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| illustration by Tim Bower |
Last May, in downtown Dallas, a person—or, more likely, an unknown number of persons—committed a curious crime. In the dead of night, they made off with a pair of metal benches that sat at a DART bus stop along Commerce Street, cater-cornered from Neiman Marcus. The benches were made of black powder-coated steel slats. Each one cost $762 and weighed 225 pounds. What made this crime so curious was that the thieves had apparently taken the trouble to grind down the studs to make it seem as if the benches had never been there. Too, the heist opened a window onto a battle that’s being fought over the culture of downtown Dallas.
The benches had sat in front of a boutique called Crimson in the City, in the renovated Dallas Power and Light Building. Stefani Schultz, a petite middle-aged blonde, opened Crimson in 2005 and had complained many times to DART about the benches. In her view, the bus stop and its benches attracted vagrants and hurt business. Though DART officials won’t say so publicly, some in the agency suspected Schultz had stolen the benches—or had enlisted someone to do her bidding.
At the time of the theft, Steven Siegerist and Rob Parks worked as managers at DART. In a series of inter-office e-mails reviewed by D Magazine, the two floated theories about the perpetrator. Siegerist pointed out that Schultz told a DART official she was glad the benches were “finally removed,” indicating she thought the agency had done it. But Parks wondered if she was merely playing dumb. “Who is it that always returns to the scene of the crime?” he wrote back to Siegerist.
DART considered not replacing the stolen benches. But Parks prevailed upon his boss with an e-mail of such forceful elegance that it could have come from Winston Churchill. “I don’t think we can condone—by allowing the bench to stay gone—theft and destruction of public property,” Parks wrote. “A felony is a felony whether committed by a street ‘recycler’ or a more genteel felon.”
Two weeks after the metal benches had vanished, DART upped the ante by installing two concrete benches, each costing $756 and weighing 1,200 pounds. The message was clear: “Try stealing those.”
Now, it is difficult to imagine that Stefani Shultz stole the metal benches or caused them to be stolen. She clearly couldn’t lift a 225-pound bench, even if someone had the other end. Nor does she come across like a criminal mastermind. No, she seems more like the kind of woman who would work her way up the chain of command to get something done—which is exactly what she did in July. In an e-mail to Mayor Tom Leppert, addressing him as “Tom,” she complained about the “ugly concrete benches” and the derelicts who seemed to prefer them even to the less-comfortable metal ones. “We are having less women from Neiman’s walking across to Crimson in the City,” she wrote. “But the Neiman Marcus customers that have continued to shop at Crimson have expressed their concern about how trashy and scary it is. I am so disappointed.”
At Schultz’s request, the mayor of the ninth-largest city in the United States went to see the two ugly concrete benches for himself. Along the way, he visited Schultz’s boutique and bought a carrying case for his wife’s dog. He was apparently convinced. A DART spokesman confirms that after the mayor’s visit to Crimson in the City, he called DART president Gary Thomas and then had his deputy chief of staff, Paula Blackmon, “see if we can get some real movement on this.”
And, like that, DART removed its own benches. Today the ladies who cross Commerce from Neiman’s to shop at Crimson in the City don’t have to see people sitting on benches, waiting to catch a bus. Instead, the people stand.
To anyone not directly affected by the benches—as opposed to Schultz, the managers at DART, the people who can’t sit down—it might seem like a small matter. What’s a pair of benches in the grand scheme of things? Or several benches? Because benches have vanished from three other locations in the Central Business District. They usually went missing not long after a business owner had complained about them in vain. And then there’s the case of what happened when AT&T moved downtown (more on that shortly).
It’s really a classic tale of what happens when any neighborhood undergoes gentrification. More than 5,300 people now live in the central business district, compared with just 200 in 1996. And in the last 18 months, more than 40 companies have either relocated to or announced plans to relocate to downtown, adding about 6,500 jobs. Recent openings include Charlie Palmer at the Joule, the CADD Art Lab, and the first national retailer in over 20 years, Jos. A. Bank. That’s all great news. But how these new businesses and new residents deal with the grittier aspects of urban life—the homeless people, for instance, who sometimes sleep on benches that are also used by working-class people and students and out-of-town visitors—will determine what sort of American city Dallas becomes.
For her part, Stefani Schultz isn’t satisfied now that the concrete benches are gone. She wants DART to move the entire bus stop. “The DART people have never walked into my store,” she says. “To them it’s all about DART and it’s not about the small-business owner who put her money into her business.”
Schultz says she thought about opening her store in Los Angeles and New York. But she chose Dallas. She calls herself an “urban pioneer” and she wants the city’s support. Crimson in the City sells expensive, tastefully tinged jeans and $109 skin-tight blouses. Next door to Crimson is the restaurant Fuse, which serves an appetizer called Peeky Toe Crab Cake for $13. But just across the street and to the left sits a boarded-up Schlotzky’s and a row of abandoned storefronts that look like they were airlifted out of Detroit. Schultz just wants the city to do what it takes to attract more businesses like hers. Less plywood in front of display windows, more blouses behind them.
“Why couldn’t [the bus stop] be moved a block up?” she asks. “These people are used to walking, so what’s a block difference? There are places out there it can be moved to. I don’t see what the problem is.”
And, by the way, she scoffs at the notion that she was the bench thief. “I am a female, and those are bolted to the ground,” she says. Schultz’s landlord, Larry Hamilton, of Hamilton Properties, backs her up. When asked about the bench thefts, he initially blamed crafty metal recyclers. Later, after being told about how the bench’s studs had been ground down cleanly, he had a conversation with his property manager. He quickly called back and said that his staff had smoothed over the concrete where the bench had been after passersby started tripping over the exposed bolts.
Which brings us to AT&T. Around the time Schultz was battling DART, managers at the world’s largest telecom were fussing with the transit agency as well. Oddly, they didn’t fare as well as Stefani Schultz did.
In May, the Dallas City Council entered into a “Bus Stop Relocation Agreement” with Southwestern Bell Telephone, which owned two buildings just up Commerce Street from Crimson in the City. At a cost of nearly $800,000 in bond funds, the Council approved a construction project for streetscape improvements along a plaza bordered by the buildings. The plan called for the destruction of the busy Commerce Street bus shelter that sat in front of the plaza—and the construction of a new one a half block away, in front of one of the company’s buildings between Field and Browder streets.
But when AT&T announced it was moving its headquarters from San Antonio to their offices in the Southwestern Bell Building, AT&T executives gave DART fits over the new location of the bus stop. In a heated exchange between AT&T’s John Chilton, a manager who worked on the plaza project, and the aforementioned Rob Parks from DART, the two tangled over why DART needed to build a replacement shelter in front of one of its office buildings.
“The question we have to ask is, Why is it necessary to provide any structured shelters on Commerce between Field and Browder,” Chilton wrote. “I am sure DART could use the dollars for replacement shelters to offset cost overruns on other major line extensions.” Chilton was taking a dig at DART for its well-publicized financial struggles from last year.
Parks, though, wouldn’t entertain AT&T’s suggestion that the shelter ought to be moved from its property. “That would be unacceptable to the DART Board or the Council and would be a guaranteed public relations nightmare for AT&T,” Parks wrote back.
Oddly, in this case DART prevailed. A new shelter was built in front of one of AT&T’s office buildings. On a warm Thursday evening in October, there are a couple dozen riders waiting under it. Just outside the shelter, a heavy man dressed in a coat and thick pants lies on the ground, passed out.
Down Commerce Street, in front of Crimson in the City, about a half a dozen people are quietly waiting at their stop. They each seem tired as they gaze down Commerce in anticipation of the big, yellow DART bus coming to take them home.
On the old, regal glass door to the boutique, Schultz lists her hours. On Thursday through Saturday, the boutique is open from 11 am to “whenever.” Schultz explains that means she closes the moment at the end of the day when she’s “too tired to stand up.”
Maybe DART can get her a bench.
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