Upper Kirby Corporate Plaza Finally Down to the Dregs and the Direct Auto Billboard

Corporate Plaza I Demolition, Kirby at Norfolk, Upper Kirby, Houston, 77098

Here’s this morning’s view of the former Corporate Plaza site, now sans the skeletal midrise that spent much of May wasting away. Standing at the edge of the rubble is the Texas Direct Auto billboard, visible here from its non-dayglo-yellow backside above the cluster of excavators picking over the last of the former midrise. On the left (at the corner of Kirby and 59) is the separately-owned Shell service station property, boxed in by the increasingly empty lot throughout the entire demo spectacle.

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The almost-vacant site of the former office-buildings-slash-restaurant-strip complex sits across Kirby from Indian-French-American-paleo-diet fusion restaurant Ruggles Black, which blocks casually risqué sports bar Twin Peaks from Kirby-side exposure with assists from Allegiance Bank, the former Cafe Japon building, and Taco Cabana. 

Photo: Lulu

And Then There Was Shell

5 Comment

  • Anyone know what their plan is for this tract?

  • @Bill: I was under the impression that the current owners were just demoing the site to sell it for a higher price. Not 100% sure.

  • Yari needs to buy the Shell station no matter what they want.

  • Swamplot – It’s time for high resolution photos. 800×600 was great when I had a 15″ CRT monitor, but the dream of the 90’s is only alive in Portland.

  • The final sentence of this report is a masterpiece, brilliantly folding every relevant feature of Houston – demolition and construction, self-satisfied trendiness, commerce, failed restaurants, middling fast food, and a cloud of limp double entendre and breezy exploitation – into one corner-sized package. This sentence belongs on a banner, downtown.