Houston’s Vintage Macy’s Building Collapses

Houston's Vintage Macy's Building Collapses

It was the end of an era Sunday morning as demolition crews knocked down the Macy’s building at 1110 Main, a building known to generations of Houstonians as the Foley’s flagship store. Unable to cross safety roadblocks, set up a block away from the site, hundreds of viewers stayed on street corners to get a clear view of the falling structure.      

 

The explosives went off just after 7:30 a.m., followed by a moment of silence, before the building fell upon itself. Cheering crowds quickly scattered as plumes of dust rolled through nearby intersections. Fifteen minutes later, the dark cloud went away to reveal a small pile of stones, and bricks where the Foley’s building stood since the late 1940s. “The explosion is the easy part,” Henry Bryant with Dykon, one of the demo firms involved in the project told Culture Map after the rupture. “The hard part is getting ready. We’ve spent months clearing out the inside of the building and getting rid of any dangerous materials. Everything has to be perfectly safe when the building finally comes down.”
              Branded a Macy’s in 2006, the vintage 10-story monster long marked the center of Houston’s downtown retail district since it opened just after World War II. But after decades of battling ever-shifting shopping patterns, the old-fashioned Kenneth Franzheim designed store finally closed its doors this past March.

 

Mayor Annise Parker, and her Downtown Retail Task Force, not long ago released plans for the now empty building site, visualizing it as the western end of a new shopping area stretching from Milam to Discovery Green. The task force’s final report revealed on September 12 looks to restore the former Macy’s block as an anchor retail space plus office, or loft conversion.