Golyadkin

The building looks A LOT like the cosmo.  I am generally pretty positive on here so don't call me a debbie downer, but I think this building will be drastically underwhelming. 

 

The gothic, cathedral style facade near the entrance could be very nice, but if it is done cheaply it will look like s**t.  

 

All this being said,  I hope for the best, sales are great already and any addition to the Uptown Skyline is fine by me!

I'm pretty sure it's intended to be sister tower to the Cosmo, hence the similar designs.

Wow, so now we know where McD's and where Astroia will go.

I'm not sure those are the sites for the two buildings. I think the tower will end up taking up a bigger footprint then that.

"Road construction is starting...in 4 months and will last 18 months, which is close to our proposed time of completion..."
He's not following the news all that closely, is he? Road construction is starting in 2015 and will be finished sometime in 2017.

"We have also increased to total height to 28 floors, as a client has purchased and entire floor with a pool."
Okay, admit it, among the people here, if you had the money, wouldn't you buy an entire custom tower floor with a pool?

Also, isn't the Cosmopolitan only like 25/26 stories? This is going to be taller?

3rd-to-last picture: BLVD Place Phases 1+2, including the Whole Foods.
last picture: Hanover residential tower.

From just now:


They've had a second of those pier-drilling things there for a few days now, and as of this morning, the base of a crane!

I wonder if at this point we shouldn't split off the Hanover tower into it's own thread.

You're right. My angle on the area made it look to me like he was in the office tower. Well, I got part of that tower in the picture too, so let's say I was right anyway.

From just now:

Now with SkylineView getting these shots, we just need someone in Sage Plaza getting regular shots for us and we'll have the site covered on all sides!

Also, @SkylineView: I see you!

The speeches started around 10:40, and wrapped up around 11:15. Pretty good speeches, too. There was a table set up with chunks of concrete from Robertson for people to take home. Mack Rhodes mentioned that the design process was 100% complete and the construction docs were 50% complete, and that they are actually a little ahead of schedule at this point. He also mentioned that the field will still be called John O'Quinn Field after a $5 million donation in the past few days by his foundation.

Got a few pictures with my cell phone before the whole thing started:
 

Also, I'd like to suggest either making this thread officially the stadium thread and making all discussions about the stadium from here on here instead of the general UH development thread, or merge this with that thread.

It most likely will by this summer or close to it. I believe they start construction once it hits 50%.

If that's the case, at the rate the sales are going by now, I wouldn't be surprised to see no delay at all between the McDonald's demo and the start of construction.

The McDonalds is officially closed.  If you need a burger in the north Post Oak area... God help you.  You will have to schlep down to the Jack in the Box on San Felipe.  Wah waaaah.

Not really excited but confused. Isn't there the proposed middle bus lanes or something that they hope someday would be converted to rails? Is this what it meant by rails?

Yeah. The bus lanes are hoped to be a stopgap measure for 15-20 years until METRO gets it together and actually builds the rail line. I believe the idea is to just slap rails down on the bus lanes and call it a day when they finally do get around to it.

Just drove by. There are a few firetrucks, a police car, and an ambulance in front of the site, with a lot of workers standing around staring at something. I couldn't see what had happened.

So that's what those people in the white shirts were. I thought it was some protest march or something when I saw them going by this morning.

Thanks.   Do we have any idea of the configuration of the additional high rises?  Or are they just "proposed"?  

 

From what I understand,  all the really cool configurations from earlier in the thread are all gone now - correct?

So far no plans of any kind have been released. There were several previous proposals for some of them, but most of them are unlikely at best. Right now we are just waiting for new information to come out, and we have no timeline for that.

Also in the Bizjournal article linked above was this last paragraph.

 

 

 

 

I'm so lost on the twists and turns of Blvd Place.  Can someone simply explain where the other 645 high-rise units are going and where the hotel is going.

 

Last I knew,  only high-rise buildings being built were Hanover's (above) and whatever Apache builds.

 

I apologize in advance for being dense on this one.

Here's the site plan:

As swtsig said, it calls for 6 towers total: 3 residential, 1 hotel, 2 office.

Someone mentioned earlier that the garage section is pre-fab and will just be thrown up in a matter of weeks. I don't think anyone can move in before it's up, as the garage section that is currently built has no slopes connecting the levels. It'd be kinda bold of them to assuming that we'll have hover cars within 5 months.

It's all been internal work for a while now. They done some minor exterior things like painting, but beyond that nothing too visible from the outside.

I had said they hadn't started it yet. And they haven't. The bottom of the current tower is part of the parking, yes, but around the outside, in the picture that HOUSTONIAN (N-ATL) posted, there is an additional garage structure. That doesn't appear to have been started yet.

I drove past a different McDonald's today, one that is the new style building that will be going here. It's really thin. With enough space for a drive thru, the edge of the building won't be any farther out than the flag poles out front, if that.

Through talking with the guy at McDonald's and looking at the renderings on their website, it looks to me like the edge of the tower is going to be somewhere between that white strip in the parking lot and the edge of the current McDonald's. I think they are pushing it over as far as they can while still having just enough room for a drive thru on that side. I suspect the tower is going to have a much smaller footprint than most of us expected.

It Looks like they just picked up their first tenant:

http://blog.chron.co...s-first-tenant/

Does anyone have some construction update shots? The curtainwall should be done soon right?

I'll try to go down this weekend and get a few shots. As of now the curtainwall is almost finished and still going up rapidly (I drive by every day and there is definite visible progress each time). The garage still hasn't been started yet.

Just went by and talked to a guy who I think was a manager at McDonald's. What I got from him:

-McDonald's is closing in 10 days.

-McDonald's reopening in May. They are demolishing their current building and putting up a new one that's pushed over more towards the apartments at 1111 Post Oak. They are going to clear the site and get a new building up and opened within 3-4 months.

-This is the new McDonald's:

They've started putting in the first steel frame for the office/retail section (phase 2 specifically - the concrete structure that's been going up on the site so far has been the garage).

There's already a 16+ story tower two blocks from this site over on Robinhood. If they do it right I can see this being a nice addition to the area. If they do it wrong, however, I can see it ruining the aesthetic of a nice neighborhood.

I'm hoping BLVD Place gets a W myself. I got to stay at the W Taipei in August. BEST. HOTEL. EVER. Also, almost every W I've seen has been an incredible modern tower. It would fit perfectly in the area.

Unfortunately, that's the ORIGINAL plan for the site, circa 2007. This tower (http://swamplot.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/hanover-blvd-place.jpg) is the most recent rendering for that site. I wish the 57-story one was more recent, but it's not. It's a pre-recession rendering, meaning that it's pretty much certain to never happen.