02/06/12 9:27am

You’ll have the remainder of this month to say goodbye to another piece of the old Washington Ave: The Guadalajara Bakery at 4003 Washington announces, through a sign posted in a front window, that it’ll be closing down on February 29th, after 45 years in business. The Houston Press‘s Katherine Shilcutt reports that new building owners have plans to turn the breakfast-taco spot on the corner of Leverkuhn into a bar, and gave the bakery 30 days to vacate; the Chavez family has no plans to reopen elsewhere.

Photo: Swamplot inbox

10/07/11 11:17am

Guatemalan fast-food chain Pollo Campero‘s new-prototype restaurant (pictured above) will soon become the fourth standalone drive-thru in a row along a section of the south side of Washington Ave. Driving east from the corner of Durham, you’ll find the W Grill (at left, featuring 2 drive-thru windows), then a Jack in the Box on the corner of Shepherd. After El Rey Taqueria comes the future Pollo Campero site at 4701 Washington Ave., slated to be the company’s next-in-line location — a new one is about to open at 702 W. Bay Area Blvd. in Webster, and another is planned for Missouri City. Any room for this burgeoning Washington Ave drive-thru scene to grow? That small building wedged between the W Grill and the Jack-in-the-Box could start to look hungry.

Images: Pollo Campero and W Grill

06/23/11 3:55pm

Installed yesterday morning on the 3rd floor of the city’s new permit HQ and Green Resource Center at 1002 Washington Ave., which features dozens of other artworks: a text wall by Mary Margaret Hansen, the project’s lead artist. “Last spring, I filled entire yellow legal pads with transcriptions of real conversations, then got it all on a lengthy word document and finally edited it to phrases and expressions that best exemplify what happens when the city takes a look at a set of plans,” she writes. “Too wet! Mud in the beams. Call back when it dries up.” Also: “What about the fees?” and “I have lingering doubts.” Your favorites are all here. Or at least some of them:

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06/21/11 5:47pm

Hanging out on the roof of Houston’s new Central Permitting and Green Resource Center at 1002 Washington Ave.: Solar panels, anchored by the first-ever commercial installation of Metalab Studio’s new PV-Pod. The local architecture firm developed the hollow high-density polyethylene pods with support from a UH Green Building Components grant. There’s one pod for each panel, and each is filled up with just enough water to resist required wind forces. This kind of assembly is much simpler to install than a typical photovoltaic-panel rack system with concrete ballast blocks, claims Metalab’s Andrew Vrana. It also allows for a more flexible layout. The new permit building opened for business yesterday.

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06/06/11 10:18pm

Ever wonder what’s behind all the political endorsements made by so many vacant lots in Houston? Why is it that the weedy site shown above at the corner of Heights Blvd. and Center St., near the future West End Walmart, for example, appears to be supporting Jenifer Rene Pool in her bid for an at-large city council seat? Among the empty lots of Washington Ave, there seems to be a lot of support for another candidate for the same position, Eric Dick. What’s up with that? Political consultant Greg Wythe, who’s long studied the demographics and political opinions of Harris County’s human population, has begun a new website devoted to exploring the campaign preferences of Houston’s vacant properties — as expressed by the various signs and banners they’re regularly festooned with.

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04/11/11 4:27pm

What’s it take to get a little paint or something thrown up onto a languishing and partially boarded-up Washington Ave building? If you’re landscape architecture firm Asakura Robinson and you’ve just moved in upstairs in front of the Drake in the building at the corner of Washington and Silver, you just put out a little invitation to Houston Street Art: Free . . . canvas! Bring on the street painters and poster kids! Nine of them showed up yesterday, including your pals weah, Article, Info, Wereone, Marbles, Sode, D-Falt, and COW. Swamplot photographer Candace Garcia caught up with the action as the paint and wheatpaste went down:

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03/15/11 3:01pm

Last Friday, a former St. Anne’s Catholic School P.E. teacher named Jonathan Barnes pled guilty to 4 counts of federal charges in connection with a multimillion-dollar oil-trading kickback scheme. What does the Bellaire resident have to do with the 360 Sports Lounge on Washington Ave? The plea agreement he signed last week spells it out: His investment in the bar was a kickback itself, one of many gifts given to him by his 2 alleged co-conspirators, to thank him for overcharging his employer, Houston Refining (now a part of LyondellBasell) by as much as $82 million for shipping contracts he arranged with their companies.

Why might Barnes have figured that a new Washington Ave sports bar would be a good investment? Well, his stint at Enron in the early 1990s had given him a solid business background.

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12/17/10 1:45pm

“You wouldn’t believe the amount of hate mail that I have received since I closed it,” owner Andrew Adams says about the Corkscrew, the wine bar he and his brother Doyle opened way back in 2006 — the early days of the new Washington Ave — but shut down last year. But Adams has been paying attention. He tells the HBJ‘s Allison Wollam he’s planning to reopen the Corkscrew in the Heights in February, as well as a second location elsewhere, which he plans to call Little Corkscrew. Where in the Heights? Adams won’t say, “because he’s still negotiating leases,” but he says he’s “considering” a building on White Oak.

If the Corkscrew does make the move to White Oak, it’ll be joining several new restaurant neighbors: Christian’s Tailgate, Tacos A Go-Go, and D’Amico’s Italian Market Cafe.

The Adams brothers recently gave up on the Corkscrew’s successor, an organic-style cocktail bar they eventually called Sugarcane, after all of 5 months. They’ll be leasing out their space at 1919 Washington to club owners who plan to open a “trendy, upscale bar, complete with bottle service,” he tells Wollam:

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11/05/10 1:19pm

Workers are dismantling the two half-built-and-holding townhomes at the corner of Jackson Hill and Washington Ave., says the reader who sends us these photos of the activity at the well-known and well-weathered properties. Demolition permits for 915 and 917 Jackson Hill showed up on Swamplot earlier this week. “No bulldozers or anything, looks like they’re disassembling them from the top down,” explains our tipster. Could this be the dawn of . . . a brand-new parking lot for Washington?

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10/14/10 1:37pm

The president of a local real estate organization is hoping Swamplot readers can help her put together a slide show illustrating changes that have taken place over the years to the Washington Ave streetscape. How many of you have access to really old photos of Washington Ave? Well, you probably don’t have to go back too far to find images of a street that looked rather different than it does today. Send your old images — and please include captions and credit info — to the Swamplot tipline, and we’ll forward them to CCIM Houston/Gulf Coast‘s Ann-Marie Daleo, for inclusion in that organizations’ Washington Corridor Overview and Networking Event on November 4th. Daleo promises she’ll post the presentation online after the event, for anyone to download. And if any good before-and-after views come out of it we’ll post them here as well.

Photos: Houston Metropolitan Research Center, Houston Public Library (top) and GHPA (bottom)

09/29/10 1:20pm

COMMENT OF THE DAY: YOU COULD’VE HAD A CHAIN STORE! “this was a terrible gym location, and parking was going to be a battle from day one. hate to be johnny-come-suburb, but it was a better call to work a deal to redevelop the site with CVS and give them their free-standing deal with drive thru. Soma would be down the street somewhere, hopefully with easier access/parking, crew would not be under, and this property would be better served than the future it has. now the owner spent time/effort with this problem, has a built-out gym that is not usable for another gym (nightclub, here we come…for 9 months), has 3500 sf that doesn’t lease (my guess is from lack of parking/ability to pay the rent) and has a basement (???) that will never lease. all of this, and he could be on a beach right now, getting his checks in the mail from year 4 of 20 with CVS as the return addressee.” [jg, commenting on Fitness-Club Scavengers at the Washington Ave Crew] Photo of West End Shopping Center, Washington Ave at Shepherd: Aaron Carpenter

09/28/10 1:16pm

A photo snapped at the storefront of Crew Health and Fitness at 4826 Washington Ave., in the restored shopping center between Shepherd and Durham, taken around 2:30 Sunday afternoon. Yes, the workout shop is now officially out of business. But what are all those yellow tags attached to the window? Free passes — to LA Fitness on Richmond! A tipster tells Swamplot the LA Fitness sales team heard news of Crew’s demise around 10 a.m. on Sunday: “They had representatives at the doors trying to sign people up when we went by.”

Photos: Swamplot inbox (Crew Fitness storefront) and Aaron Carpenter (West End Shopping Center)

09/11/09 1:05pm

COMMENT OF THE DAY: WRAP KNAPP WITH VELVET ROPE LINES “Good riddance! This landmark has for too long stood in the way of shiny-shirt progress. Think of how many bars with names like ‘Elite,’ ‘Wealth,’ or ‘Entitled’ you could fit on that property! For my money, I might just have to call [it] the Bourgeoises, in honor of the now defunct Proletariat. And by ‘in honor of’ I mean ‘urinating upon the memory of.’” [Nord, commenting on GM Wants To Take Away Knapp]

07/07/09 12:04pm

More action in the ongoing battle over the Washington Ave. Spec’s: Responding in kind to the lawsuit filed against his company by the Harris County District Attorney in March, the owner of Spec’s has filed his own complaint against the city of Houston and Harris County.

The new countersuit claims that by granting the store permits, the city had agreed to allow the Spec’s at the Washington and Westcott roundabout to sell alcohol — even though the property was less than 1000 ft. from Memorial Elementary School. According to a city ordinance, only establishments earning more than half their revenue from food sales are allowed to sell alcohol within 1000 ft. of a school.

Spec’s owner John Rydman says the city agreed to issue the permits to sell alcohol at the store

even though the proximity to the school was noted on the application. He said he renovated a building and entered into a five-year lease at a cost of $2 million based on the assumption that the permits were valid. . . .

In a previous interview, Rydman said he knew of the potential problem and would not commit to build out the property or to sign a lease unless the city agreed to a variance. When the permits were granted, he said he thought all obstacles had been cleared.

The Harris County Attorney’s office contends that the granting of the permit was a simple error — and Spec’s officials knew it.

Meanwhile, a Swamplot reader writes in with a few pointed questions about the roles of the building’s owner and leasing agent in the dispute:

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06/29/09 9:53am

HAIF poster Htowngirl, who lives near the new Ei8ht nightclub at the corner of Roy St., complains about . . . uh, parking difficulties in her neighborhood. And posts a few photos of an early Sunday morning scene from a few weeks ago:

The parking for Ei8ht in the neighborhood is already horrendous, I can’t even imagine what it will be like when Taps, Busty LaRoue’s, and this new “country” bar open…

Sample of the parking issues… I live a few blocks off Washington, near Ei8ht…the scene outside my house at 3 AM Sunday Morning a few weeks ago. Drunk suburbanite 21-year-old drove into our ditch.

Still there in the morning…

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