Bakery until its closure “for renovations” last March.
The business wilted several years ago, but the location of the church-run St. Theresa The Little Flower Thrift Shop at 5334 Washington Ave is getting a new tenant: a branch of Dallas’s Clutch Bar will be moving into the space. An entity associated with the thrift shop bought the property back in 1991, and the store blossomed until the early ’10s, closing by mid-2013.
Clutch Bar’s website touts a Summer 2016 opening; as far as what will be served in the space, the site for the chain shows a large draft beer selection and mentions a weekly special on “adult milkshakes”.
Greenway Coffee Co., the roasting operation behind Blacksmith’s coffee (in the former Westheimer home of Mary’s), appears to be involved in a coffee project intended for the ground floor of the 1917 Cheek-Neal Coffee Co. building. The former coffee plant at 2017 Preston St. (located across Congress Ave. from the Loaves and Fishes soup kitchen and SEARCH Homeless Services’s under-construction employment center) received little use or maintenance following the 1946 departure of coffee manufacturing operations; the building is currently being renovated after sitting vacant for years across 59 from Minute Maid Park.
2017 Preston’s new owners mentioned plans to put a coffee shop on the ground floor of the structure to the Houston Chronicle in September — and on Friday, Greenway’s David Buehrer posted a photo of the renovation’s interior progress to Instagram:
East Coast Korean fried chicken chain Bonchon is planning a new location at 24437 Katy Fwy., between the Grand Parkway and Katy Mills Mall in the strip-center storefront previously occupied by Johnny’s Pizza House, which closed last year. The chain’s previous Dallas location, its first foray into Texas, opened to so much enthusiasm for its double-fried chicken that the location had to shut down for a week to regroup shortly after its December 2013 opening; half a year later, the location closed permanently. Bonchon’s second Texas trial will open next to Fix My Phone and Katy Peridontology and Oral Surgery.
Photo of former Johnny’s Pizza House location: Scott L. via Yelp
