The plastic hasn’t even been peeled away from the awning, but Blacksmith is open as of yesterday morning. Headed up by Greenway Coffee & Tea’s David Buehrer, the coffee shop is operating out of the popular leather bar Mary’s old building at 1022 Westheimer. A block west of Montrose Blvd., Blacksmith is Lower Westheimer’s second coffee shop to open in the last few months — Southside Espresso went in next to Uchi at the end of October.
One more of each, thank you: Creekside Park Village Center, rendered above, will be the Woodlands’ 7th and will be anchored by its 4th H-E-B, the master-planned community says. The shopping center will serve Creekside Park, a 100-acre community planned to go in up there west of Lake Paloma. It appears that the center will herd its shoppers inward toward a 4,300-sq.-ft. glass-walled restaurant, which you can see in the rendering. And there’s gonna be a fire pit in that park-like median-thing. (And a water feature on the other end. You know. Just in case.) In all, 80,000 sq. ft. of retail and office space are proposed for the site on Kuykendahl.
DOWNTOWN WOULD LIKE TO KNOW IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO SHOP DOWNTOWN 
Around the same time that Macy’s announced it was closing its store at 1110 Main St., Mayor Parker announced that she’d organized a task force to figure out how to plug up the gaps in Downtown retail; accordingly, the Downtown Management District’s recruiting whichever Houstonians it can to respond to a 20-question shopping survey. It’ll be up through January 31. [Downtown Houston; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Flickr user cjt3
A January newsletter from The Southampton Civic Club informs members that Hanover, building the mixed-use midrise pictured above, has purchased additional property on Morningside in Rice Village “just north” of the current construction site. The newsletter states that Hanover is planning to begin Phase II: a 12-story, 200-unit residential building with no retail. The newsletter’s language suggests that the property is bound by Morningside, Tangley, Dunstan, and Kelvin; that’s where the Village Commons, the Tangley Building, the Village Apartments, and Garden Gate are — at least for now.
Long a fixture on White Oak in the Heights, the Blue Line Bike Lab has opened a second location in the East End. In early November, the repair shop and retailer moved into a suite that had been gutted for a CrossFit gym at 740 Telephone Rd. in the Tlaquepaque Market, a little more than a mile from U of H. The shopping center, bound on the east by Lockwood and on the west by Dumble, might not be the most obvious location for pedal-pushing hipsters looking for a fixie: next door, as the photo above shows, is Space City Hearing Aids. But Bohemeo’s is just a few doors down and Thai restaurant Kanomwan is tucked in there somewhere, as well. And the East End has had two railroad right-of-ways transformed into hike and bike trails. Paul Dale, one of the lab’s resident gearheads, says, “We’re betting on the neighborhood.”
Photos: Allyn West
It might not be sporting an engine — and KHOU reported yesterday that the vertically parked car’s Fiberglas shell weighs in at just 350 lbs. — but at least the headlights work. Similar Mini Coopers have popped up before on billboards and storefronts, especially in Europe, but a rep from design and interiors store Internum told auto blog Jalopnik yesterday that the Mini on their Kirby wall is “the first example of a Mini-on-building ad in the U.S.” It’s also the first to have been given a special citation by the city.
A red tag from the City of Houston, a reader reports, has been posted on the window at Internum, the design and interiors store at 3303 Kirby where this Mini Cooper’s been mounted since December 18. “Remove car from building front,” the City of Houston violation reads, “barricade sidewalks at front — do this immediately.” The violation is dated December 27, but as of this morning the car’s still hanging in there.
Did you know Macy’s had a store Downtown? Well, not for much longer. Macy’s announced this morning that its 1110 Main St. location will be shuttered this spring. Clearance sales will start January 7 and continue for up to 11 weeks. The store debuted in 1947 as the Foley’s flagship (at right) in a 791,000-sq.-ft. Kenneth Franzheim building. The company will close 5 Macy’s and one Bloomingdale’s in other cities as well.
Photos: jaraylee182004 (Macy’s), Jim Parsons (Foley’s)
CLOUD 10 HITTING SWEET SPOT IN THE VILLAGE 
We’re guessing Chris Leung will be keeping his ice cream below 273 Kelvin in the shop and open kitchen he’ll be launching this spring at 5711 Kelvin in Rice Village. Cloud 10 Creamery will be one of the street-level shops in the new Hanover apartments set to open next month. This’ll be Cloud 10’s first storefront; Leung’s ice creams have been available since last summer at a few restaurants and food trucks around town. [Houston Press; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Chris Litherland
This rendering of a glassy new Macy’s, posted a couple of weeks ago on the website of architects Munoz + Albin, incited a new round of speculation (on HAIF, anyway) about the fate of Downtown’s last department store. The ol’ box of bricks at 1110 Main St. (pictured below), designed by Kenneth Franzheim, opened in 1947 as the Foley’s flagship. Would Hilcorp, which now owns the property, demolish the post-war relic?
COMMENT OF THE DAY: THE PARKING LOT IN FRONT “Is it possible that any place in our region that doesn’t have a huge field of suburban-style parking in front of it starts at a big disadvantage? Even patron reviews I read regarding otherwise popular places like Sugar Land Town Square and The Woodlands Town Center view having to park in a (free) garage and walk around the block as a serious knock on those places. With the Pavilions garage requiring payment and the public sidewalks harboring the occasional homeless person, Pavilions might have an unavoidable disadvantage for many folks. Is free off-street surface parking and never having to set foot on a public sidewalk that essential to a quality experience in Houston? Doesn’t downtown, and the city, have more to offer? Certainly other large cities — even Los Angeles — do.” [Local Planner, commenting on Books-A-Million Now Packing Up Its Books, Leaving Houston Pavilions]
Christmas Eve was the last day of business for Houston’s only Books-A-Million location, in the Houston Pavilions sorta-mall. Workers at the 1201 Main St. store are now packing the bookstore’s remaining inventory onto pallets (at left), which will be shipped off to the national chain’s warehouses or other locations. (That means there’ll be no goodbye sale.) Books-A-Million had threatened to leave the space back in January of 2011; a quickly arranged sweetened rent deal from its landlord allowed it to stay. But that agreement has now expired, and Pavilions has new owners: A group headlined by former LA Lakers point guard Magic Johnson bought the 3-block complex — out of bankruptcy — this past August.
Photos: Downtown Houston Management District (store); Swamplot inbox (pallets)
Former Houston Rocket Hakeem Olajuwon quietly opened the doors this past week of a brand-new flagship store for his new clothing line, DR34M. It’s conveniently located just off NASA Pkwy., inside a mansion built during the Depression by a Texas oilman — used later for more than 20 years by NASA for its Lunar and Planetary Institute.
The 17,000-sq.-ft. Italianate mansion by the Clear Lake shore was completed in 1930 by Houston city hall architect Joseph Finger for Jim West, whose family sold it to Humble Oil when he died in 1941. Since then, it has been owned by the Pappas restaurant family and Rice University. And in 1969, during the Apollo missions, the nearby Johnson Space Center moved its moon unit here; it stayed until 1991.
Olajuwon, who has made a lot of investments in Houston-area real estate since his 2002 retirement from the NBA, bought the West Mansion in 2006. He had plans to subdivide the sprawling 41-acre estate to sell off to developers, according to news reports. Later reports indicated the mansion would be razed, or that a retirement village would be built around it. But since early this year, workers have been making extensive renovations to the building, inside and out:
Collectors and artsy-crafty types will have to head to East Downtown for their muse-feeding materials when Texas Art Asylum, a 18-month-old venture in the First Ward’s art district (top), packs it all up and moves its various shop-classroom-warehouse operations from several sites to one consolidated locale at 1719 Live Oak St. (above and left). The new space, about 6,000 sq. ft., is the former home of pedicab vendor Space City Bike Cabs.
A sudsy education center for the “beer curious,” Premium Draught tore the butcher paper from its windows and started pouring this week at 733 Studewood, the former Kaboom Books spot. The store shares a Heights strip center with the high-usage Antidote — and also shares the intersection of Studewood and East 7th 1/2 8th with the recently opened Sonoma Wine Bar. Premium Draught owner Johnny Orr realized he might have to rethink his plans to build the usual sit-and-stay-awhile bar. “After taking a look at the demographics of the surrounding neighborhood,” he tells Swamplot, “we opted to pursue this beer for carry-out business model instead. Parking in this town and in the immediate neighborhood around the store is minimal. As the White Oak corridor continues to develop we wanted to try and avoid the type of mess that has occurred on Washington. . . . The Heights did not need late night bar traffic clogging the streets.”
Photo: Allyn West
