A suggested course for future generations of Dallas Independent School District history students: Whatever happened to 3700 Ross Ave.?
Sooner than later, DISD's headquarters, which was constructed in the early 1950s and added on to over the years, will be vanished. Stinks, I know — I love that building, so long as I don't have to step foot in it.
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But 10 days ago the district filed a demo permit on behalf of the Leon Capital Group, the soon-to-be-owner, which still isn't saying what it intends to do with the block at Ross and Washington Avenue. The developer referred all calls to DISD. Scott Layne, the district's chief operations officer, said he doesn't know the buyer's plans either.
So many secrets when it's right there in black and white: "Demolition of entire building," reads the permit, referring to a structure that dates back to Warren Travis White's days as DISD's superintendent. The city's website says the bones will be hauled off to the Lewisville Landfill some time after the city green-lights the bulldozers.
The building's not coming down any time soon. DISD officials said Monday they won't be completely moved into their new $46 million digs, in a North Central Expressway office tower near Park Lane, until January. But it's a done deal. There are no take-backs once the permit's pulled. So, eventually, that will be that.
Can't say the pending demo comes as a shocker, especially as that stretch of Ross Avenue in particular fills up with more apartment buildings done in the Modern Penitentiary style all the rage across this disposable city. More to the point, the school board knew exactly what it was doing when OK'ing the sale in late February: Leon Capital Group made it clear it was dropping $9.4 million on just the land, not the building. Four trustees voted against the sale; most, only because they wanted other bidders to up the ante.
The admin building, site of many a protest and landmark ruling, is as much a visual landmark as it is a historic one, a mid-'50s deco-flavored structure whose construction was overseen by architect Mark Lemmon, who, at the time, was the district's design consultant. Along a stretch stripped of most of its history and marked for gentrification, DISD's HQ is a rare, defiant survivor.
Preservationists and city officials are rightfully saddened and outraged by the district's doings: The Dallas City Council's Philip Kingston, who reps that stretch of Ross, calls the pending razing "criminal" and wants at least the facade preserved "at the bare minimum."
"The elected officials on the DISD board who are supposed to be acting in the public interest are either ignorant or disrespectful of the need to preserve our architectural heritage," he said Monday. "It's flabbergasting."
But that's not the only reason he's furious: Kingston and DISD trustee Miguel Solis wrote in these very pages back in December that they'd hoped the district would sell the HQ, as well as other surplus properties, to a developer that would would bring affordable housing to Ross Avenue and elsewhere. They pitched a plan whereby the city and district would collaborate on requiring "neighborhood supportive retail and mixed-income housing likely to attract more families to areas they have historically been boxed out of."
That didn't happen. Instead the district sold off the properties piecemeal without ever talking to its alleged partner at 1500 Marilla about how it might be in everyone's best interest to adaptively reuse some of the structure and figure out how to bring back the very people the district seems hellbent on chasing off. So, in the end, we'll get what we keep getting: market-rate apartments full of transient tenants who don't have kids in the district and skin in the game.
Solis said Monday that, yes, he's disappointed about the demolition of history.
"But for me, my bigger concern is ensuring we have thoughtful urban planning that allows for the breaking down of this tale of two cities that currently exists," he said. "The only way to do that is to demand development that allows for integration and preservation. There are a lot of different components in play. And that's why I voted against the sale of the building."
3700 Ross would very likely qualify as a city landmark, said Dallas' historic preservation officer and Lost Dallas author Mark Doty. Barring that, pieces of it could easily be reused.
"And to tear it down is the height of laziness," Kingston said.
If nothing else, this demo permit reveals yet another glaring failure at Dallas City Hall — the absence of a strategic planning department that would intervene in a case like this and work with the developer to try to find a way to save some of the old while building the bright-and-shiny brand-new. But right now there's just one way to save an old building over an owner's objection: Get Katherine Seale, the chair of the Landmark Commission, to initiate designation proceedings.
Seale's great, my hero, saving this city's history one vote at a time. But that's no plan at all.
