Houston: 713 Music Hall

713 Music Hall occupies one of the more remarkable adaptive-reuse spaces in Texas: a wing of the historic former Barbara Jordan Post Office building at 401 Franklin Street in downtown Houston, a structure originally designed by architect Wyatt C. Hedrick and opened on September 1, 1934 as the second Grand Central Station. The building served as Houston’s main post office for decades before closing in 2015, and developer Lovett Commercial later redeveloped the entire complex into the mixed-use POST Houston, which opened to the public in November 2021.

The concert hall inside POST Houston first opened under the name The Terminal before being renamed 713 Music Hall — a nod to Houston’s area code — and today holds up to 5,000 fans across a flexible flat general-admission floor plus a raised, fiberglass-grated tribune for elevated viewing. Architecture firms Powers Brown Architecture and OMA (led by Rem Koolhaas) designed the build-out, which includes a double-height translucent polycarbonate wall dividing the room into two distinct zones and an aluminized-fabric-clad bar area meant as a deliberate design tribute to Houston’s NASA and space-exploration heritage.

Operated by Lovett Commercial in partnership with Live Nation, 713 Music Hall’s 90,000-square-foot footprint gives Houston a genuinely unique concert space, one whose century-long history as a train station, then a post office, and now a live-music hall is almost impossible to match anywhere else in the state. A bright yellow staircase inside connects the main floor to a hidden upstairs lounge, adding one more distinctive touch to an already unusual building.

For another major downtown Houston venue, see Texas Music Map’s page on Bayou Music Center. Few concert venues anywhere can claim a building history as layered as 713 Music Hall’s, making it one of Houston’s most architecturally significant live music stops. It’s a genuinely rare case of a working post office being reborn as a full-scale concert hall, and that history adds a layer of context most first-time visitors don’t expect to find.

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