UNBAKING A LONELY STRIP CENTER SPOT 
Saddled with a “terrible” location — a lonely strip center on Barker Cypress Rd., halfway between Katy and Cypress, year-old Ranch Bakery is taking to Kickstarter to raise funds to — break its lease? No — start up a food truck, explains owner John Homrighausen. It’ll be a souped-up delivery truck with “a giant pair of longhorns for the front & a horn that plays ‘The Eyes Of Texas,'” he promises. The spot at 5431 Barker Cypress is good for his catering company, Homrighausen explains, “but an unfortunate one for a retail store.” He hopes to lure fans of kolaches and Big John’s King Kong Ding Dongs to donate a total of $19,965 towards the effort by the end of the month. [Kickstarter, via Eater Houston] Photo: Ranch Bakery
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Tag: Strip Centers
There’s a changing of the guard at the strip-center endcap at 10705 Westheimer in Westchase. Workers have been taking down the signs; the Smashburger in that location closed for good on Monday. A reader claims that the burger joint, on a small strip directly adjacent to the McDonald’s at the corner of Wallingford Rd., was the chain’s worst-performing store. And: that the location has already been reserved for Dunkin’ Donuts. A franchise group plans to open 16 new Dunkin’ Donuts stores in Houston over the next 6 years.
- Previously on Swamplot: Dunkin’ Donuts’ Big Texas Push, Smashburger: Meat Candy for Strip Centers
Photos: Swamplot inbox
GAMESTOP’S APPLE-POLISHING STRATEGY 
Strip-center mainstay GameStop has a new strategy to keep itself from going the way of video-game cartridges: changing its business in the direction of another strip-center mainstay: the mobile phone store. The company began a program of buying used iPhones last fall; it’s now ready to remake itself as a leading reseller of used Apple gadgets. Company employees are working on coming up to speed on repairing Android devices as well. Seventy-one of the Texas chain’s 6,600 locations are in the greater Houston area. Sixty stores around the country have already begun selling prepaid wireless plans; an analyst suggests selling phone plans to go with used phones could become a big new business for the chain. [SF Chronicle] Photo of GameStop Outlet at Westheimer and Hwy. 6: Dr. Mario Kart
The Alamo reinforcements have arrived! Okay, they’re just temporary steel props, but they’re now holding the tilt-up concrete facade out of the mud around the tamale-themed strip center Warwick Construction is putting up on Houston’s Northside. The 23,000-sq.-ft. Alamo Tamale Company development at 809 Berry Rd. just west of Irvington will include a bakery, a reception hall, a restaurant and cantina, a dessert bar, and — yes — an on-site tamale-construction facility. Plus: a drive-thru meant to accommodate about 20 tamale-pickup vehicles.
The half-empty strip center left over from a series of unfortunate redos of City Hall architect Joseph Finger’s 1937 Tower Community Center (which once served as an art-deco companion piece to the former Tower Theater across the street) is now under contract to a new owner, along with the entire 2.86-acre block at the southwest corner of Westheimer and Montrose. That’s the word from a posting on the property’s listing site noted by Going Up! City, but the listing brokers at HFF aren’t providing any additional information.
Unless someone wants to spill the beans on the purchaser’s identity or any plans for the current home of Half Price Books, Spec’s, Papa John’s, and 3-6-9 China Bistro (along with the standalone Jack-in-the-Box at Montrose and Lovett) before then, you’ll have to wait until the seller issues a press release — which will happen sometime next week, a source tells Swamplot — for additional details. The property went on the market in early March.
STRIP CENTER PUNISHMENT 
Houston’s “preeminent BDSM dungeon,” writes the Houston Press‘s Jef with One F, “started out as a simple one-room space in the Galleria area in 2010, but now hosts a multi-room facility that serves as one of the few full-time dungeons in the city.” A FourSquare listing reveals that Maison Noir is lodged inside “erotic fantasy superstore” Bizarre Times, in the crotch of a strip center on Winrock just north of Westheimer, across the street from the Penthouse Club and the Super Clean Carwash. “The facility is outfitted with many pieces of bondage furniture such as a vertical steel cage, a St. Andrews Cross, a CBT chair . . . multiple spanking benches, a vertical rack, and a bondage table.” [Art Attack] Update, 4/20: A couple of dominatrixes have sternly corrected us; Maison Noir moved from its Winrock location earlier this year. Photo: LoopNet
HOUSTON PRESERVATIONISTS MOVE TO STRIP CENTER, CHANGE NAME 
The Greater Houston Preservation Alliance’s days as a scrappy preservation organization housed in offices in the historic 1929 Gulf building downtown are over. From now on, it’ll be a scrappy preservation organization housed in offices in a Westheimer Rd. strip center. Okay, it’s that fancy brick-clad River Oaks strip center with the argyle tower across at 3272 Westheimer, across from Lamar High School. And it’s name is gonna change too. The GHPA shall now be known as Preservation Houston. [GHPA Preservation Houston; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Jim Parsons/Preservation Houston
The real-estate fund that’s owned the half-vacant strip center at the southwest corner of Westheimer and Montrose for the last 4 years has put the entire 2.86-acre block up for sale. On the site now: Half Price Books, Spec’s Liquors, Papa John’s Pizza, and the 3-6-9 China Bistro in a stuccoed-over 41,838-sq.-ft. building once known as the Tower Community Center (to match the Tower Theater, now home to El Real Tex-Mex, across the street). Also included: the standalone Jack-in-the-Box on the corner of Montrose and Lovett. No list price, but broker HFF is indicating “price guidance” of $10 million or higher.
The Art Deco building still lurking beneath was designed by architect Joseph Finger in 1937, 2 years before he completed work for Houston’s city hall. Here’s how the shopping center looked then-ish, with a Walgreens on the corner of Yoakum St.:
VIDA’S SECOND ACT 
The owners of the renamed and renovated Melcher Crossing shopping center by the tracks at 4218 San Felipe brought in their own adults-only restaurant last September, reporter Rusty Graham explains: “‘We thought “how hard can it be?‒ Evie Melcher said. ‘We thought we’d just open it up and it would run itself. But there’s so much to bring together.’ Between a manager that didn’t work out and a ‘diva’ chef who quit, the Melchers have experienced and overcome the challenges. The restaurant is ‘chefless’ for the foreseeable future, the kitchen overseen by a manager. Menu items are recipes supplied by the kitchen staff; after the chef quit workers brought in family recipes that were cooked up and tried out. The best are on the menu today, what Evie Melcher calls ‘sexy Tex-Mex.’ ‘Tex-Mex doesn’t need to be weird’ she said. “Our food is less greasy, better tasting and of a higher quality, but it isn’t weird. It’s going home and not feeling so full.'” [River Oaks Examiner] Photo: Vida Tex-Mex
WHY HANK’S ICE CREAM IS CLOSED THIS WEEK 
There’ll be no butter pecan, vanilla, or creamed corn flavors available for the next few days at the southern end of the angled strip center at the corner of Murworth and South Main St. — for a period of mourning. Hank’s Ice Cream owner and founder Hank Wiggins, who opened the shop with his wife Okemah in 1985, passed away on New Year’s Eve. He was 74. [Houston Chronicle] Photo: Edgar V.
It sure looks like it: Here’s a photo of the theater’s west parking lot, sent to Swamplot by a reader who noted that a concrete pour began on Saturday morning. Earlier this month, Weingarten received a permit for “Landlord Improvements — Infill/Leveling,” though the permit’s title doesn’t make it clear what kind of leveling the national REIT wanted to do to the landmarked structure at 2922 S. Shepherd Dr., which is expected to be transformed into Houston’s first Trader Joe’s market.
Why would Weingarten want to pour a thick layer of concrete onto the floor of its historic building — and how much demolition of the theater’s interior might be accompanying this work?
COMMENT OF THE DAY RUNNER-UP: SOWING SPRAWL “Then the birds fly over the empty dirt and drop seeds for nail salons, cell phone accessory stores and quickie loan dives. The city would have to plant chinaberry trees to protect it.” [Hellsing, commenting on Mayor Parker Wants To Buy Unused Eastwood Elementary School on Credit]
STRIP MALL LIFE 
Late last month undercover detectives arrested 3 women working at the Touch of Class Spa in the strip center at 8201 Broadway in Pearland on prostitution charges; 2 male customers found on site during the sting operation were questioned and released. Last week, a fourth woman, suspected of running the operation, was also arrested. After an intensive investigation that included poring over the massage parlor’s in-house video surveillance system, police officials concluded that the spa workers were not being held against their will: “However, surveillance video revealed the women actually lived and worked at the spa 24 hours-a-day, using their massage tables as make-shift beds.” [Pearland Journal; Pearland Today] Photo: Pearland Journal
I’LL TAKE A TABLE UP IN FRONT BY THE BUMPERS, PLEASE 
Winning the top spot in Houston Press food critic Katharine Shilcutt’s personal accounting of the 5 ugliest restaurant buildings in Houston: “Anything in a strip center.” And with that award, these comments: “. . . that’s roughly half the restaurants in Houston. You’d think that because they’re so predominant, it would have gotten easier by now to convince wary friends that a place is good even if it’s sandwiched between a Smoke ‘n’ Toke and a payday loan place on Gulfton. But books will always be judged by their covers — and restaurants are no different.
I’m tooling with a theory right now in which one of the main reasons Houston is so ignored on the national scene is because so many of our great restaurants are in shitty, suburban strip malls. But it’s a great Catch-22: These amazing restaurants have moved into low-rent areas . . . because it’s easier to take bigger risks and open fledgling businesses when your overhead is low. Alas, eight lanes of Westheimer traffic don’t have quite the allure that Williamsburg does. . . .” Other non-strip winners in Shilcutt’s book: Lucky Burger, Sparkle’s Hamburger Spot on Dowling, Aladdin on Lower Westheimer, and Ruth’s Chris on Richmond Ave. [Eating Our Words] Photo: Tier 2 Business Brokers
The next contender for the endcap of the Modern strip center at the corner of North Shepherd Dr. and 34th St. refashioned last year from the longtime home of Garden Oaks’ Binswanger Glass Co. is almost in. Taking over from the stalled out Octane Coffee and Wine Lounge will be the Shepherd Park Draught House — a pub featuring a full menu and an interior festooned with punk, pop, and rock memorabilia. Its owner: Ken Bridge of Delicious Concepts, the same company behind Heights restaurants Lola, Dragon Bowl, and (most notably) Pink’s Pizza, which has a convenient location next door. Expected opening date: “very soon.”
