story here. - PegasusAblon

DALLAS
REBORN
How a city known for its glitz and glamour found its soul:
by reclaiming neighborhoods in and around downtown
In the shadow
of downtown
Dallas, The
Traveling Man
— a nearly fourstory artwork
— welcomes you
to the neighborhood of Deep
Ellum.
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BY MATT GOODMAN
PHOTOGRAPHY BY ALLISON V. SMITH
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DESCEND
INTO
DALLAS ON
A CLEAR
NIGHT
AND YOU’LL
SEE THE
LIGHTS.
O
opportunity never left dallas,
even during the recent recession. The
housing market is strong and the cost of
living is low compared to a Los Angeles
or a New York. In that way, Dallas is the
same as ever. Its conventional reliance
upon freeways has severely wounded
its urban core and fueled the success of
a booming gaggle of increasingly distant
suburbs, each sporting the byproducts
of a growing tax base: strong school
districts and the luxury, upscale conveniences that Dallas was once known
for. But Dallas is a young city (est. 1841)
undergoing an immensely important
transitional period. It’s becoming an
interesting city, at once more urban and
more celebratory of its roots.
Why is that necessary? Because even
though the region surrounding Dallas
has been healthy, the city itself is recovering from too much attention paid to the
CREDIT
The LEDs often shine green on the towering Bank of America building, creating
a neon hue visible from thousands of feet
in the air. The spinning orb of Reunion
Tower twinkles from the western edge of
downtown. The 23-light upward floors of
the Omni Dallas Convention Center Hotel
merge into a fluorescent splotch. Meanwhile, thousands of tiny pairs of headlights
zoom up and down, left and right at all
hours of the evening along the region’s
concrete arteries, like orderly fireflies.
This is the Dallas most associate with
the city: opulent, glitzy, a spectacle that
promises more than it delivers. A light
show that masks the city’s lack of a soul
with money and tackiness.
This opinion is not new. So goes the
adage from Fort Worth, the city’s little
brother 32 miles to the west: Life is too
short to live in Dallas. Some from Austin proudly display their slur on their
chests: “Keep Dallas pretentious.” David
Berman of the Silver Jews once sang that
the city “shine(s) with an evil light,” and
Jimmie Dale Gilmore crooned “Dallas is
a rich man with a death wish in his eyes.”
This opinion of Dallas is, however,
dated. And wrong. To its residents, none
of these things are top of mind. After all,
most who haven’t fled to the surrounding suburbs know the city’s secret: that
Dallas is a web of burgeoning, interesting
neighborhoods, each with its own identity and unique offerings. So direct your
focus away from the lights and the skyline and its misplaced reputation.
Instead, look at the destinations
beyond the soaring Santiago Calatravadesigned Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge,
which connects downtown to Oak
Cliff. Drive right past those downtown
lights and into Deep Ellum and East Dallas.
Zoom in and see what Dallas has become —
and the signs of what it can soon be.
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PETER PHIPP/GETTY IMAGES
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP:
Yoga at Klyde
Warren Park, the
Perot Museum
of Nature and
Science, and the
Nasher Sculpture Center
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Truck Yard is
one of the new
places helping
to revitalize
the Lower
Greenville
neighborhood
of Dallas.
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suburbs and not enough to its interior urban areas. As a whole, yes, the Dallas-Fort
Worth-Arlington Metropolitan Statistical Area — sexy name, no? — is a success
story. It added 1.2 million people between
the 2000 and 2010 U.S. Census. Dallas
proper, however, accounted for less than
1 percent of that growth: It added 7,706
people, the fewest the city has gained
since 1880, notes Patrick Kennedy, an
urban planner and designer.
“You can have a strong region with a
strong core city. You can have a strong core
city with a struggling region. You cannot
have a strong region with a struggling core
city,” he says. “The foundation for success
is not there; it will implode on itself.”
Kennedy and others are working to
redefine that foundation, beginning
with shifting the public discourse on development and transportation. (More
walkable neighborhoods and local businesses, fewer high-speed highways and
toll roads.) Because of efforts like his
and the organic revitalization of areas in and around downtown, many
neighborhoods are thriving or in the
middle of redevelopment. Uptown —
570 development- stuffed acres near
the city center sandwiched between
the inner-core neighborhoods of downtown, Oak Lawn and Victory Park — is the
crown jewel and the closest realization
of high-quality urban living, an urbanist
dream that features apartments that open
up to the street and a high density that
promotes walkable neighborhoods. Nothing like it exists here and, 15 years after its
creation, cheap developable sites are in
short supply. Development is spilling over
into nearby neighborhoods wanting to
re-create the experience and value, benefiting other central neighborhoods such
as East Dallas and the Design District.
Examples of un-Dallaslike development abound. Klyde Warren Park opened
in 2012 on top of the Woodall Rodgers
freeway, making it more pleasurable to
walk to Uptown from downtown. Connected neighborhoods and an insistence
on walking or biking aren’t tenets of Dallas’ past. Could they be part of its future?
AT T H E I N T E R S E C T I O N O F
L O N E S TA R A N D
R O C K S TA R
A N EW ER A O F BO UTI Q U E H OTEL LUXU RY B EG I N S .
K N I F E M O D E R N S T E A K | S A LO N P O M P EO
|
E X H A L E S PA
5 3 0 0 E M OCKI N G B I R D LN , DALL AS , TX 7520 6
214 .520.7969
|
TH EH I G H L AN D DALL AS .CO M
CONTINUED ON PAGE 83
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CONTINUED FROM PAGE
81
RECLAIMING THE PAST
(Design District, Trinity Groves
and Bishop Arts District)
Modern Dallas is existential. Its thinkers
are analyzing policy, strategy and development to understand why it’s in the
place it is. Downtown Dallas is encased by
what’s often described as a noose of freeways, occupying valuable land that could
be used in major real estate plays similar
to Uptown. And this gas-guzzling city is
discussing the feasibility of tearing out
a freeway. Urban movements like these
are meant to recast the city to others by
increasing the number of neighborhoods
that attract small, locally owned, innovative businesses unique to Dallas.
“I want local people who are actually going to be there,” says Michael
Ablon, principal and founding partner of Dallas-based development firm
PegasusAblon. “That collection of individuals … it’s what makes a city.”
PegasusAblon was a major player
in redeveloping the Design District, a
once-industrial pocket located west
of downtown to the east of the Trinity
River. For decades, it was a warehouse
and showroom district open mostly to
the city’s designers. But a new exit off
the freeway and its proximity to the
American Airlines Center, the home
of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks and the
NHL’s Dallas Stars, helped get it rezoned as a retail and residential zone.
PegasusAblon’s partnership snapped up
40 acres of land in 2007. Ablon refused
to rent to national chains. He didn’t advertise, instead controlling information
flow through his own website and Design
District-focused blog. Keeping the spirit
of the neighborhood, both in the way it
looks and by the businesses populating
it, opening it to the public was his aim.
The Design District retains the
look of the past but has an updated
feel: It is a mélange of slickly designed,
different-colored warehouses and
storefronts populated by art galleries, bars
and restaurants. The Meddlesome Moth,
an upscale yet approachable gastropub in
the heart of the neighborhood, is in an old
tile showroom, for instance.
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FROM TOP: Kitchen
LTO is in Trinity
Groves. A
woman and her
dog walk the
Katy Trail.
11/02/2015 09:24
Hanging water
molecules
inside the
Perot Museum
of Nature and
Science
“We said, ‘You can’t touch the walls
and you can’t touch the floors and you
can’t touch the ceilings without consent,’”
Ablon says. “It wasn’t to be controlling, it
was to say, when someone comes here in
the Design District, you have funky tile
all over the place. You can’t be anywhere
but at an old tile showroom in the Design
District. That’s part of the magic.”
This strategy of reclamation has been
strong across the Trinity River in Oak
Cliff since the late 1990s. In 1995, developers David Spence and Trey Bartosh
bought their first old building at the corner of North Bishop Avenue and West
Sixth Street in North Oak Cliff, a 16-unit
apartment complex that dates back to
1929. Spence’s company, Good Space,
now has about 20 residential and commercial properties around the booming
Bishop Arts District, a shopping and eating destination that managed to do the
impossible: get residents from the north
IT’S BECOMING
AN INTERESTING
CITY, AT ONCE
MORE URBAN AND
MORE CELEBRATORY
OF ITS ROOTS.
to cross the Trinity River for recreation.
When he bought that first building,
Spence had a head full of writings by the
urban historian Jane Jacobs, who wrote
the eponymous words “new ideas must
use old buildings.” In 2000, he bought
and renovated the Bishop Arts Building. It now houses the chocolatier Dude,
Sweet Chocolate, which has expanded to
three locations and is sold in more than
40 specialty grocers, museums and other
retailers throughout the region.
The building’s other famous tenant,
the Italian restaurant Lucia, is so popular
four years after opening that procuring a
reservation can take months. House-made
cavatelli and black cod have captured the
palates of a town once known almost solely
for exorbitant hunks of red meat.
Spence wasn’t planning to house
these types of success stories when he
decided to pursue commercial tenants in
the Bishop Arts Building. It was mostly
because of the unsexy reason of practicality: In commercial leases, tenants
must fix the toilet when it breaks, not the
landlord. But nevertheless, the neighborhood has taken off, planned or not.
“One of my favorite quotations is from
Nietzsche: ‘Understanding kills action.’”
The Heartbeat of the City
(Downtown, Deep Ellum and Lower
Greenville)
Scott Rohrman walks Main Street in
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LE T
C
E
Deep Ellum one afternoon in slacks and
a button-down shirt. Hours later, many
of the buildings he owns in the core of
this once hardscrabble entertainment
district will be filled with people who
look quite different from him — many
tattooed and bearded with tattered jeans.
The Deep Ellum cognoscenti were
nervous when his company, 42 Real Estate, began buying buildings here in 2012
(29 as of this writing and 10 parking lots).
Who was this outsider, and what was
his vision for the neighborhood? What
Rohrman brought was stability.
Deep Ellum has died and been resurrected more than once. In the late 1800s,
it was among the first commercial districts
for the city’s black and European residents. The blues thrived here in the ’20s
via the guitar strings of artists like Blind
Lemon Jefferson and Huddie Ledbetter,
better known as Lead Belly. In the ’80s and
’90s, it became home to the city’s counterculture, offering a place for the punk kids
and others to feel comfortable. New zoning laws, infrastructure concerns and a
lack of coordinated leasing efforts zapped
its energy and again put it into hibernation. It’s awoken in the past three years.
Its buildings, for the most part, remain from past generations and are one
of the largest group of 100+-year-old
buildings in Dallas. Even in past down
periods, Deep Ellum is one of the state’s
most easily recognizable neighborhoods.
Prior to Rohrman, the properties were
split among about 25 different owners. Separate individuals owned the parking lots
and hiked prices when the neighborhood
was busy, which drove the populace away.
And to attract quality tenants, Rohrman
had to run off derelict tenants. He estimates his occupancy rate dipped to 30
percent after purchasing the buildings.
His strategy paid off: Deep Ellum’s
offerings are more diverse than they’ve
ever been. Pecan Lodge, declared the
world’s second-best barbecue joint by
Texas Monthly, passed on a seven-digit
relocation offer from a Dallas suburb to
open its brick-and-mortar spot in one
of 42 Real Estate’s buildings on Main
Street. About a block away is the Akola
11/02/2015 09:25
FROM TOP: Four
Corners Brewing
Co., good eats at
Pecan Lodge in
Deep Ellum and
trails below the
Margaret Hunt
Hill Bridge
Project, a nonprofit that sells jewelry
made by women from Uganda and donates the proceeds back to them.
The neighborhood will also likely
benefit from the city’s (past-due) project
to widen sidewalks on Elm Street. A similar plan transformed Lower Greenville
into one of the city’s premiere dining and
drinking destinations. Much like Deep
Ellum, Greenville endured a slump following neighborhood complaints about
drunkenness and violence.
The city redid its zoning laws to push
out the nuisance tenants and set about
widening the sidewalks and narrowing
the street from four lanes to two, another example of a small effort to promote
walkability. Three years later, two of the
city’s 10 best new restaurants as ranked
by D Magazine (full disclosure: my employer) are on Greenville Avenue.
“A lot of times I’d say, because I mean
it, that we’re not doing real estate deals.
We’re community involvement,” Rohrman says from the bar at Pecan Lodge,
between sips of a beer at local brewery
Four Corners Brewing Co., made specifically for the restaurant. “I give everybody
a hug, I know most of the people in the
kitchen. I know the guys in the smokehouse. It’s about community. What we’re
trying to do is make everyone feel like
their family is part of a neighborhood.” This is where Dallas is shining brightest these days, in the shadows of the lights
downtown. Look past the sprawl and the
chains and the malls and you’ll find a city
eager to redefine itself and set a new path
for a future starkly different than its past.
“The city is just now getting into a
maturity, where it has a depth to these
places,” Ablon says. “Now, (tourists) could
say, I was in Dallas and went to the Design District or XYZ neighborhood and
I thought it was really special. Five years
from now there will be 10 of these neighborhoods. And 50 years after that there
will be 20 of these neighborhoods, and 50
years after that, there’ll be New York.”
MATT GOODMAN is senior writer
at D CEO magazine and a freelance
writer who lives in Dallas.
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