You know how liquor stores and other places will hang up bounced checks to shame customers who tried to swindle them? I think Dallas City Hall should have a similar “Wall of Shame” for developers with particularly bad track records. When these characters come back with new ideas, staff should look over their shoulder, point, and say, “Hey, wait, you’re the guy who did that.”
Two names on my imaginary wall of shame: the Trammell Crow Company and Ross Perot Jr.
You know the beef with Trammell Crow Company. Ross Perot Jr.’s Victory development warrants equal skepticism. Yes, as Steve Brown recently reported, the new owners at Victory are doing yeoman’s work trying to salvage the site. It will be an uphill fight. A big part of Victory’s problem is its terrible design, which stifles connectivity to downtown and Lower McKinney (another area of town laid out to be as absolutely unaccommodating to pedestrians as possible).
The other big part of Victory’s problem when it opened was what we might call “Dallas Brain.” It was sold as a big, flashy, high-end, super-exclusive, gleaming urban neighborhood — all glitz and glam resident VIPs shouting “World Class!” from the Ghost Bar balcony. And then, whoops. The market didn’t support it. Retail suffered. The streets were dead. The W works and the AAC is the AAC, but putting the rest of the development back together has been a slow process, with success coming from tamping down the original bling-brand and bringing in lots of residential apartments. That should have been the approach from the start.
So, back to that picture of Ross Perot Jr. on the Wall of Shame. He’s back with another idea: a new downtown skyscraper for the site at Woodall Rodgers Freeway and Field St, the current location of bank drive through. Here’s what has me worried. It sounds like Perot is still suffering from “Dallas Brain”:
Zoning on the corner allows construction of a more than 1.5 million-square-foot skyscraper with no height restrictions.
So Perot has decided to think big with the property.
“We are going to have a competition to design a building and bring top architects from across the world,” he said. “We need to get these great architects in the city.”
Sigh. Listen, I like big buildings. I like architecture. It’s fun to live in a city that has a slew of minor works by great architects on hand (ahem, Kimbell and Nasher excepted). And as Patrick Kennedy is wont to say, Dallas’ ambition for itself is its greatest quality (Perhaps my favorite Kennedy quote: “Dallas is this toddler carrying a shotgun around: it doesn’t know how to wield it or where to point it, but it has a lot of potential to do a lot of damage. You just have to focus and harness all that energy.”)
But Perot’s bit about “going big” and bringing in “top architects from across the world” should, at this point in the city’s history, provoke a knee-jerk reaction. Wait! Hold on a second!
The first question should be this: does downtown need another skyscraper?
Isn’t figuring out what to do with the skyscrapers that already exist one of the challenges to downtown redevelopment? They have outdated floor plates and vacancy that depresses overall property values in the central core. Their millions upon millions of square feet underwrite the demand (real or imagined) of all of the parking lots and garages downtown.
Success in the CBD has been driven by new residential, as well as investments at the street level, notably the Headington Company’s work on Main Street. In fact, Headington has big plans for Field Street, just a few blocks from the Perot site. Their idea doesn’t center on a sky-scraping monolithic architectural gemstone, but rather turning the intersection into something that resembles a real city square. That’s not Dallas Brain, that’s how Dallas should be thinking about itself.
I’m not saying that we should stop building tall buildings or allowing good architecture downtown. And, heck, leasing is booming downtown so there may be demand for the project (even if demand is currently being driven by residential and restaurants — you know, the street level-minded stuff). I do like Perot’s ambition, but he sounds like the toddler with the shotgun. We don’t have a lot of development opportunities left downtown, and every single project has to contribute to the vision of the whole. Perot Jr. + world class “Dallas Brain” + new development = hold on a minute.
And so, my second question for this project: how can a development at Woodall and Field contribute to stitching together the other two Perot-driven monolithic urban structures that are right there, the Perot Museum and Victory?
A suggestion: If Perot really wants to tap world-class architects for his new project, then he should charge them with thinking out, not up. Dallas needs more connectivity, not more height. It needs a city, not more architectural showpieces.
