Merchants and Manufacturers Building (One Main Building)

Significance

The Merchants and Manufacturers Building, known as the M&M Building, was completed in 1930 above Allen's Landing, where John Kirby Allen and Augustus Chapman Allen founded Houston in 1836. It was the largest building in the city when it opened, a vast commercial showroom designed to bring wholesalers and buyers under one roof. The Great Depression undercut those ambitions, but the building found a second life in education. South Texas Junior College bought it in the 1960s, and it became the home of the University of Houston-Downtown, which renamed it the One Main Building. It remains the university's largest facility, and it is listed on the National Register, designated a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark, and counted as a contributing building in the Main Street/Market Square Historic District.

Climate risks tracked

No building in this collection sits closer to the water. The M&M Building rises directly from the banks of Buffalo Bayou at its confluence with White Oak Bayou, and its lower levels have flooded repeatedly, including during Tropical Storm Allison in 2001 and Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Protecting it means treating the lowest floors as floodable: water resistant finishes, mechanical and electrical systems moved to upper floors, and deployable barriers at bayou side openings. Storm surge pushed up the Ship Channel is a low probability but serious risk for a site this low. Hurricane winds load the long brick facades and the many windows of this very large building, so securing window systems and roof equipment matters. Monitoring for settlement near the bayou bank also helps, since regional subsidence and bank erosion can affect foundations along the water.

Use the preservation assistant to talk through retrofit strategies for these specific threats.

Location

Nearby landmarks

• 1913 · Beaux-Arts

  Rice Hotel

• 1926 · Spanish Renaissance Revival

  Julia Ideson Building

• 1927 · Italian Renaissance Revival

  Niels Esperson Building

• 1924 · Commercial / Chicago School

  Sam Houston Hotel