rechlin

Only four more days left on the grace period for your car's registration, cloud713.

Click for a bigger, close-up view of the "mud-mat".  I too wonder what it is!

The white primary lights on the poles are always on at night.  Depending on the phase of the moon, a decorational blue light on the top of the poles may also light up.  Where the path goes under Memorial just west of the bend in the bayou, the lighting attached to the bridge is either white or blue depending on the moon phase.

This should be about the same as BG Group Place, as both include a two story garage and probably need a similar foundation, but I don't know officially.  I have no idea how thick the concrete mat will be, but again it should probably be similar to BG Group Place due to a similar building size and composition.

They have put a lot of dirt back in the hole from the old Texas building to shore up the walls (its foundation is still in place) while they put in the outer wall for the new building just outside the old foundation.  I've been watching them use a giant auger to take dirt out from just outside the old foundation, and then they put rebar and concrete deep in there.  My guess is once the new wall is in place, they will probably dig up that dirt and remove the old walls.

Thanks, Howard Huge.  I now see the link (where your quote came from) that I was looking for on page 1 of this thread, with the story behind this block:

http://www.downtownhouston.org/news/article/back-future/

Amazing that it took almost 30 years for the bulldozing of the historic buildings on that lot to be (almost) redeemed, but I'm glad it's finally happening.  It's such a shame that after they were illegally turn down, it sat for so long as an empty lot.

I've been out of town for most of the last month, so I haven't been able to follow any of these developments in person lately.  However, I have been watching the construction camera.

I noticed yesterday they started digging what looks like a hole in the side of the wall towards the Magnolia Hotel.  Might this be a tunnel connection?  Has anyone who's been on top of the Binz Garage been able to see what they might be doing there?

See the indicated area here:

Speaking of Boston, Boston doesn't even have rail to their airport yet -- they are still running BRT for that line.  So I can't see them doing rail to even Hobby anytime soon (though Hobby would be a lot cheaper to get to than Intercontinental).  Someday, sure.

Old apartments: 240 units on 2 stories with surface parking

New apartments: 378 units on 5 stories with a parking garage

Does this mean they are only using part of the space?  Or how did the number of units only go up by a bit over 50% even though it got significantly denser?  Are the units much bigger?

And tonight around 8:30 I caught them disassembling the construction elevator.  They had to take breaks whenever a train came nearby, because the forklift had to go onto the tracks to get at the elevator.  Getting really close to being able to finish the façade!

I haven't provided any updates lately since there hasn't been much to update on, but finally we're seeing a little more progress so I figured I'd share another photo.

Today they started taking down the main construction elevator, now that the mast climbers have been gone for a couple weeks.  This photo taken in the morning shows it down about a quarter of the way; by late afternoon it was down about half way.

Also, they put a giant tank on the roof, and then built a frame around it, and then put panels on it and painted it beige; you can see it right in front of the Esperson cupula in this photo.

You can't see it in this photo, but the first floor of the penthouse has now been painted beige to match the upper two floors (which were painted months ago).

They're now almost done installing windows, too.  As of mid afternoon, they had installed window frames all the way down to the eighth floor in the unfinished section on the right side of this photo.

Curtains and bathtubs are visible in some of the windows in this photo, too.

Digressing from the topic here, but...

Basements are always expensive.  People don't have basements unless there is a good reason.  In the north, you need the foundation of the house to be below the freeze point, to avoid problems with the foundation shifting, so you have to dig.  If you're going to dig down, you might as well have a basement, even if it's only halfway undergound (in North Dakota, where I am from, basements are typically at least 3/4 below the ground to ensure stability of the foundation).  Also, the basement provides better insulation from the cold, so you have reduced heating expenses if you can have more of your house underground.

In northern cities of Texas like Dallas, you can't easily get a basement because the bedrock is so close, meaning expensive blasting would be required.  My parents went through this in Arkansas -- when they built their house they spent something like $20,000 on blasting just to get only a third of their lower floor below ground.  So basements are actually even less feasible there.  In Houston, we don't have that problem, but the cost of digging the basement still makes it not worth it for most residential homes, since there's no real need for one aside from slightly better insulation in the summer (though a lot of commercial construction uses basements).  No, the water table is not much more of a concern than in other places -- even in places like North Dakota, most modern homes have sump pumps to keep water out of the basement, and people still get flooding occasionally.

Right now the golf cart guards are mostly staying on the completed section (north bank east of Montrose).  I've been seeing them most days over the last couple weeks.  Presumably they will roam the entire park once the construction is complete.  All they seem to do now is get in the way, though; I've noticed no change in the number of homeless (basically just one guy) over the last year.

Here's what Hines had to tell us about the new tunnel amenities under 806 Main, which will be closed for 2 months starting Monday, May 19 for the renovations:

In case you didn't notice in the photos that I see were just posted, when I walked by earlier today the crane was coming down.  Not surprised, since they didn't even use the crane Thursday or Friday.  Time to finish digging the basement!

Just when I thought they were almost done tearing down the Texas Tower, it appears there is one more floor to go -- the basement!  You can kind of see it from the construction camera.

I thought the building would be gone this week, but if they have to excavate the basement, that may take until next week.  The first floor is about 3/4 gone now.

I'm curious: has any housing stock come online downtown since the completion of the census in 2010?

I think the City View Lofts opened in 2011.  Also, it's possible some of the last units of the Commerce Towers opened since then.  I know that was a gradual process over quite a few years.

The Melrose Building is really the only building left near 609 Main that badly needs to be addressed.  It smells awful and has been vacant for as long as I can remember.  Now that they totally renovated the old Texaco garage next to it, with the Texaco building behind it in the process of being renovated, and with 6HC supposed to go in across the street, it seems like it is time to finish addressing this block (the other half of the block is surface parking).  Yet I have not heard a word anywhere about any plans for the building, either tearing it down or renovating it.

I vaguely remember reading somewhere that 609 Main is supposed to have "unparalleled" access to the tunnel system.  I know some have said there were rumors it would be connected to the JP Morgan Chase Center Garage across Main.  But I also read that it was going to be connected to BG Group Place.  The only way I could see that working would be to go from BG Group Place diagonally across Fannin/Rusk through the renovated Texaco building, under the garage that will be built for it, into the Sak's garage (which already has an abandoned tunnel connection to it across Capital, I believe), and then across Fannin to 609 Main.  Perhaps "unparalleled" means they will have both for 609 Main?  Has there been any update on this?

If the latter connection is made, that would mean that the block with the Melrose building will then have easy tunnel access (via the tunnel diagonally between BG Group Place and the Texaco building), so perhaps that empty half block could be put to use.

Battlestein's is nearby, too, but I wouldn't be surprised if they do ground level renovations as part of the 806 Main project (the sidewalk has been closed off for well over a year anyway), and it's nowhere near the eyesore that the Melrose Building is.

Looks like they removed a lot of the exterior from the lower floors over the weekend, after chipping away at the windows earlier in the week (click for bigger versions):

The AT&T building is actually a predecessor to a data center.  Back when telephone switching equipment took lots of space, they had to build buildings like this just to handle telephone calls.  There's a similar one downtown, too.  Nowadays the switching equipment is much more compact, so I guess these buildings could be converted to data centers.  Usually companies like to have data centers be much less prominent, though.  I have no idea what all this building is being used for now.  I'm sure some of it is still used for switching, but I think that wouldn't occupy the whole building.  It used to have a bunch of antennas, I think for microwave frequencies, on the roof, but they are all gone now.

The speculation among my coworkers and me is that the "STOP" line means that they can't lower the scaffolvator (lol) on that side any more past that point because it will hit things on the building, so at that point they either need to stop lowering the mast climber or remove it altogether.

You can easily see the camera from the ground, so I can tell just by looking up there that the camera we've been watching (which looks to the southeast) is down for the window washers.

However, while walking by the other day I noticed they also had a camera mounted on the other side of the Chase Tower, facing to the northeast.  That should give a perfect view of the two Market Square towers once they start, plus the International Tower if anything ever comes out of that.  I wonder if anyone can guess the URL of that camera?  I tried a few things but couldn't figure it out, but maybe it's not published online yet.  I figure since the Market Square residential tower is also a Hines project that they'll probably pay for the camera for that one, too.

Unless they've changed it since this plan was posted here in September, the leg facing Main will be a pocket park. The leg facing Prairie will be a loading dock:
 

They've clearly been digging a pit in the south corner of the block for a while now, I think since early last week. There's been a steady stream of dump trucks all week, hauling out dirt rather than just debris from the tower deconstruction.