The pile of mangled disco parts beyond the fence pictured at top is all that remains of the less-than-2-year-old La Roux nightclub building at 4011 Washington after crews brought down the house last week. In March, a real estate company connected to Zadok Jewelers bought the entire 39,000-sq.-ft. block on Washington between Leverkuhn and Jackson Hill St. La Roux was evicted earlier this year.
The club’s entrance was off Leverkuhn:
A fourth Candy Shack Daiquiris To Go is planning to open next year on Washington Ave, just 2-and-a-half blocks to the west of the existing W Grill Margaritas To Go drive-thru at Washington and Durham.
Candy Shack is slated to take over the property at 5111 Washington Ave (pictured above), where Coast Eatery + Bar both opened and closed this year. (The property was listed for lease in August.) Before Coast’s tenure, the space was occupied by itinerant Mexican-food joint Taqueria La Macro.
There’s much more than just a drive-thru going into this location, however: The Washington Ave Candy Shack will include a bar, for drinkers not speeding off to their next appointment.
Photo: LoopNet
Another potential future target in striking walking range of that 542-space parking lot Lovett Commercial looks to be planning at Center and Silver streets: the color-splashed warehouse redo sketched out above, as seen in another of the company’s current leasing fliers. This one is for a facelift of the 1970s building former occupied by Mass Electric Construction Company at 1201 Oliver St., a few blocks west down the railroad tracks past Sawyer St. Clustered nearby are a fair number of other Lovett-affiliated developments (including some of the artsy hubbub between Sawyer and Silver).
Renderings and site plans suggest a cidery could be taking over the west end of the building — the flier includes a north-is-down look at plans for splitting up the space, including a cutout for a breezeway:
The paved lot now being marketed as 1818 Washington Ave. (across Silver St. from that recently recolonized cluster of ex-nightclub buildings, and bookended to the east by the former bakery now housing B&B Butchers) appears to be marked for some higher purposes, per recently released leasing materials for the property. Plans on Lovett Commercial’s flier for the site show 2 structures (rendered above as things might look from Washington Ave., facing toward Tacodeli) that pretty much fill up the whole piece of land — but fear not, parking-requirement hawks! The land directly north of the property, a 2-block elongated space nestled mostly between Center St. and a stretch of Union Pacific railroad, is marked up to become a 4-plus-acre surface lot, with room for 542 cars or so; that’d likely more than make up for the parking spaces that B&B would lose, too.
That’s the apparent plan for now, anyway — the flier does point out that some kind of garage structure is probably on the table for later on. As for the yet-unbuilt spaces for lease: The site plans show an L-shaped 2-story building, plus a smaller, squatter freestanding restaurant space tucked back along the corner of Silver and Center. The larger structure has spots marked off for a couple of upstairs patios, as well as office use:Â
The green-and-yellow speckled warehouse at 1005 Sawyer St. has a new blue leasing sign from Braun Enterprises tacked to its forehead, as regular real estate surveillor Chris Andrews noted over the weekend. Braun bought the mid-sixties building last month, per county records of the transaction; the 6,360-sq.-ft. structure sits north of Washington Ave. sports-nightclub Social Junkie (which Braun also bought early last year), under the watchful gaze of the 24eleven Washington apartment midrise (to the left below):
The greying former site of the Wabash Feed & Garden Store is fully back on the market again, after high hopes for a new Creek Group restaurant on the site slowly faded into lengthy delays and an eventual leasing sign out front last year. Nancy Sarnoff notes in the Chronicle that the property went back up for sale last month, looking somewhat more worn down than the first time. A glance at CBRE’s marketing materials for the site shows many of the recent newcomers to the garden store’s stretch of Washington Ave., including the new storage midrise across the street, and the Pearl and Elan apartment complexes each about 2 blocks away in opposite directions from the just-over-half-an-acre property:
The old Wabash Feed & Garden building on Washington Ave. may still be sorting out its current relationship status, and missing the company of Los Dos Amigos  and Premo’s Grocery (knocked down across the street last year) — but at least it’s no longer the only property on the corner with an out of date sign (as pictured in the shot above from a reader). The new Uncle Bob’s Self Storage across the street, which replaced Premo’s and Los Dos Amigos, is already waiting on a branding swap-out — the storage company acquired Life Storage in July and decided to take the new name, simplifying its box-of-boxes logo in the process. The 6-story storage midrise is set toward the corner with Malone St. where Premo’s stood, while Los Dos Amigos got the parking-lot treatment:
NATIONAL HISTORIC PRESERVATIONISTS TO GATHER IN HOUSTON, GAWK AT ASTRODOME 
The National Trust for Historic Preservation — that’d be the folks that coined the ‘orgy of irrational destruction’ line picked up by Save the Bungalows a few years back — is holding its annual conference in Houston for the first time, starting next Tuesday. Current president Stephanie Meeks cites the city’s “compelling preservation story,” amid a regional lack of preservation-minded rules and regulations, as a reason for picking the city. Planned field trip locales include the Astrodome (currently getting ready for that basement parking garage remodel), as well as Mission Control, the artsifying warehouses and industrial facilities around Washington Ave., and a handful of Galveston historic districts. Also on the docket: the debut of the organization’s Atlas of ReUrbanism (a digital collection of built environment data aimed public officials, reporters, and other city data scavengers), for which Houston is one of 5 starter cities. Would-be attendees can catch some conference sessions next Tuesday through Friday in the neighborhood of the newly-game-faced George R. Brown Convention Center; those who don’t want to make the trip downtown can watch some sessions at home. [Previously on Swamplot] Photo of Astrodome: Russell Hancock via Swamplot Flickr Pool
A reader sends a set of quick driveby shots of the former home of Walter’s on Washington, which has been getting some cosmetic attention of late. After a 2009 relocation announcement, Walter’s slowly made its move to a former car and cabinetry warehouse on Naylor St.; the Washington Ave property was passed around to a few different owners (including corporate entities called Ay Papi and Carnegie Homes and Construction) before landing in the hands of The Mosaic Group in June of last year. Mosaic appears to have sold or transferred the property to one Joe F. West last August, but is still listed as the owner-slash-occupant of the space on the building permits that have been issued since then (including a few from as recently as May).
Mosaic also snapped up the empty lot next door last summer, which was bundled with the property during the August sale (and had been wrapped up together with the building behind the same now-absent construction fencing):
Meanwhile, catty- corner across White St. from the beer-and-haircut-related happenings to the east, work on DWI lawyer and billboard enthusiast Tyler Flood’s 3-story cafe law firm retail center at 2019 Washington Ave. is also ramping up. A reader sends the above early-morning photo of recent stirrings on the long and long-empty lot between White and Henderson; a demo permit was issued for the narrow strip last Tuesday, with a building permit following hot on its heels 2 days later.
An 1,800-sq.-ft. ground floor retail spot (which Flood previously hoped would be inhabited by some sort of cafe) is currently listed for lease on LoopNet, along with some divisible office space. The listing includes a look at the most recent rendering for that building, which seems to have straightened up and gotten a little taller in places, compared to the 2014 design (also shown below):
Australo-Texan Platypus Brewing has been not-so-secretly secreting away a set of fermentation tanks in the back of the reforming nightclub complex at 1902 Washington Ave (at the corner with Silver St.). The brewpub is readying the northernmost segment of the structure; a tree-lined patio is planned at the corner of Silver and Center streets. Here’s the updated site plan from Lovett Commercial’s latest leasing flier, now with more details about other tenants filled in:
SALVATION ARMY DONATION CENTER WILL SOON TAKE YOUR GLASS RECYCLING, TOO 
The first 2 of 10 planned locations for a new city-backed glass recycling pilot program will open this weekend. In the wake of the elimination of glass this March from the city’s single-stream contract with Waste Management, glass hoarder and reseller Strategic Materials is opening up a collection point at Sharpstown Park (at 6600 Harbor Town Dr., across from Sharptown Dental Clinic and the Sharpstown Country Club), and not at the Sharpstown Park Apartments on Bellaire Blvd. as accidentally initially advertised). That drop spot will be accessible during normal park hours; the company is also opening a 24-hour drop site at the Washington Ave Salvation Army Family Store  & Donation Center, across Hemphill St. from the Salvation Army Adult Rehab Center and across Washington from Darkhorse Tavern. If the first 10 spots work out, the city says that more locations could eventually be added. [City of Houston] Photo of Salvation Army Donation Center at 2208 Washington Ave: Vincent M.
The spot formerly known as Hughes Hangar appears to be ditching the airport theme following the closure earlier this year of both the nightclub and its across-the-parking-lot companion The De Gaulle. Remodeling of the area between the 2 buildings has been underway as well — above is the ex-bar’s former back patio, now an open lawn shielded from view of Washington Ave.
The space appears to be reopening as an events venue; the new name is Hughes Manor, and the new logo (shown here) is also similar to the old:
The spot Braun Enterprises has been sprucing up at 1815 Washington Ave appears to have been leased out last week to the folks behind the Texas expansion of Tennessee’s Gus’s World Famous Fried Chicken. Documents filed with the county show that an entity called Texas All Fry (registered to the address of the Gus’s location in Austin) signed for the space on Wednesday. Pandora and Throne Ultra Lounge are among the latest in the succession of night clubs and bars to have recently occupied the late-1940s structure, which sits across the street from B&B Butchers.
The above rendering (from the same leasing flier that accidentally leaked word of H-E-B’s negotiations for the Archstone Apartments spot at the corner of Washington and Heights Blvd.) shows the front facade with a new patio and a few more windows. A careful look at the building’s past listing photos show that some of the apparent reshaping may actually involve the un-bricking of some former doorways:Â
Something is stirring drinks these days inside former location of Beirut Fine Lebanese Cuisine, which reopened last fall as Fig + Wasp Test Kitchen and then quickly closed again. Up & Down on Washington will be officially opening at 4105 Washington Ave. this Friday after a few weeks of soft operation in the upstairs of the space; whether the fig-wasp name was a deliberate nod to the creepy symbiotic relationship between the 2 components is unclear. Photo of 4105 Washington Ave: Kuehn Inc.
