LOW PROFILE The Rainmaker

ON AN AUTUMN SATURDAY AFTERnoon, Robert Boyd, clad in tennis togs, sips iced coffee in his sunny Carrollton living room. Amid toys scattered by his two-year-old, Jeffrey, he ponders what is currently the central question in his life: can a thirty-three-year-old Harlem-born black convince the heavy hitters of white North Dallas to back another multimillion-dollar downtown Dallas arts facility? Boyd, an aggressive, street-smart entrepreneur, is ready to roll the dice and find out.

The project in question, a proposed multi-cultural arts center in the vacant downtown Foley’s building, shakes out as the ultimate challenge-or nightmare-for a developer to sell to a financially strapped city government still taking voter heat for the pricey Meyerson Symphony Center. But Boyd has a prestigious rainbow coalition of boosters who believe that if anyone can make this deal work, it’s Big Boh. “Robert’s a smart, smart guy who understands the politics of this city and that project. I’m not concerned about him calling the right play in the huddle,” says John Scovell, a pedigreed insider and former chairman of the Central Dallas Association. “He’s a doer, a rainmaker.”

While Boyd is a relative newcomer to the Dallas scene (he moved here in 1985), his resume has fast track written all over it: a master’s in Planning from Harvard, a stint in former New York Mayor Ed Koch’s office of economic development, corporate real estate in Memphis, top congressional aide to Representative Harold Ford (D-Tenn.), and three years as CEO of the West End Marketplace.

That Boyd would wind up in Dallas at all, that he would earn a chance to prove his mettle 2,000 miles from the Bronx neighborhood where he grew up, seems a much greater longshot than securing city support for the Foley’s deal. In fact, the biggest break in Boyd’s youth may have come one day when his high school class was invited to a party on Nelson Rockefeller’s sprawling estate in upstate New York. Boyd’s Jesuit headmaster, the Reverend O’Brien, beckoned him into the dense forest for a heart-to-heart, opening with a line Boyd remembers verbatim: “You’ll look back on this conversation some day and realize I was the best friend you ever had.”

“He really identified my strengths and weaknesses. He said 1 was smart but didn’t apply myself. I had a lisp he said was a lazy tongue that I should get professional help for-which I never did,” admits Boyd. “He also saw my future in politics, which I didn’t at the time, and don’t right now, but I sure did for a while. I blew him off at the time-I was fifteen,” Boyd says, laughing, “but he really set me on a course. Not long after that, I’d see my friends go off to the service or to prison, and think, hey, I want something else.”

A rebellious nature kept the teenage Boyd in constant trouble with his father, a New York City detective. “I probably went out twelve times when I was Fifteen because my father would ground me for thirty days if I was even a minute late, so I’d stay out all night and have a blast, serve my thirty, and do it again.” But Boyd managed to avoid scrapes with the law-unlike some of his schoolboy friends. Instead of running the streets, Boyd spent his junior and senior years working as a janitor in the high school where his mother taught. Far from feeling bitter over the menial work, Boyd was elated. “I made ten dollars an hour cleaning toilets. I had thousands of dollars in the bank when I graduated.”

Boyd wrote a check for his first year’s tuition at Brown University and worked steadily throughout school to make ends meet. “Name the job and I had it-security guard, janitor, dishwasher in the faculty club.”

Although a graduate degree from Harvard looks good on his résumé, Boyd’s seminal intellectual experiences came during his undergraduate years at Brown. Entering college in the shadow of the civil rights movement and the years of campus activism, Boyd considered himself a revolutionary. “I had three important professors at Brown and my roommate and I would invite them to dinner. We’d talk all night and kill a bottle of Scotch. It was great. The academic term was nothing compared to those eight or ten dinner conversations with them during my senior year. And you know what? I owe them more than gratitude. They bet me I’d change and I was sure they were wrong,” he says. “Now I owe them dinner.”

By the time Boyd reached Harvard, he and his friends were already self-mockingly calling themselves Pierre Cardin revolutionaries. “We were just liberals, reformers,” he says, but even today his heroes are iconoclasts, challengers. Jesus, Malcolm X, Che Guevara, and W.E.B. Du Bois, the first black to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard, would join father Robert and son Jeffrey Boyd at his fantasy dinner party.

It is perhaps easy to dismiss Boyd’s college idealism. This guy wants to make big money, and fast. Yet Boyd considers himself as revolutionary for his place and time as Malcolm X was in his. The game now, from Boyd’s perspective, is played on the inside. “Everything in Dallas happens from the top down,” he says.

Boyd left the West End Marketplace to go freelance early in 1989. “I always said I’d never go out on my own without lots of money and a great idea. I didn’t have either,” laughs Boyd. But he did have clients-including Buffalo Bills quarterback Jim Kelly, who hired Boyd to put together a historic renovation deal in downtown Buffalo.

Then came the idea. Last spring, Lee Cullum and Roger Witherspoon of the Dallas Times Herald editorial page called Boyd to explore their idea of converting the Foley’s building into an arts center. The two thought they’d hit upon a way to solve the problems of many individual arts groups at a time when city resources were limited, but they wanted someone with real estate savvy to look at their idea. Boyd had shared thoughts about downtown development issues with the Herald folks for years, and now they had dreamed up a project whose ambition matched his.

The project is indeed ambitious-converting an aging, asbestos-ridden albatross into a vibrant center for the performing and visual arts. Lining up small- and medium-sized arts groups, as well as individual artists, behind a project that can work for all of them will mean some tough sledding.

Boyd admits that forging unity among the arts groups will be difficult, but he sees the issue ultimately as one of political will. “The council and the city staff have got to believe philosophically that this is a good thing,” says Boyd, who argues that his is the best downtown economic development project being proposed. “All the momentum has been going into the museum and the symphony, and this project is right for the other arts groups. The city has to be involved because none of these projects have ever happened nationwide without public sector involvement. The city doesn’t have any money, but that doesn’t stop people from coming in and asking for downtown shopping malls that no one wants (see page 41) and no one has demonstrated a need for.”

So Dallas ends up with the ball squarely in its court. Will the city go for it? Boyd is predictably optimistic. “They’ve got to realize these offers don’t come along every day. We’ll build it, we’ll lease it to the city, and we’ll give them free rent for several years,” he says. As Boyd sees things, the city gets the arts groups off its back for no money down, no bond indebtedness, and a fraction of the more than $2 million that will be spent on annual maintenance for the Meyerson. “If they don’t do it now, they’ll have to explain later why they didn’t when such a sweet deal was on the table. They’re going to have to pay ten times more to do it in three years,” says Boyd.

Hugh Robinson, former president of Southland’s CityPlace and one of Dallas’s most respected businessmen, sees Boyd’s chances “as fifty-fifty, because of the city’s relative inability to put money into it at this critical time.” But Robinson, one of Boyd’s regular tennis partners, thinks he’s the right man for the job. “Bob has a tremendous development sense, and he’s good at running the numbers and knowing what can and cannot work-maybe as good as anyone in the city. I think he was a great choice.”



WHILE HE DISMISSES THE EFFORTS OF DALLAS Together (“1 don’t believe in their philosophy of the trickle-down effect”) and thinks the 10-4-1 redistricting plan will have virtually no impact on local politics, Robert Boyd seems nothing but pleased to be where he is, trying to do deals in his adopted city. “There’s never been a better time, in my opinion, to be black, have your act together, and be in Dallas. The biggest mistake the white community made in this town is they didn’t franchise black business people in the past. That’s changing. This community berates itself for being so far behind, but I can show you some cities it’s way ahead of in terms of blacks holding major positions in business and government. Enlightened leaders here realize that to end racial polarization in this town, you have to build coalitions.”

Boyd compares his experiences in Dallas to those in Buffalo, where, oddly enough, he’s had a much harder time being accepted as a black, Harvard-educated businessman from New York. Even though he’s partnered with local demigod Kelly, Boyd had to recruit a Polish good of boy with insider ties to front for the downtown Buffalo project. For Boyd, prejudice in business is just another obstacle to get around. “The bottom line is get the job done,” he says. “I may hope my son doesn’t grow up to face these same problems, but it’s no big deal. I’ll laugh all the way to the bank.”

Boyd seems to enjoy speculating about his future, toying with options. He says that at forty he may want to return to political work, perhaps run for mayor if he’s made his financial mark. Or land a corporate vice president’s job. Or get his Ph.D. in political economy. He fondly quotes Confucius on the question: “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.”

Such dreamy comments jangle against the reality of the frenetic, focused pace Boyd maintains. Inside his broad teddy-bear body resides a cagey and seemingly indefatigable schemer with a restless vision of our urban possibilities, a black outsider this town could someday stretch itself to embrace as a favorite son. It may be that wherever Robert Boyd ends up, he’ll have an appreciative audience watching. They might even be cheering, the Reverend O’Brien among them.