Minute Maid Park

Pioneer of downtown's east side, restaurant owner Irma Galvan, has watched her neighborhood rise from an economic wasteland to ground zero of the redevelopment efforts inspired by Enron Field.

When Irma Galvan opened her own Mexican restaurant 11 years ago, the eastern part of downtown surrounding her pioneering outpost was a scary frontier.

Crime was such a constant problem that she locked the doors of Irma's as soon as the lunch rush was over. But that didn't stop thieves, who broke into the restaurant at night and climbed into her second-story balcony to pilfer whatever they could find. They even dug up her landscaping and sold the plants to patrons at a nearby nightclub.

Depressed and tempted to call it quits, she decided to confront the thieves personally. Galvan asked a burly, 6-foot-7-inch friend to pose as her husband, and the diminutive widow also packed a toy gun for a little additional persuasive power.

"I found them selling my plants out there, and I told them that `If I ever see you on my place again, I'll shoot you,' " Galvan says with an embarrassed laugh. "That stopped it completely."

The thieves are gone now and Galvan has a different -- and far more desirable -- set of problems. With the Astros' new stadium opening just three blocks away, she finds her restaurant in the middle of the hottest development zone in the city.

"This was a forgotten part of Houston," said Galvan. "This area was dead. Now I hear my customers talking about doing shopping malls, lofts, bars, all sorts of things around here."

Houstonians driving up to Enron Field on opening day will be disappointed if they expect to see a gleaming array of new office buildings, restored loft condos and bustling sports bars. What they will find in the blocks adjacent to the baseball stadium is a motley assortment of vacant lots and battered buildings, many with their windows boarded up.

But look again at some of these street corners, and you may see a cluster of people standing around an old building. One is talking into a cellular phone. Another is scribbling on a clipboard. They are the architects of this neighborhood's future.

Armed with fat checkbooks and ambitious blueprints, investors and developers are descending on downtown's once forgotten east side. Details of their plans are just now being made public, and, taken collectively, they are capable of redefining the way Houstonians think about downtown.

Just over the left field wall of Enron Field, barely out of reach of a Jeff Bagwell homer, a large brick and glass tower called Ballpark Place has been proposed by Trammell Crow. Ballpark Place will probably have stores and restaurants on the ground floor, followed by several levels of parking, with the upper floors devoted to offices and residences. For now, Trammell Crow will use the land for surface parking, but the firm is expected to create a 20-story tower on the site within a year or two.

Crescent Real Estate Equities recently purchased two full blocks of land just south of Enron Field for a new office tower and parking garage. But Crescent's larger contribution to the area may be massive mixed-used development that could be something of a mini-Galleria.

As it is envisioned at this early stage, it would include a large chunk of retail stores, a 250-room hotel, as many as 300 condominium units and some offices. The L-shaped project would run along Crawford Street, just south of Enron Field. Crescent has not committed to going forward on the project, and it might take years to complete, but company officials say it's definitely on the drawing boards.

"We've got to take a serious look at this. This could be exciting," said Alan Friedman, president of development for Crescent.

Two blocks north of the stadium, local investor Yorum Vulkan is proposing an ambitious 37-story, twin-tower condominium project with plenty of parking space to serve baseball fans. Unlike the big corporate outfits that have bought most of the land around the stadium, Vulkan is more like a wildcatter. His biggest partner is a Tel Aviv diamond trader. Vulkan said it will take about six months to complete the plans for his project.

Three blocks from the stadium, an abandoned Nabisco cracker factory built in 1910 is being redeveloped as 39 loft residences. As workers labored Friday to tear down a small portion of the building, a brick wall collapsed and injured several men.

Spire Realty of Houston has been a major player in the downtown land rush, snapping up five properties in the ballpark area in December -- including an old bus station and the abandoned William Penn and Sam Houston hotels. Spire plans to convert the buildings into an assortment of residential and retail businesses, possibly including a hotel.

Stadium-area land speculators looking to turn a quick buck will soon be brushed aside by real development deals, said Bill Franks of Spire Realty.

"The ballgame has started," Franks said. "The speculators are getting out of the way and the users are coming in."

Developers are willing to pay top dollar for ballpark area property, and the sales pace is brisk. Vacant lots that were selling for $10 to $20 per square foot in 1997 are now trading for $50 to $60 per square foot. The best parcels within two blocks of the stadium are fetching $150 per square foot. Since a typical block runs 62,500 square feet, the inflation quickly runs into millions of dollars.

"I've got eight or nine contracts in the title company. This is the best seller's market I've seen in the 30 years I've been here," said Reggie Bowman, a veteran real estate broker who worked to push downtown long before downtown was cool. "Prices have gone up big time."

This is a dramatic reversal from the days when nobody wanted this land. About the best the landowner could hope for was a chance to be used for juror parking by the county courts.

"In 1997 or 1998, there was no activity at all," said realty broker Mike Hassler of CB Richard Ellis. "There was no activity up there, period. In 1997, you could have anything you wanted up there."

Now developers are scouring the area for any available land with a price tag on this side of outrageous.

In perhaps the truest test of Enron Field's impact, the stadium is generating what many believed was impossible -- development spilling eastward past the Eastex Freeway. The Hanover Co., a large apartment development firm, has contracted to buy four blocks on the east side of the freeway, near the intersection of Texas Avenue and Hutchins, for a major residential complex.

Hanover's deal could be the catalyst that helps turn an area of abandoned warehouses and vacant lots into the next Midtown, an area teeming with apartment and townhome construction on the southern rim of downtown.

If the Hanover deal happens, "it will open that east side wide open," said realty broker David Cook of Cushman & Wakefield.

Development on the east side of the freeway will be enhanced by the recent creation of a tax increment reinvestment zone. The 66-acre zone, which includes the old Chinatown area, will provide additional funding for improvements to streets and utilities there. Realty agent Sandra Gunn said a new residential frontier east of U.S. 59 is just a step away.

"All of a sudden you're going to cross that line. It's prime. It's ready," Gunn said as she stood atop a loft building looking eastward toward the dusty, deserted lots east of the freeway.

The east side of downtown will be invigorated by more than the Hanover apartment complexes. The old Herrin warehouse on McKinney is being renovated into lofts. And another loft apartment is planned near the corner of Dowling and Polk.

A microcosm of the attitudinal sea change toward downtown's east side is a shabby building at Chenevert and Franklin that Irma Galvan bought six years ago. She paid about $105,000 for the building, saying she wanted it primarily because it belonged to a furniture company that she spent 28 years working for.

"I bought it for sentimental reasons. I never dreamed the stadium would come down here," she said.

Now Galvan is being peppered with lucrative offers for the 23,000 square foot parcel that's located one block from Enron Field. One proposal is to lease the building for $100,000 for 10 years -- $1 million in total rent. The tenants would fix the place up, and then turn over the improved building back to Galvan when the lease expires. But the tenacious Galvan won't do it. The building is hers, and she intends to occupy it with a new restaurant and bar she plans to open in 2001 -- after a lot of the street, highway and loft construction swirling around her is completed.

"I could sell it for a lot of money, but I didn't buy it to make a lot of money," she said. "I bought it because this neighborhood is very important to me. I grew up here and have lived her most of my life. This neighborhood is who I am."

Other nearby landowners stand to cash in big time. J.D. Austin, who has owned the Fiesta Ballroom and La Luna Lounge for years, said he is surprised that his property has not already been sold.

Austin's land -- almost one acre across the street from Enron Field -- has attracted attention from topless bar operators and a group that wanted to renovate La Luna and Fiesta and rename the establishment the Margarita House. But Austin said he didn't want to sell to a topless joint and nobody else has matched his asking price of $4.7 million.

The revitalization of downtown clearly did not start with the construction of Enron Field. Restaurants, lofts and bars began sprouting up in the blocks around Main Street and Market Square for other reasons. The biggest single reason cited by most of the new business owners is the redevelopment of the Rice Hotel, which emerged from mothballs in 1998.

"We already had the beginnings of a boomlet going on downtown before the stadium," said Bob Eury, head of the Houston Downtown Management District.

A strong local economy, fueled in part by a resurgent energy industry, is sparking widespread growth. Downtown office buildings are brimming with tenants and vacant space has become scarce.

Enron Corp.'s new downtown office tower, which is now under construction on downtown's southwestern rim. It is the first downtown high-rise to be started since the great oil bust of the '80s. Texaco's venerable old headquarters building is being transformed into a 325-room Ritz-Carlton, and the old Humble Oil building also is on its way to becoming a hotel complex.

There is a groundswell of smaller downtown developments that are bringing life to downtown during nights and weekends -- hours when downtown streets used to be empty.

When Scott and Laurie Littlewood decided to open a downtown brew pub called The Mercantile Brewery & Pub, the ballpark played a very minor role in their decision to locate downtown. In fact, the referendum to build the stadium had not yet been passed by local voters.

"The biggest thing for us is the lofts, to get people living down there and creating a neighborhood environment," Laurie Littlewood said.

David Edwards, owner of a fashionable nightclub called the Mercury Room, isn't kidding himself that baseball fans dressed in shorts and sandals will be pouring into his art-deco bar to order a martini. But he is enthused by the idea of 40,000 people coursing in and out of the city. Some of those people will see his place and come back by when they want a more upscale experience.

"But I am very excited about the stadium. It gives more credibility to downtown," Edwards said. "Downtown will be a completely different experience in three, four or five years from now. I have friends from New York who now ask me, `Why in the hell do you live in Houston?' You won't hear that kind of question in five years from now."

It seems fair to say most of the new restaurants and bars that are now open would have moved into downtown with or without the presence of Enron Field. But it's also fair to say many that will make up the next wave are very influenced by the stadium.

"People have been putting (downtown) deals in front of us for 10 years," said Lonnie Schiller, president of the Cafe Express restaurant group. Schiller and his partners always said no because they wanted to wait until downtown could support a Cafe Express with strong lunch and dinner business.

Cafe Express is now in the final stages of completing a lease on Main Street that would allow the restaurant to open later this summer.

"The stadium is a very strong factor in our decision," Schiller said. "We think it's finally time to come downtown. We want to be on one of those streets between the office towers and the stadium so thousands of people will be passing our restaurant before and after every game."

To encourage pedestrian traffic to flow through downtown, the city is spending $21 million on phase one of the Cotswold Project, which will beautify the streetscape with landscaping, improved lighting and some ornamental touches like fountains and flags.

One of the prime paths will be Texas Avenue, which runs on the south side of the stadium and continues past the Rice and on toward the Bayou Place entertainment center.

Texas Avenue has recently been endorsed by the highly experienced Hines development firm, which has proposed to construct a high-rise office tower at Texas and Milam.

Along Texas Avenue, restaurants, clubs and other new development "are going to stack up all the way to the ballpark," said retail center broker Todd Moseley of Moseley Commercial Real Estate. Moseley just leased space at the corner of Texas and Main for the new Samba Room, a Latin themed restaurant that will open later this year.

"I think people just don't realize what the ballpark will do for downtown. I think it's been underestimated," Moseley said."It's what downtown has needed for years -- people."

The biggest contribution of Enron Field, many observers agree, is accelerating the downtown revitalization already under way and pulling it much farther east than it would otherwise go.

"Let's face it, before the ballpark, people wouldn't go into the east end of downtown for anything," said Ed Wulfe, a retail developer recruited by city officials to try and orchestrate the revitalization of Main Street. "The stadium will take downtown to the next level."

Not everyone is hopping on the stadium bandwagon. Pete Pappas, a key figure in the Houston-based Pappas chain, said he has no plans to put an eatery anywhere close to the ballfield. He doesn't think 81-home games will generate enough business to make locating near the field worth his investment.

The Pappas restaurants near the Astrodome pull in an extra $5,000 in sales on game days, he estimates. While that certainly helps business, what really makes those restaurants profitable is all the residents and offices around the Loop 610 area that support them year-round.

"I will open a barbecue restaurant downtown this year, but I want to stay where all the office people are," Pappas said. "It will be in the ground floor of one of the office buildings."

But for every stadium skeptic, there seems to be an optimist ready to take the plunge. And none are more optimistic than Bruce Molzan, owner of Ruggles restaurant. Molzan is in the process of opening three restaurants downtown, all on the east side of Main Street. Total investment by Molzan and his partners -- including Astros owner Drayton McLane -- is about $4 million.

That pays for Ruggles Bistro Latino, which opened at 711 Main last year, and two eateries inside Enron Field. The bigger of the stadium restaurants will command a breathtaking patio right above centerfield.

"During game days, it's going to be a grand slam," Molzan said of his stadium eateries. "This is one of the most unique restaurant locations in the country."

Molzan's larger goal is to build a business that thrives even when the Astros are not playing at home.

"We'll be able to cover our costs on game days," he said. "The catering events and the business we do on non-game days is what will bring us into the black."

Like new baseball stadiums in Denver and Baltimore, Enron Field has certainly generated an impressive roster of real estate projects. But some development-minded executives say more is needed to keep the ball rolling.

"Downtown has great possibilities, but we also need an arena and a convention hotel down there. Eighty-one days is not enough to drive downtown. The cities that have great downtowns have everything downtown, not just a few things," said Tilman Fertitta, chairman of Landry's Seafood Restaurant, who is looking to build an entertainment complex downtown.

Landry's is one of the bidders who wants to redevelop the city-owned Central Waterworks and Fire Station No. 1, located on the banks of Buffalo Bayou near the Theater District. Fertitta is coy about most of the details, saying bidders aren't allowed to discuss their proposals before the city selects a winning candidate. But his bid reportedly includes a large aquarium-themed restaurant, extensive gardens and a large fountain.

"I have a lot of interest in downtown," Fertitta said. "I've been scouting for downtown restaurant sites for a long time. But you have to have catalysts to drive people downtown. We've got to have the arena and a big convention center hotel."

Optimistic those developments can get done, some downtown experts say the current round of development is merely the beginning.


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