COMMENT OF THE DAY: WE’RE ALL INTRUDERS HERE “Now, if I lived next to it . . . I would be vocally opposing it based on its proximity to me, but I have to say, those of you living near its proposed location were on the WalMart end not too long ago, changing the quality of life for many of your neighbors with your big stucco three and four story homes going in next to small bungalows. So, while you are throwing stones, you might want to consider that in the not so distant past those stones were being thrown at you.” [EMME, commenting on Y’All Can Discuss the West End Walmart on Your Own]
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Tag: Retail
COMMENT OF THE DAY: WHAT LOCAL REALLY MEANS “How can you explain that the TacoBell/KFC, Panda Express, Smoothie King, and Subway aren’t local? Each of these are owned by a franchise company which is local. Only a portion of the local money spent there go to the corporate parents and the rest remain with the franchise owner. This is also true for MOST McDonald’s, Starbuck, and pretty much every ‘casual’ dining establishment. Yes, they are national names, but locally owned.” [kjb434, commenting on The New Strip Centers Coming to Heights Blvd. and Other Details of the Washington Heights District West End Walmart Plan]
Y’ALL CAN DISCUSS THE WEST END WALMART ON YOUR OWN Missed all the fun at last week’s big celebration of Walmart’s impending arrival in the Inner Loop? Two ways you can still get in on the action: Mayor Parker’s office has posted videos of the presentations given by the mayor and chief development officer Andy Icken at the gathering. And a second public meeting is scheduled for tonight, at a venue guaranteed to keep things orderly — The High School for Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice. But the folks from Ainbinder and Walmart won’t be around this time, according to the mayor, who’s announced the meeting “will focus solely on areas of the development that are under the city’s control.” [CitizensNet via Off the Kuff; previously on Swamplot]
Reopened yesterday at 12151 Westheimer between Dairy Ashford and Kirkwood: Arpi’s Phoenicia Deli, which crossed the street after 27 years to be closer to Arpi and Zohrab Tcholakian’s flagship (and 2009 Swamplot Award-winning) Phoenicia Specialty Foods store. The new 6,000-sq.-ft. space at the front of the shopping center will still feature shawarmas and salads, but mixes in a new Phoenicia-branded coffee house — and gelato, in classic flavors like Pistachio & Orange Blossom and Cardamom Turkish Coffee. A new Phoenicia Specialty Foods location — in the ground floor of One Park Place across from Discovery Green Downtown — is scheduled to open later this year.
The high-stakes leasing drama that culminated in Sunday’s sudden early-morning shuttering of the Angelika Film Center at Bayou Place Downtown included some familiar plot elements: the wandering eye, the unwillingness to commit, the threats of retaliation, the uh . . . 30-day notice to terminate. Andrew Dansby and Nancy Sarnoff track the courtroom scenes:
Angelika’s landlord, Bayou Place Limited Partnership, filed suit more than a week ago claiming the cinema was threatening to remove equipment from the theater if it did not receive a new lease.
The landlord’s petition outlines a situation dating to 2007, when the theater’s first 10-year lease expired. It did not exercise an option to renew for another 10 years.
The Angelika – also called Bayou Cinemas in the petition – continued as a month-to-month tenant at reduce rent, according to the petition.
Bayou Place and the Angelika continued discussions on a new lease, even as the landlord, an affiliate of the Cordish Co., sought a tenant that would enter into a long-term lease for a cinema.
But during a meeting, according to the petition, a principal of Bayou Cinemas threatened to remove equipment if the parties couldn’t reach a deal. Based on the initial lease agreement, the property belongs to the landlord, the petition claims.
The theater’s lawyer has filed a general denial of the allegations in the suit.
And oh, the broken promises: Angelika says the company had received official notice ending its month-to-month tenancy as of September 18th; Bayou Place’s general manager says Angelika changed its mind about committing to something longer term. How will it all end?
At last night’s meeting, representatives of the Ainbinder Company revealed the suburban-style site plan for the development centered around Yale and Koehler streets in the West End they’re calling the Washington Heights District. Among the plan’s notable features: 2 bank- or chain-restaurant-style pad sites planted on the west side of Yale St. just south of Koehler, and a couple new strip centers along Heights Blvd., each featuring a double row of parking spaces in front. A rendering of the southmost strip (above) shows it changing facade costume every few bays, following the template of a sort of mini-Wild, Wild West version of Uptown Park. These new buildings would become only the 5th and 6th strip centers on the almost-3-mile length of Heights Blvd., joining such exclusive company as the Heights Food Mart north of Center St., the cell-phone-friendly Heights Retail Center at I-10, the Pink’s Pizza and Sunny’s Food Store combo at 14th St., and that just-in-from-Austin building at 6th St. that used to house McCain’s Market — in easy-auto-access splendor.
One change from the version of the site plan leaked last month: 2 other strip centers in the project — both on Yale St. south of the main Walmart driveway — have been moved up to the street and their parking placed in back. Well, maybe the back: It isn’t clear from the renderings, but it’s likely the store entrances will move to the Walmart side as well, turning away from Yale. The development’s 5th strip center offers parking-lot views to all 3 streets it faces: Heights, Koehler, and Yale.
But the Washington Heights District promises to be so much more than just a symphony of Inner Loop strip centers. There’s also . . . the Walmart!
Just ahead of tonight’s meeting, Ainbinder Company has released the requisite mostly-empty-parking-lot and pedestrians-standing-in-a-median renderings of the Walmart the company is hoping to seat off Koehler and Yale in the West End. The renderings come from a 5-page brochure for the company’s Washington Heights development that includes an aerial view and plenty of lovely images documenting the site’s industrial recent past, going so far as to call the former Trinity Industries plant on the site — where beams, columns, and other structures were fabricated from supplied raw materials — a “steel mill.” But no official (or updated) site plans for the current proposal are included.
Here’s a view of how the Walmart might look in the early dawn, as you drive up:
Here they are: the latest views from the scene on Fondren just north of Harwin, where cleaning chemicals and hair sprays likely accelerated an early-morning strip-center blaze. The exploding cans were locked inside M Trading Company, a wholesale business that supplies local dollar stores, at 5710 Fondren. Also consumed by flames: Jessie’s Hair Salon, and the better portion of blossoms in Floreria Lee. A&C Tires and Star Karaoke appear to have made it through mostly unharmed.
A closer look at Greater Sharpstown’s latest strip-center-arcade fire:
MORE THAN A COLLECTION OF RED SHIRTS AND BLUE SHIRTS 
Hearing the news that Mayor Parker will be hosting a public meeting Wednesday evening at Downtown’s George R. Brown Convention Center to answer questions about Ainbinder’s Walmart & friends development targeted for a 24-acre property near the intersection of Yale and Koehler streets in the West End (just south of the Heights), the folks behind the Stop Heights Walmart website have come up with an interesting plan: Urge opponents of the discount chain’s first foray into Houston’s Inner Loop to attend the meeting wearing red shirts. Notably, that’s the daily uniform of the hundreds of thousands of “team members” who work for discount rival Target. One Walmart opponent noted on the group’s Facebook page that red shirts are available for low prices at Walgreens. “Please don’t buy them at Walmart :) Given, right?” asked another commenter. A few representatives of Ainbinder and Walmart itself will be on hand at the meeting, wearing blue vests and greeting visitors at the door. [Stop Heights Walmart; previously on Swamplot] Photos: Rufus Quail; Alice Wright
COMMENT OF THE DAY: HIGH CONCEPT “Bastards. That’s the spot where I was going to put my retro video game and Peruvian/ Japanese fusion restaurant, “Eatariâ€. Guess I’ll have to keep on looking.” [wilf, commenting on Where the Buffalo Grille Will Roam]
Ainbinder Company president Bart Duckworth says he’s hoping to unveil plans to “community leaders” next week for the firm’s 23-acre development at Yale and Koehler in the West End — which the company is calling Washington Heights. But it sounds like they’ll look at least something like what we’ve already seen. Some details: The exterior of the Walmart the company wants to plant on 15 acres of that development will “feature more browns and show an effort to break up the stark ‘big box’ look with architectural detailing,” writes real estate promoter Ralph Bivins, who the company invited to look at the plans. Duckworth tells Bivins the Walmart’s large parking lot and store front will have tree plantings that “exceed the norm.”
The project’s leasing broker tells Bivins he wants “chef-driven restaurants, local boutiques and non-chain outlets” to occupy the new retail spaces on Yale and Heights Blvd., which he views as an extension to recent developments along Washington Ave.
Duckworth also describes portions of the “380” agreement his company has been trying to negotiate with the city:
COMMENT OF THE DAY: KICKING OFF THE GOLDEN AGE OF MONTROSE BLVD. EXTENDED PATIO DINING “This is so Houston it hurts. This has got to be nominated for some kind of best of/worst of award at the end of the year. I don’t know what the category is, but making a building less sidewalk and pedestrian friendly in order to accommodate a billboard is a classic.” [Cap’n McBarnacle, commenting on Must See This: Billboard Bunny Pushes Back New Montrose Office Tower]
That’s 4,000-sq.-ft. of art-gallery space on the second floor of M Fifty-Nine, a new 13-story office building Midway Companies is planning for the northeast corner of Montrose Blvd. and the Southwest Freeway. This view is from the southwest, looking toward Downtown (in the lower left, you can see the ghostly image of a portion of the Montrose Blvd. bridge that would actually be in the foreground). The design, by local architects Muñoz + Albin, includes 64,000 sq. ft. of office space and 7,000 sq. ft. of “restaurant ready” retail on the ground floor facing Montrose. Behind the gallery space: an enclosed parking garage for more than 200 cars. Midway Companies, the developers of CityCentre, hopes to begin construction on the project early next year.
What’s on the site now?
Scheduled to open a little later this month amidst the mixed-use toniness of CityCentre: Yet another bistro-patisserie-tearoom-bar-coffeeshop-library-flower shop and performance-space hybrid, this one called Flora & Muse. Financing for the new venue comes in part from Turkish television star BaÅŸak Köklükaya (you may know her as Findik from “Uy Basuma Gelenlerâ€). The store promises a “whimsical, neo-Victorian interior” designed by Laura Umansky (her Laura U Collection is on Westheimer near Hazard). Chef David Luna, formerly of Shade and Canopy, at last steps out from beneath all those overhangs to develop the menu for the mini-mixed-use mashup, which will include a 1,200-sq.-ft. patio.
- Flora & Muse
- Flora & Muse to Introduce Houston and its Bustling CityCentre Environs to a Multifaceted and Multisensory Bistro Concept [PRWeb]
Photo: Swamplot inbox
A few snippets from yesterday’s grand opening of the new 88,000 sq.-ft. H-E-B at the new “Katy Main Street†shopping center at the southwest corner of I-10 and Pin Oak Rd., just west of the Katy Mills Mall: a “Texas Front Yard†at the entrance where you can pick up mulch, bug spray, and that giant parrot-like watering yardbird you were looking all over for; a solitary “Fudgie Wudgie†fresh fudge stand; a guacamole station; and H-E-Buddy giving hugs and high fives to shoppers in the produce section. This is the fourth H-E-B in Katy. It’s adjoined by a new strip center with no current tenants.
