MOBILE, Ala. — Cummings & Associates, Inc. has announced that the historic Buick Building at Suite 1110, 455 St. Louis Street in downtown Mobile, is now leased.
The new tenant, Automation Controls + Engineering, is a provider of advanced automation, controls and test systems for product manufacturers across a variety of industries. Marl Cummings IV of Cummings & Associates handled the lease.
An Engineering Firm Downtown
The tenant type is the notable part. Automation and controls engineering firms have historically located in industrial parks and suburban office space, near the plants they serve and the highways their field engineers use.
A firm of that kind taking downtown office space reflects a shift in how technical companies think about location. Controls engineering is substantially design and programming work performed at a desk, with site visits as a separate activity. Where the design work happens is increasingly a recruiting question rather than a logistics one, and downtown space competes for engineers in a way a metal building on a service road does not.
What the Company Does
Automation, controls and test systems are the layer between a manufacturer’s equipment and the people running it — the programmable logic controllers, human-machine interfaces, sensor networks and automated test stands that determine how a production line actually operates.
That is a well-matched specialty for this region. Mobile County’s industrial base includes aerospace assembly, shipbuilding, chemical processing, paper production and steel and metals operations, all of which depend on automated systems and all of which periodically need them designed, upgraded or replaced.
The Buick Building
The building at 455 St. Louis Street is one of downtown Mobile’s stock of historic commercial structures, named for its original automotive use — a common origin for early 20th-century buildings of that type, when car dealerships and service operations occupied prominent downtown corners before relocating to suburban highway frontage.
Adaptive reuse of buildings like it has been a consistent feature of downtown Mobile’s redevelopment. The structures have the floor plates, ceiling heights and natural light that modern office tenants value, and their conversion keeps occupied buildings on streets that would otherwise carry vacancies.
Downtown Occupancy
Individual lease announcements rarely make broader news, but the cumulative pattern is what determines whether a downtown district functions. Office tenancy generates the weekday foot traffic that supports restaurants, retail and services, and a district that fills its upper floors sustains its ground floors.
Downtown Mobile has added residential, office, entertainment and dining activity over recent years, with the district’s growth prominent enough that the city recently launched an interactive parking map covering nearly 2,000 on-street spaces, seven garages and 57 surface lots within the Hank Aaron Loop.
The Broker
Cummings & Associates, Inc. handled the transaction, with Marl Cummings IV representing the deal.