Lowe's at the North Loop (Houston, Texas)

Lowe's and its adjacent businesses in an early 2020s aerial.
When I originally published this post, I talked about the Lowe's and adjacent CVS being part of a bigger North Loop disassembly project. What I didn't mention at the time because I found out fairly late in research was that Lowe's was not the first thing on the site.

On June 23, 1963, Normandy Apartments officially opened at 2820 Ella Boulevard. An article describes them as having 118 units (44 1BR, 74 2BR) across twelve two-story brick buildings. A few pictures and advertisements from 1963 (Houston Chronicle) are shown below.

Across a drainage ditch was an apartment complex built a few years later, the smaller 2700 Ella Boulevard Apartments (which featured 90 units).

In the mid-1960s 2700 Ella was renamed as Heights Field before around 1974 when both apartments came under common ownership, with Normandy Apartments becoming "One Normandy Place" and Heights Field becoming "Two Normandy Place". There's not many references after that other than notice of land some sales and stories of illegal dumping when some units of Two Normandy Place had a way of taking out the trash by simply hurling it into the drainage ditch that separated the two properties. Both apartment complexes were still there in 1995 and there's a reference to a window smashed in 1998 at 2700 Ella. I assume the Lowe's came in soon after. ixtures like cabinets and the sinks, and these were carried over to the apartment complex.

When Lowe's (1521 N. Loop West) it redeveloped the entire site, including some single-family homes on West 28th Street. The ditch is still there, buried under the parking lot (the white-patched section of the parking lot that appeared in 2017 relates to that). A Murphy Express (1527 N. Loop West) was built in the parking lot around 2010-2011, shortly before the Shell (which never connected to the Lowe's parking lot, as it predated it) was redeveloped as a CVS (the CVS does connect to the parking lot).

UPDATE 07-09-2026: Major update to account for the new apartment complexes and downplays CVS (to be covered in the new North Loop page).