The Mostly Glass Building That Won’t Be Replacing the Downtown Macy’s

This rendering of a glassy new Macy’s, posted a couple of weeks ago on the website of architects Munoz + Albin, incited a new round of speculation (on HAIF, anyway) about the fate of Downtown’s last department store. The ol’ box of bricks at 1110 Main St. (pictured below), designed by Kenneth Franzheim, opened in 1947 as the Foley’s flagship. Would Hilcorp, which now owns the property, demolish the post-war relic?

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Munoz + Albin tells Swamplot that the rendering was never “a real project.” It was put together as a marketing effort in “a sort of competition,” the firm says, that aimed to brainstorm ways of improving Main Street Square. The firm has since updated its website — that is, deleted the rendering — to suggest as much.

Downtown Management District spokesperson Angie Bertinot tells Swamplot that Hilcorp has reviewed many renderings like this one but isn’t, in her words, “anywhere near making a decision” about what it wants to do with the full-block property, which also fronts Travis, Dallas, and Lamar.

Rendering: Munoz + Albin. Photo of Foley’s: Jim Parsons

8 Comment

  • Awwww. We never get anything nice.

  • Demolish the first department store building where I first used my Father’s credit card????!!!!!!!

    Sacrilege, I say!!!!

  • @miss_msry: Be grateful Macy’s has even continued to keep operating this location in the first place! Most downtown department stores around the country are now, for the most part, extinct.

  • Umm, that thing looks like a cardboard box.
    Ugly.

  • Im usually all for historic preservation but this building is about as drab and depressing as they come. I hope something nice replaces it.

  • wow. That rendering looks amazing. DO IT! :)

  • I worked in that building for several years in the early 90s and I can attest that NOTHING on the interior is worth salvaging. It is one of the blandest looking stores in the chain. Of course being 65 years old, many people have fond memories of shopping there in its heyday but even the building itself is monolithic, boring and somewhat oppressive at ground level.

  • Downtown Macy’s is where only the swankiest pigeons in Houston live. Not only do they have to be rich and famous to live there, but dexterous as well (to avoid all those upward-pointing needles above the doors, that are supposed to “deter” them). The outside fascia and sidewalks are so encrusted with petrified pigeon-poop, that it would take double the explosives to demo that building!