strickn

On 4/28/2023 at 6:19 PM, hindesky said:

Proposed plat for Montrose Car Care.

You could be a Gerry Hines and start out by building independent book stores with mechanics' parking lots tucked underneath.

But you know...if that parcel for parking is smaller than the Montrose parcel, and the latter is 7700 square feet, it is likely that the brokerage sign in your first photo for five buildings, marketing most of an acre (acre is 43560 square feet) of ground, sale or lease and together or in part, was a larger ell shape including some "contributing properties" on the block.  Even those properties have a lot of their back halves open for their parking.  
 

You can introduce your mechanic to your gas station owner to your crane operator friends.  It's bound to be the first hotel whose parking garage will include valet auto repair and inhouse refueling while-you-read-and-wait in the sunny independent bookstore off the hotel lobby cafés.

https://www.houstonpress.com/media/pdf/nixon_meyerland-sept11.pdf contains the extensive brunch documentation 

have you ever found any photos of the demolished Blaffer home at 2 Briarwood?

Looks like the original owners and designers used at most local oyster shells even in the gateway

More charming in this photo than in the one mkultra linked.  Who took this photo and where is it found?

A later owner (Rice U?) must have turned a lot of the shaded yard into a paved driveway and motorcourt

The Frogger as pedestrians dash and dodge thru those three wide curb cuts

Go go go go ohhhh too late

I was wrong.  Stephen Fox made an excellent investigation of the 1920s Auto Row here-- all the more reason for Chevron to have left the last of the urban auto dealerships standing in 2018 before they ignored his reasoning and tore it down, replacing it with nothing AFAIK. https://www.ricedesignalliance.org/shelor-motor-company-building-and-the-milam-street-auto-row-a-history-by-stephen-fox

see also

http://www.houstondeco.org/1920s/burton.html

If blueprints are available in archives then I would not be surprised to find out that an office tower had been designed by the architects, but never built above the ornate base after the Depression kept on

DIBS

Before its demolition its later address 1414 Milam shows up too

Milam @ Clay would be a place people would go to see if this weren't demolished 

Wish the Nau Museum of Houston History could get a bee in its bonnet to make a new version of this building on the spot for their collections

Can we have a super daytime searchlight on Transco please?

Just got promoted by the HAIF brass from Condominium to Convention Center so I'm afraid you'll just have to wait 

tbh Tory Gattis and other Houston fans have been analyzing it this way for decades

Huh!  That's interesting 

Groups who latch onto innovation as a useful buzzword are less likely to find themselves looking at where it actually takes place

You can see how far below the downtown average this building has listed a full floor sublease:  https://www.commercialcafe.com/commercial-property/us/tx/houston/three-allen-center-1/

Not an expert in accounting but I would also expect that renting to yourself depresses the value more than it elevates the market clearing price.  I would expect, even when you are involved with a third party CBRE/JLL leasing agent/broker, that there are tax rules about how hard a bargain you can agree to when a transaction isn't arms' length.  If there were none then private equity vulture capital could even more easily strip cashflow from one subsidiary to another, under the guise of holding the keys to one asset or another that the first one has agreed to lease back.  

On 8/5/2023 at 8:21 AM, 004n063 said:

I think virtually any high-rise in Houston is ultimately a net good, for exactly the reasons you mention.

But I personally can't think of a single one that I am or ever was (post-renderings) excited about...

there is an element of remove that is inherent to the form and intrinsic to the appeal of highrise living. Obviously I think that's a lot better than a gated enclave of suburban mansions, but it still runs counter to the ethos of incidental community and public realm that (to me) is characteristic of great urban environments.

Again, not intended as a critique of this project or as any kind of active opposition to highrises. But personally, I'd choose Fort Greene over Downtown Brooklyn, Boston's South End over its Seaport, Roma/La Condesa over Paseo de la Reforma in CDMX, etc

yes, I agree.  I don't know how to refer to or relate to a place I live if I only have a hotel-room's-eye presence and not a garden or porch

Smacks of a soft building, since Toronto-based Brookfield also controls American National (the same company that the Moody family of Galveston built, and which a Brookfield subsidiary BAMR acquired last year).

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/brookfield-asset-management-reinsurance-partners-105500010.html

Well, html won’t display after all. https://www.google.com/maps/embed?pb=!4v1693423202515!6m8!1m7!1sHgIT0xBA_AxuxW0H2SdcoQ!2m2!1d29.76344367295827!2d-95.35994331749268!3f324.8149246327079!4f48.58286269830066!5f0.4000000000000002" 

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<iframe src="https://www.google.com/maps/embed?pb=!4v1693423202515!6m8!1m7!1sHgIT0xBA_AxuxW0H2SdcoQ!2m2!1d29.76344367295827!2d-95.35994331749268!3f324.8149246327079!4f48.58286269830066!5f0.4000000000000002" width="600" height="450" style="border:0;" allowfullscreen="" loading="lazy" referrerpolicy="no-referrer-when-downgrade"></iframe>

Opposite UHD College of Public Service, now…

Yes here we go https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gate_Tower

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Building_penetrated_by_an_expressway_001_OSAKA_JPN_(square_crop).jpg

by ignis 

In Osaka and other Japanese cities you’ll see a highrise built with a freeway ramp passing through it… TxDOT hasn’t allowed that in DFW or Houston or San Antonio but maybe the Austin developers are willing to extend this enclave that way…

Thinking about this some more, not many skyscrapers have 25' window walls without anything tying them back to a slab in the middle.  
 

It would be eerie to have those mullions creaking in front of you in a tropical storm.

And from cityliving's drone tours

Bunch of drones on Segways gliding by every weekend...

It's going to take a hundred dollars a head just for drapes in there to offer us a little privacy from the helicopter passengers 

Nearly deleted by the constructors of 288, but escaped with one lot width to spare.  Phew!

https://www.google.com/maps/place/2302+Wichita+St,+Houston,+TX+77004/
 

HAIF no longer lets me edit that post so I'll just add offtopic that Wisconsin, Tennessee, Ohio and New Jersey all have their governors' residences inside a city that is not their state capital (link below).  With Texas being like a whole other country it would be appropriate not to centralize everything and give Austin a big head.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_Governor's_Mansion