FROM THE PUBLISHER

ome men walk through a forest and never see firewood. Some people drive through downtown Dallas and never see the money waiting to be made. But some people do. And, fortunately for all of us, they act on it.

Reggie Graham’s grandfather and father officed in the Kirby Building, and his father still offices in the First National Bank Building. “I was brought up to think downtown is where you go to work,” he says with a laugh. He bought his first small building on the east end of Commerce in 1984. He bought his second in 1991, and his third in 1992. He remodeled all three buildings with an imaginative use of space and light, and found the kind of tenants who appreciate the scale and workmanship of his buildings: a photography studio, an ad agency and a design firm. Creative people like creative spaces, and they like being around other creative people.

Chip Johnson discovered the same thing when he took the plunge in remodeling the old John Deere building and its neighbors in 1984. Once a tractor manufacturing plant, 301 Elm Place is now one of the city’s best-designed and most comfortable office spaces, attracting a variery of creative types and acting as a showcase for its architect and principal tenant, Corgan Associates.

Lew Wood and John Miller are betting the same principle applies to the apartments and lofts they’re constructing from old warehouses between Deep Ellum and Fair Park. The ceilings soar to 20 feet, and the architecture is full of appealing surprises. Joe Beards group bought the old Adam Hats in 1995. Their 90 units will be ready for occupancy on Dec. 1, and are already 50 percent leased. Graham Greene and his partners are betting on the same success with the 120 aparments they’re readying for occupancy in the Titche’s Building. Jay Barlow thinks their reasoning is sound. Last year his company bought the 30-year-old Manor House with its 250 apartments, made some improvements, and now enjoy 100 percent occupancy.

Dallas has always been a city of entrepreneurs. We’re home to some of the most famous entrepreneurial names in the modern history of American business: Erik Jonsson, H.L. Hunt, Stanley Marcus and Trammell Crow, to name only a few. Today that same entrepreneurial spirit is driving the renaissance of our own downtown and restoring it to its rightful place as the center and heart of one of the nation’s fastest growing regions.

In the grand scheme of things, this newest crop of entrepreneurs are small players, and their projects are small ventures. That’s what makes them so important. We are baby-stepping our way into our future, and that means it’s unlikely anyone is going to run off a cliff. By most people’s accounts, it began with one project. In 1988 Robert Shaw talked his investors into a new idea, building a 132-unit apartment house near downtown in the State-Thomas area. His investors and other developers watched with bared breath: Could this possibly work? It not only worked, it was a home run, and by 1996 Shaw’s Columbus Realty had nine new apartment and loft buildings in Uptown, with two more under way.

After rehabilitating small buildings in the Cedars area, Bennett Miller created Magnolia Station in 1993 with 70 apartments. He’s now adding 20 single-family homes. Miller picked an unusual location, to say the least: between Harry Hines and Stemmons, behind a paper mill, and next to a public housing project. “When that succeeded,” a developer told me, “I became a believer.”

Downtown Dallas has always been the financial and legal center of the region. Today it is rapidly becoming an entertainment and living center as well. All that is due to the imagination of a hardy band of visionaries, some young and some middle-aged, who are carrying on the entrepreneurial tradition that built this city from a collection of tog cabins on the Texas plain into one of the world’s great metropolitan areas.

Here we present the downtown not only of today, but also of tomorrow. Not a distant tomorrow either, but a tomorrow you will see IS, 12 and even six months from today. Nobody’s waving a magic wand to make this happen; instead old problems are being recast as new opportunities. This downtown is a place of excitement and creativity, where fortunes will be made and a city recreated.

Wille Allison