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H-Town Man

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Everything posted by H-Town Man

  1. H-Town Man
    The Discovery West tower by Skanska has the retail entrances recessed from the above facade, so that pedestrians have shade cover as they walk along Lamar Street.
  2. H-Town Man
    Well, there's no design review or zoning so up to the developer and possibly the tenant. I think Hines made it optional for the tenant to open to the exterior and Frost Bank didn't want to. Hines did envision that building as an attempt to revitalize central downtown, but it was more like, "We shall grace them with the presence of our expensive building" rather than really embracing the place architecturally. They saved the Stowers Building, though, and put a nice lobby on Rusk, so baby steps. The urban renaissance hadn't happened in Houston at that point, although people on here were trying to awaken understanding and the city and Metro were doing all they could with things like the Main Street rebuild, Cotswold Project, etc.
  3. H-Town Man
    This picture made my day. I have not generally liked this building so far, as I fear the march of glass and concrete into the Historic District. But at ground level, this is pivotal for downtown Houston. We have not, since before World War II, seen a Class A office building that devoted such attention to the ground level, sidewalk experience. Texas Commerce Tower had ground floor retail as a nod to Main Street, but it was in the parking garage building. BG Group Place turned a cold shoulder to Main. 609 Main has ground floor retail but it's sort of an afterthought architecturally; the emphasis is increasing but it's not really there yet. But this building (1) sharply differentiates the first two floors from the rest of the building, (2) puts the retail on the best street frontage, Texas Avenue, (3) makes the office entrance secondary to the retail - a total revolution for downtown, and (4) adds a canopy as a significant architectural component, in the tradition of the Rice Hotel, acknowledging the climate and the needs of pedestrians, i.e., people who are not necessarily tenants of the building (!). I mean, you literally have to go back to the days of the Gulf Building, 1929, to see this kind of recognition of the street and the public domain in a Houston office building. Obviously the Houston Center reno gives similar attention, but that's a renovation. This is the most premium product from the most premium developer in Houston. A century has gone by and the circle is complete; an era has finally ended, a new one has begun.
  4. H-Town Man
    Good point. I guess I'm wondering, will it just be a low, mostly retail development, or will there be a high rise (likely residential) component above it?
  5. H-Town Man
    Rereading this, I think you must have been referring to the Crane-owned site. I had thought you wrote it in reference to Block 100 (next to Marriott).
  6. H-Town Man
    Not sure if this will be mixed-use or just retail. https://www.houstonchronicle.com/texas-sports-nation/astros/amp/Astros-Jim-Crane-expansion-Minute-Maid-Park-16596664.php
  7. H-Town Man
    Is Dillard's still utilizing the full building? Lots of department stores have shrunk within their buildings and filled space with back offices or storage.
  8. H-Town Man
    Didn't say we wanted it, said it's something that could happen at that location, given what's happening at Richmond/Post Oak. Developer will build whatever is feasible that can give the highest return to the land. 4x50 may be a bit aggressive, but maybe 50+2x30.
  9. H-Town Man
    If there's this much money involved, it opens the door to creative thinking. The landlord goes to Dillard's and says, "Look, I have this opportunity to put towers on the site, it would help your foot traffic, let's do a lease modification." Dillard's says, "Towers don't really help me, sorry." Landlord says, "Does a lease extension to 2065 help you?" Dillard's says, "Ok, tell me your idea." Landlord says, "You get this footprint in which to rebuild your store and x number of spaces in a parking garage, plus a covered driveway for dropoffs and a nice monument sign on the street." Dillard's says, "I wanna sign that's visible from 610." Landlord says, "Alright." Lease modification is drafted and signed, bulldozers roll in...
  10. H-Town Man
    Next to Le Meridien, behind 1 Houston Center.
  11. H-Town Man
    Oh my.
  12. H-Town Man
    Dillard's doesn't have to let the space go. They could partner with a developer to redevelop with four 50-story towers and a Dillard's at the bottom.
  13. H-Town Man
    If they are building this at the corner of Post Oak and Richmond, think what could be done with the Dillard's site, which is at least twice as desirable, without the freeway interchange stigma and dingy Richmond Ave. surroundings. I think we are going to see a lot of redevelopment along Post Oak Blvd. in the next 10 years.
  14. H-Town Man
    I will never in a million years understand why someone would go to a dentist in a high rent location. They do not pay that rent bill by charging you less, they do so by charging you more and performing work you don't need.
  15. H-Town Man
    It is amazing how an incurable disease has blessed our city.
  16. H-Town Man
    I don't understand all the "tell us how you really feel" posts. Brittanie cited ample evidence to support her opinion of the guy. The discussion we should probably be having is, how did he climb so high? His career should have ended with the revenge porn incident (and that was in the days before cell phones... this guy was like a pioneer of the art). What is it about the image this guy presents or his loudmouth way of making ridiculous, polarizing statements that made cities want to keep hiring him as a public steward?
  17. H-Town Man
    Thank you for bringing this to light for us.
  18. H-Town Man
    I think they found evidence of oil and gas at the construction site and are going to go ahead and frack the site before proceeding further with construction.
  19. H-Town Man
    Update from a Costar interview with Mark Cover, CEO of Hines Southwest Region: "At this point, Texas Tower will reach its TCO [temporary certificate of occupancy], its official completion, I guess, in another 60 days, and maybe a little bit sooner," Cover said. "We’re around 50% leased." As for the remaining available space at Texas Tower, Cover said prospects are interested in the high-rise for a variety of reasons. "We’ve got some great conversations going on with some companies who are looking to either make a significant upgrade in their systems and in their offering to their employees, or coming into the market who haven’t been there before, or in one case coming into the country and looking for an image that goes with that building," he said.
  20. H-Town Man
    FIFY
  21. H-Town Man
    Was the photo in the print edition? Not that it matters much.
  22. H-Town Man
    Exxon added its last highrise there in 1994 and it was a nice one, so the office district still had legs into the 90's. For the mall, the "Gunspoint" reputation had already set in by the early 90's. Whoever thought of that little nickname really did a number on the place, let me tell you. It said something when even your parents knew the slang term. The blame I've always heard is on all the cheap apartment complexes that were built around the office district. That's what brought the bus routes.
  23. H-Town Man
    I was in Greenspoint over the weekend and thought a little about this forgotten area. Driving in I noticed how nice all the lawns were around the office buildings with trees lining the roadways. My wife commented, "Houston really does have nice trees." It occurred to me what a shame it was that all of this was going to waste. Office occupancy for that submarket is about 45%. A group of office buildings sold there a couple of years ago for around $30/SF - they would have been worth more in Amarillo. The whole area kind of said "80's" to me, and of course, the 80's is pretty down right now. But it won't be forever. In 10 or 15 years, people are going to say "Ahh! The 80's!" the same way that 15 or 20 years ago they started to say, "Ahh! Mid-century!" And then Greenspoint will be a really hot commodity, assuming it's still there and hasn't been totally disfigured by renovations. The place has a pretty decent skyline for a suburban office complex, taller than most suburban skylines, thanks to the money and power of oil. If Houston could just find some office user that would look on these buildings as the gems that they are.
  24. H-Town Man
    No one has mentioned The Book Collector in Rice Village, which back in the 1990's filled the little house at the southeast corner of Morningside and University. They specialized in first editions, Civil War, and Napoleonic history, as well as very expensive toy soldiers. All over the main room were first editions of books like The Great Gatsby, The Sound and the Fury, Catch-22, Rebecca, The Old Man and the Sea, etc., priced at thousands apiece, enticingly displayed, but if you touched one of them, an alarm went off. The owner was a heavyset man named James Taylor (IIRC) who would talk your ear off if you looked like you had money and pretty much ignore you if you didn't. If you were the well-dressed wife of one of his toy soldier collectors (these miniatures ran $500-$1,000 apiece) coming to buy a gift for her husband, he would lick the bottoms of your shoes. It was difficult to browse and focus on what you were looking at with the sound of his sycophancy bellowing through the store. Then there were his declarations that he had "the best selection in the South," that he'd "pay more for your books than anyone in the South." I will give him this much credit: he was a unique person in a unique place, of a type that was disappearing from the world. I look at Google Earth and am surprised to see 1/4 Price Books still in the same location on South Shepherd that I remember visiting 20 years ago. I would not go there again but I do credit the owner for staying in business. We chatted a bit about books and then I brought to the counter a copy of The Savage Mind by Claude Levi-Strauss. He loudly remarked, "Levi-Strauss! The good stuff!" with a look of mockery, as though to question the caliber of my reading. I think he thought I was getting a book about the maker of blue jeans rather than the French anthropologist. Becker's Books is another one where my one or two visits 15-20 years ago will have to do, I have no desire to ever go back. Decent selection though, and perhaps time has mellowed the owner? There is something about running a used book shop in Houston that brings out the "big fish in a small pond" syndrome to an unbearable degree. The one place whose owner was congenial was Copperfield's on Louetta at Champion Forest Dr. He had the kindly demeanor and quiet manner that one envisions in a used book shop owner. The selection wasn't anything special - I suppose he was dependent on what people brought in - but his character sticks in my memory. The shop is long gone now; hope he came out well in the end.
  25. H-Town Man
    Since Hindesky's photo was taken, depicting a property that had been searching for a tenant for a couple years already, the pandemic landed a gutpunch to the office market and the aspirational multi-block development that was to partially surround this building declared bankruptcy.
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