If you run or bike the Heights Hike and Bike Trail on a regular morning, you already know the stretch. Somewhere past the skate park and before the trail bends toward White Oak Bayou, there is a chain link fence, a brick smokestack, and a hundred-year-old warehouse that has sat closed off from the path for as long as most current residents have lived here. For most of 2025 and into 2026 that fence has been the only story: scaffolding, dust, a construction notice zip-tied to the gate.
That fence is coming down this fall, and what it reveals is not another standalone restaurant. It is the last piece of a plan that has been running since Radom Capital and Triten Real Estate Partners broke ground on the site last summer: turning two developments that happen to share a property line, M-K-T and the newly built Swift BLDG, into one continuous trail-facing district.
The building has a longer history than the trail does
Before it was anything else, the site at 621 Waverly Street was a 1917 cottonseed oil refinery. In the early 1950s, Swift and Co. converted it into what National Register of Historic Places documentation describes as the largest meatpacking facility in the South at the time, capable of processing a million pounds of meat a week. The building sat vacant for years before Radom Capital and Triten Real Estate Partners took it on. In 2024 it earned a City of Houston Protected Landmark designation and a nomination to the National Register of Historic Places, which is part of why the redevelopment has kept the original brick and steel awnings rather than starting over.
The redesign comes from Michael Hsu Office of Architecture, the same firm behind M-K-T next door, with Edgeland Group handling the landscaping. That last detail matters more than it sounds like it should. Edgeland's brief was not just planting beds. It was building the pedestrian connections between the two properties, so a walk that currently dead-ends at a fence becomes a walk that continues from one development straight into the next.
What is actually opening, and when
The tenant list is now largely locked in, and it reads like a roster built for people who are already outside rather than people driving in for dinner:
- Merit Coffee, a San Antonio roaster with locations across Austin and Dallas, is opening its first Houston cafe here, with a patio that looks out over the trail itself.
- Escalante's, already running seven locations across Houston, is opening its eighth inside a 4,500 square foot space with two patios. Public lease filings put the start date at September 2026, which means if construction stays on schedule, this one opens within weeks of you reading this.
- Van Leeuwen Ice Cream is opening its fourth Houston location on site.
- Leemoo, the Montrose-founded juice and health bar concept, is opening its third Houston location here.
- SweatHouz, offering infrared sauna and cold plunge recovery, is targeting a winter 2026 opening.
- Strong Pilates Studio is bringing its reformer-based classes to a 2,500 square foot space, its second Houston area location after Katy.
- The Skin Clinic is expanding into the building as well, and this is the detail that tells you the most about what this project actually is.
A tenant already next door is doubling down
The Skin Clinic is not a new name to this stretch of the Heights. It currently operates out of M-K-T. Rather than staying put or leaving the area, the clinic is relocating into the Swift BLDG and more than doubling its footprint in the process.
That is not a business chasing a new customer base across town. It is a business that already knows the foot traffic on this exact block and is betting that the traffic gets heavier once the two properties are physically stitched together. When a tenant moves from one side of a shared property line to the other purely to get more room, it is a stronger signal about where demand is heading than any press release from the developer.
Triten's own materials describe the goal directly: rotating tenants between Swift BLDG and M-K-T so the two projects differentiate rather than compete. The Skin Clinic's move is that strategy in action, not just in language.
The tenant mix is built for the trail, not against it
Look at the lineup again and a pattern shows up that a citywide restaurant roundup would miss. This is not a collection of destination dinners you drive to and circle the block for parking. It is a coffee stop before a run, a Tex-Mex patio to end a bike ride, an ice cream stand for the walk home, and three separate recovery and fitness studios within a few hundred feet of each other.
Here is the rough timeline as currently confirmed by the developers and the businesses themselves:
| Tenant | Type | Confirmed opening window |
|---|---|---|
| Escalante's | Tex-Mex, 8th Houston location | Fall 2026, lease start September 2026 |
| Merit Coffee | Coffee, 1st Houston location | Fall 2026 |
| Van Leeuwen Ice Cream | Ice cream, 4th Houston location | 2026 |
| Leemoo | Juice bar, 3rd Houston location | 2026 |
| The Skin Clinic | Med spa, relocating and expanding from M-K-T | Fall 2026 |
| SweatHouz | Contrast therapy | Winter 2026 |
| Strong Pilates Studio | Reformer fitness | 2026 |
The building itself totals roughly 60,000 square feet, split close to evenly between more than 30,000 square feet of office space and 30,000 square feet set aside for restaurants and retail. Developers have described plans for up to six restaurant concepts with patios facing the trail, which means the current tenant list is not the finished picture.
What changes for the loop you already run
If your current route treats the trail as a straight there-and-back, this fall gives it a natural stopping point. A coffee before you turn around at Merit. A cold plunge at SweatHouz after a longer Saturday run. A patio at Escalante's that faces the same path you walked in on, rather than a parking lot.
The more useful shift is what happens to the M-K-T side of the equation. Businesses there are no longer sitting at the edge of a development that stops at a fence. They are now the front half of a corridor that continues past the old smokestack and into a second cluster of restaurants and studios. For anyone who already treats M-K-T as a regular stop, that means more reasons to keep walking rather than turn back to the car.
None of this changes the fact that the Heights remains one of Houston's more walkable inner loop neighborhoods, built around a rail-line-turned-trail that residents already use daily. What changes is how much of that trail actually has something worth stopping for. A hundred-year-old meatpacking plant is about to become the reason your loop gets a few hundred feet longer, not because a developer added mileage to the trail, but because two adjacent properties finally agreed to stop treating a shared fence line as a boundary.
If you are weighing what a stretch of trail like this does for property values nearby, or you are simply curious what else is changing in the neighborhoods along Houston's inner loop, the Greater Heights neighborhood guide is a good next stop. And if you are thinking about buying, selling, or just want a sense of where your Heights home stands today, Lauren Laigle offers a complimentary consultation and home valuation, no pressure, just a clear read on where things stand.
