Houston Pavilions land sale complete

Looks like the rumored Houston Pavilions shopping and entertainment complex downtown may be a step closer to reality — the company that owned the three blocks between Main, Polk, Dallas and Caroline has completed the sale of the land and agreed to lease its garage at 1313 Main St. to the project developers.

Houston Pavilions is a proposed $200 million complex that will include 365,000 square feet of retail space, an office tower and more than 200 condos. It's modeled on Denver Pavilions, a 350,000-square-foot complex that opened in 1998 and includes a number of stores, restaurants and a 15-screen movie theater. And it could work — downtown these days is notoriously low on street-level retail and there aren't any mainstream movie theaters, and Houston Pavilions would be in a prime spot on the MetroRail line. (We imagine American Apparel, which is opening a store at Main and Dallas in the old Sakowitz building, would be glad to have something across the street drawing people in, too.)

When you talk about downtown shopping complexes, you have to talk about The Shops at Houston Center. But Houston Pavilions could thrive where the Shops failed — it might have a viable mix of tenants (like the Shops did for a couple of weeks), we assume it would have windows and, perhaps most important, it looks like people would actually be able to figure out how to get inside. Maybe we're hoping for too much.

Someone on the Houston Architecture forum says a public announcement will be made about Houston Pavilions on the 19th. Stay tuned.