Midway's East River Project To Include Office, Retail, Hotel
Midway released renderings for East River, the 150-acre site east of downtown Houston along 6,000 feet of Buffalo Bayou waterfront. The multiphase, mixed-use project will include residential, restaurants, office, retail, entertainment and recreational space. The campus is within an opportunity zone.
The project will be built in five phases. CBRE will be responsible for leasing activities. A brochure sketches out the plans for Phase 1.
The redevelopment plans include:
- 8.9M SF of Class-A office space.
- 500K SF of retail space.
- more than 1,400 multifamily units.
- more than 475 single-family residences.
- more than 12 acres of green space.
Around the turn of the 20th century, the site was the home of the Merchants and Planters Oil Co., owned by William Marsh Rice, founder of Rice Institute. The fate of the site changed dramatically after the greater Galveston hurricane of 1900 and a fire that destroyed the mill.
By the 1920s, Brown & Root Engineering and Construction Co., which later became KBR, transformed the site as a pioneering road and general contracting company. In its heyday, 5,000 people worked on site. But by the second decade of the 21st century, the once bustling campus lay dormant.
Midway acquired the property for its East River redevelopment in July 2016. The former industrial site was used to try to lure Amazon in 2018, but those plans were rejected by the e-commerce giant. Midway had no additional comment on this project at this time.
