DREAMS FOR CROZIER

Architecture student John Sebastian has an idea. He wants to turn Crozier Tech High School into a Dallas version of San Francisco’s Ghiradelli Square or Boston’s Faneuil Hall Marketplace. Such a development, Sebastian says, could earn the owners and developers – the Dallas Independent School District, the City of Dallas and Pete Baldwin-$3.7 million a year.

Sebastian would use the 106,000 square feet of space in the old school building and an additional 158,000 square feet of new construction space to make a shopping and office center with restaurants, bars, stores and a movie theater. He would build an underground garage for parking. There would be plazas and fountains, and it would be, Sebastian says, “inviting to the pedestrian.”

The center’s neighbor across Bryan Street, the Plaza of the Americas, “has not drawn the volume of business its planners anticipated,” Sebastian says. Critics of the Plaza of the Americas cite a “cold and aloof environment” and the Plaza’s uninviting entrances as the reasons it has not been as successful as anticipated. Sebastian believes the old building would provide inviting warmth and familiarity.

Sebastian cites the Boston center as precedent for a public body-such as the school system – retaining ownership while allowing a developer to renovate and operate the center. The city of Boston still owns Faneuil Hall.

Presently Crozier Tech is the district’s magnet school for students interested in business. Last year U.S. District Judge Barefoot Sanders ordered a study to determine if the magnet schools should be combined into one. That study is not yet complete.

The DISD might be better off just selling the property; the land is now worth between $20 and $30 million.