Elgin Area Chamber Of Commerce: A Former Post Office Transformed

Elgin IL

17 December, 2021

2:31 AM

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Press release from the Elgin Area Chamber of Commerce: December 16, 2021 A double-helix staircase in the food market is one of three distinctive sets of stairs at Post Houston meant to draw visitors to the rooftop park. (Steve Lee/CoStar) By Marissa Luck CoStar News From a distance, not much of the historic Barbara Jordan Post Office in downtown Houston appears to have changed at first. The facade looks as it has for decades, with rows of concrete, vertical fins jutting from the former five-story office building in front of a nondescript, windowless, concrete warehouse where 2,000 mail sorters once worked. But step inside or up on the roof and the difference is undeniable. Light spills in from transparent portions of the roof and dozens of skylights carved into the ceiling, brightening the lower levels of the once-dingy and -dark warehouse. Neon lights frame a metallic, double-helix staircase twisting up to the roof, a formerly unused space that now houses a 5.5-acre public park in the sky. Palm trees and bamboo rise from the surface of the carefully landscaped sky garden surrounding a 300-person event venue and future urban farm. Below the farm, the building now holds a 5,000-person performance venue fashioned after a German nightclub with tiered seating and enclaves of hidden bars. In one of the most ambitious adaptive reuse projects in the country, a development team led by Lovett Commercial and international architecture firm OMA transformed the 550,000-square-foot, hulking, concrete slab of the former post office into an expansive mixed-use project that includes offices, a music venue, a food hall, an urban park and farm and a proposed hotel. The 16-acre project, called Post Houston, opened in November near Downtown's Theater District at 401 Franklin St., the site of the former Barbara Jordan Post Office named for the first Black woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from the South. Post Houston's design showcases how older, out-of-date buildings can be transformed into modern, mixed-use destinations that draw huge crowds. Post Houston's architectural team said preserving an old structure ultimately produced a more unique project than building a new cookie-cutter high-rise, an important concept for a city known for demolishing historic buildings. The project offers a national lesson in how to reinvent an old warehouse into nearly any use imaginable without tearing down buildings. "It's important to see the building as an asset and as a canvas that you're operating on and not just as an obstacle to doing what you need to achieve," OMA Partner Jason Long said in an interview with CoStar News. "But at the same time, not to treat the building as precious at every moment." That means balancing respect for historical features with taking opportunities to create something new, Long said. The design leaves intact relics of the building such as a bomb shelter and a series of tunnels that supervisors once used to spy on postal employees to make sure they weren't stealing cash or other valuables sent through the mail. The site originally housed Houston's Grand Central Station, which was replaced by a train depot in the 1930s. By the late 1950s, it became offices for the U.S. Postal Service, with parts of the depot getting demolished or swallowed into a new structure. The Barbara Jordan Post Office served as Houston's main post office in operation from 1962 until 2015, when the U.S. Postal Service closed hundreds of facilities to generate cash amid huge financial losses and falling mail volume. Other former post offices around the country have been transformed into mixed-use destinations such as Chicago's Old Post Office, which developers tout as the world's widest urban office building, and New York City's James A. Farley Post Office Building, where Facebook has leased 730,000 square feet. While Post Houston's 120,000 square feet of office space hasn't been leased during Houston's tough office leasing environment, the project's 24,000-square-foot coworking space by Common Desk, along with a much-hyped, 53,000-square-foot food hall and a 90,000-square-foot music venue operated by Live Nation could eventually lure office tenants. Post Houston's architecture team, which included Houston-based Powers Brown Architecture, faced challenges in redesigning the building, which was built in 1962 by Wilson, Morris, Crain & Anderson, the architects of Houston's infamous Astrodome, and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, including adhering with strict historical guidelines and tax credits. Though Lovett Commercial declined to release project costs, officials told Downtown Houston magazine that tax credits covered about 45% of the project's expenses. Those tax credits came with strings attached that restricted the design. For example, architects could not add windows to the front of the mostly dark, windowless warehouse. That was a considerable challenge for a building that is as wide as four Boeing 747 airplanes sitting next to one another, Long noted. To appeal to future office tenants, "we knew we had to come up with a way to get light into the lower levels of the building without overtly cutting out windows," said Scott Thomas with Powers Brown Architecture in an interview with CoStar News. The design added 46 round skylights that can be walked on and three transparent portions of the roof made with plastic rather than glass. The material, called ETFE, is a specialized, UV-resistant plastic that puffs up like long linear pillows stacked up against one another. Pieces of the material are layered and pumped with constant air to inflate them. "The light quality is such that when you're in a space that's covered with a large ETFE roof like this, it almost feels like you're outside," said Long. Contractors demolished part of the roof on the east side of the building where a coworking space flows into the lobby of 713 Music Hall, Live Nation's 5,000-person venue. The original roof was removed and replaced with a new roof elevated several feet higher to give Live Nation the expansive space it needed for audiovisual uses, said Thomas with Powers Brown Architecture. Contractors also cut out a major opening in the vintage structure to create an expansive general assembly space. Pieces of NASA spacesuits, a nod to Houston's own Johnson Space Center, and leather adorn the walls surrounding a three-tiered seating venue illuminated by blue lights and multiple bars within the 90,000-square-foot space. The design relies on original columns plus newly installed columns with holes that allow seated guests to have views of the stage, Long said. Unlikely Duo When local Taiwanese-American developer Frank Liu, with Lovett Commercial, purchased the high-profile site in 2015, it drew some initial concern because his company is mostly known for building shopping centers and townhouses that are "neither ugly nor distinctive" and are "mostly inconspicuous despite their large numbers," according to Texas Architect Magazine. Indeed, OMA's partnership with Lovett Commercial is a bit like the fictional Homer Simpson character from "The Simpsons" marrying a super model, said Kirby Liu, director of development at Lovett Commercial and Frank Liu's son, at Post Houston's grand opening in November. OMA's international adaptive reuse projects include turning a Soviet-era restaurant into a contemporary art museum in Moscow and converting a distillery into a museum for Prada in Milan. Lovett Commercial beat out some bids from developers that wanted to demolish the project and start from scratch for the high-profile site. "This site after all stands alone as the key to unlock the urban potential of downtown. So perhaps there was a little disappointment when this once-in-a-generation opportunity fell into the hands of a developer whose primarily known for townhouses and strip centers and perhaps that disappointment was magnified when it became known that we wanted to preserve virtually the entirety of the complex," said Kirby Liu. Lovett Commercial bought the site at a time when global oil prices were collapsing and sending the commercial real estate market that tended to rely on energy tenants into a tailspin, with oil and gas companies shedding office space and fleeing pricey downtown leases. Two years later, Hurricane Harvey crashed into the city, flooding underground pipes that overwhelmed the former post office's sump pumps, flooding basements and destroying much of the building's infrastructure, Kirby Liu said in an email to CoStar News. "To be honest, we were not immune from mounting public incredulity that we were chasing what seemed to be a project with all the odds stacked against it and inexperienced leadership at that," Kirby Liu said at the ceremony. "This is a manifestation of our collective hope in that true architecture is for everyone from every walk of life." The space appealed to many walks of life on opening weekend in November. Hipsters in plaid pants and combat boots stood in 30-minute long lines for tacos, while kids with light-up shoes ran around grandparents who sucked down oysters and wine. Gen Zers posed for selfies on a wooden staircase suspended from the ceiling. During the day, a crowd of yogis stretch out on mats on the rooftop garden with a views of skyscrapers framing their tree poses. At night, views of twinkling city lights on the roof drew couples snapping shots for Instagram in front of the orange glow from the vintage office building behind them and strips of vertical light illuminating the garden. "The 5.5-acre rooftop, I think that is not something you typically see in projects like this, that kind of scale and ambition for a public space is a bit different," said Long with OMA. Landscape architects Hoerr Schaudt brought the Skylawn to life with sweet-smelling guava trees, birds of paradise, azaleas and a grove of six bamboo planters framing an outdoor dining and event lawn. Meandering walkways wrap around two future restaurant spaces. Despite all the changes to the building, it is still filled with homages to history. Original teal, red and white paint was restored throughout the space. Letters posted on the columns that served as wayfinding signs in the warehouse can still be seen scattered throughout the food market. Doors in the ground where mail used to be dropped into a sorting room below can still be seen under what's now an outdoor seating area. "Robust cast-in-place structures with that structural capacity are rarely built anymore," Kirby Liu said in an email to CoStar News, referring to the original concrete poured on-site. Using the building's original structure lent the project "irreplaceable character," a robust base for the Skylawn and simplified the design process. Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said the reinvention of the former post office reflects where Houston is going. "It says that we can reinvent spaces" for what "we will be, who we are and where we are going," said Turner at the grand opening for Post Houston. Source: www.CoStar.com This press release was produced by the Elgin Area Chamber of Commerce. The views expressed here are the author's own.