That’s 4,000-sq.-ft. of art-gallery space on the second floor of M Fifty-Nine, a new 13-story office building Midway Companies is planning for the northeast corner of Montrose Blvd. and the Southwest Freeway. This view is from the southwest, looking toward Downtown (in the lower left, you can see the ghostly image of a portion of the Montrose Blvd. bridge that would actually be in the foreground). The design, by local architects Muñoz + Albin, includes 64,000 sq. ft. of office space and 7,000 sq. ft. of “restaurant ready” retail on the ground floor facing Montrose. Behind the gallery space: an enclosed parking garage for more than 200 cars. Midway Companies, the developers of CityCentre, hopes to begin construction on the project early next year.
What’s on the site now?
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This brick office building at 4503 Montrose:
Directly to the north is the 4411 Montrose building, home to several art galleries and Tart Cafe.
- Coming Soon [Real Estate BisNow]
Rendering: Midway Companies
Nice looking building! Will there be a light rail station nearby?
The “M” in “M 59” is for Museum District, right? It seems like Montrose keeps shrinking…
I much prefer the 30’s era home that is there now, but knowing they’re already using it for construction equipment storage it’s a forgone conclusion that the home’s days are numbered.
Very interesting. Access is tough there with no feeders/exits
also the midway link goes to stream
@Crowner: Thanks for catching that. It goes to Midway now. Stream Realty is apparently working with Midway on preleasing.
I dig. They will fill the restaurant space on the 1st floor for sure.. it will be interesting to see if they fill their office space.
Crowner, there’s an entrance to 59 south on Richmond at the spur that’s not too far away, but this will certainly add to the traffic.
It takes about three or four cycles to get through the Richmond light heading north on Montrose from 5:00 to 6:15 pm nowadays, and traffic usually backs up all the way to Banks.
Saying it’s on Montrose at 59 is a bit of a stretch.
More like Montrose overlooking 59.
Access will be tricky. Coming southbound on 59 means getting off on Fannin and finding your way from there? Going northbound to the spur to Richmond to Montrose is only slightly less complicated.
People complaining about access have it all wrong. Why do you have to have access right off of US 59?
This building is on a major thoroughfare that is very close to other major roads.
By this concept of access, the Menil is horribly placed!
Just north of this building are more office buildings and St. Thomas University. All with fairly horrible access to US 59.
The Montrose corridor will continue to get denser and the light rail along Richmond will serve this lower portion of the corridor quite well.
Very nice design, but that not-quite-regular window pattern is stolen right off of the new Rice University BRC building on Main.
looks great, but it does seem like a lot of office space in an odd location. i assume this would be targeted towards medical/banking due to the cost/sqft and being located outside of other business districts.
accessibility from the freeway isn’t much of an issue since the main st exits/on ramps are relatively nearby. one of the main light rail stations will be there at the corner of richmond/montrose too.
I really don’t think the access for this building is any worse than getting off a freeway downtown or the galleria and taking surface streets to your building, or from your buidling back to the freeway at rush hour. I go from here to the freeway all the time and its less than 5 mins.
Good luck to the secretaries and nurses required to give directions to said location.
“From miss_msry:
Good luck to the secretaries and nurses required to give directions to said location.”
Yep. Getting to Montrose and turning left or right is a tough one. Thank God for Mapquest!
kjb, the Menil IS horribly placed…for a highrise office building.
There are lots of better places in this city for new office space if new office space is warranted.
kjb434,
Are you feeling OK? It seems like you made a positive comment about light rail in Houston.
I’m not against the concept of light as an alternative choice. I have a major problem that the cost can never be justified and ultimately it’s a waste of taxpayer money. Especially when there is a cheaper alternative in BRT.
It’ll never reduce traffic congestion (a myth some pols propagate) and will likely increase congestion.
I can appreciate your argument, except for the use of “never”; which assumes a knowledge of the future that you can’t know. Some assume that Houston will never be as dense as other cities that would grind to halt today without light rail/subways/etc; though many of those systems were started nearly 100 hundred years ago.(or that gas prices here will always be half what other countries pay). Who knows what Houston will look like in 50 yrs?
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I don’t have a problem with BRTs. They are a great solution that will never take off in the USA until Americans get over their ridiculous snobbery (and ignorance) about buses.
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I do have a major problem with the never-ending expansion of freeway lanes in this town. For me, the 20 lane Katy Freeway/Toll/HOV and its 5-6 lane feeders is one of the worst infrastructure projects ever dumped on Houston. Billions misspent in my opinion. No doubt, something similarly destructive and visually polluting will be done to I-45 from Downtown heading North. I just wonder if in 20 yrs when these 30 lane highways are over capacity, will the solution be to destroy more businesses, homes, and trees to widen them to 60 lanes? Nothing in TxDot’s or Harris County’s history suggest otherwise. There has to be a better solution than always adding more lanes as the only response.
John,
There is a theoretical maximum for freeway expansion. The Katy Freeway has hit it where it has 8-10 main lanes. Beyond that, traffic can only be attributed to the driver and the geometry of the entrance and exit ramps.
Another good example is the Southwest and Eastex freeway. It will never be considered for a main lain expansion. What it will likely be considered for is a two way HOV or HOT lane addition and updates to the exit ramp geometry (event the exit ramp configurations are good on those freeways.
Use of “never-ending” is quite off the mark. Also, if highway funding wasn’t so limited in the late 70s and 80s, many of our freeway wouldn’t have went so long without upgrades and would have received incremental upgrades. The would avoid the massive projects like the Katy Freeway and projects like the Southwest Freeway in the 90s.
As for LRT and traffic congestion, I brought this up before on Swamplot and other sites. Theoretical calculations and empirical data (from cities across the world) have shown time and again that LRT does not reduce traffic or provide congestion relief. It’s more of a matter of fact than opinion in the transportation world. It’s why only politicians and supporters make the claim and engineers and designers never do.
Yeah! More cut through traffic for my neighborhood. At least my house will have shade from the setting sun.
The location is a nonissue. This part of Montrose has a few midrise office buildings already and continues to densify. There are quite a few restaurants within one block of this particular building that could stand to gain a little business if this building is successful.
Is this still going to be built ? I don’t see it on the Midway website