I mentioned Dakota’s the other day on this blog. It’s one of our favorite watering holes downtown. (Especially since, when you walk into Stephan Pyles at 4:45, those surly folks bark, “We’re closed!”) Anyway, a memory-having FrontBurnervian dropped some knowledge on me about Dakota’s: how it came to be named that and how it wound up in that odd location. This might not be new to everyone, but it was new to me. Thought I’d share:
The reason Dakota’s is where it is owes to the Baptists across the street. They owned the old property on the principal site (I think it was the old downtown YMCA), and Lincoln Property Company planned to implode it and build a gleaming, 40-50 story tower, Lincoln Plaza. Sometime during the negotiations, the church said that the sale was off if alcohol was to be publicly served in the new building. Deal breaker.
Lincoln envisioned a nice restaurant to anchor the building, to give it a sense of destination. The company was housed in rented space at Marty Tycher’s Turtle Creek Village, and the new downtown tower was going to express their arrival as the second largest real estate company in the country behind Trammel Crow.
Envisioned isn’t a strong enough word. They absolutely intended to have a dining establishment, since they were going to be so close to the arts district, etc. And not some deli, but a power lunch/dinner downtown restaurant. Obviously, alcohol had to be in the mix, so Lincoln turned to the little triangle of land immediately north of the property. It was owned by the city, too small to have anything on it, surrounded by streets, but the company proposed a subterranean plan that would link a tunnel to their new building below ground as well as to the Baptist-owned parking garage in which Lincoln was going to rent weekday space for its people to park. The only thing above ground would be an elevator shaft.
The city blessedly signed off, and preacher W.A. Criswell was satisfied because it wasn’t on the property that he and the church were selling. Crisis resolved.
As for the name Dakota’s, my mom worked for Lincoln back then. She phoned one afternoon and said that the names being proposed for the restaurant were horrible. She ran them by me, and she was right. Since Lincoln wasn’t (and isn’t) in the restaurant biz, they’d hired a firm to design the place. This firm would ultimately do a great job with the interior, but their options for the name really sucked. Everyone had already agreed that it shouldn’t have the name of the company on it, but beyond that the choices were lame. So mom had been doing some private brainstorming. “What do you think of ‘Dakota’s’ for the name?” she asked.
“I hate it,” I said. “It’s where John Lennon lived and died by an assassin’s bullet in New York, and it has no connection to your new building.”
“Actually, it does,” she replied. “It so happens that the building is going to be clad in pink Dakota granite.”
By the end of the conversation, I was sold, and her idea won the day.
