smontgomery
24 August 2002, 12:09 PM
Pumping life into downtown
City's center finding its pulse as the heart begins to beat
08/23/2002
By VICTORIA LOE HICKS / The Dallas Morning News
Dawn has barely begun to fling vivid orange splotches onto the sleeping skyscrapers, but at street level, downtown is yawning and stretching its way into a new day. Leash in hand and cellphone on ear, an elegantly rumpled young loftie accompanies a greyhound across Main Street to the tiny patch of greenery that borders Pegasus Plaza. Like other dog owners similarly employed, he ignores the plastic bags in dispensers labeled: "Keep the scene clean Baggit!" Pegasus surveys the scene at intervals, revolving hugely into and out of view atop the Magnolia Hotel. Inside the hotel's sleek art deco lobby, where the only sound is the clink of silver against china, there's no hint of the sound and fury mounting just a few feet away.
There, on Commerce Street, ever-thickening clots of cars hurtle from stoplight to stoplight. Just as the sun extricates itself from the horizon, a white car extricates itself from the pack. It stops at the curb in front of a Starbucks, where the driver, a woman in a Dallas fire department uniform, abandons it squarely in the middle of a no-parking zone. While the two young women behind the counter concoct her grande latte, they run down the roster of their "regulars." "Where's Alex?" asks one. "I don't know," replies the other. "I think sometimes he has Fridays off." Slowly, haltingly, downtown is starting to resemble a living neighborhood, worth experiencing at closer range than on a picture postcard. If the body is to keep a pulse, innumerable sages agree, the heart that must beat is the eight blocks described roughly by Field, Commerce, Elm and Harwood streets. This is the story of an August workday in that slick, gritty, vital heart.
An awakening city
All over downtown, workers are tramping toward their places of business. A grizzled panhandler plies the sidewalk outside Starbucks' window. As if by magic, his approach seems to inspire even the most dilatory office worker with an urgent desire to reach his or her cubicle. A hotel doorman, white shirt crisp against navy vest, nimbly dodges the outstretched hand. Up and down, up and down goes the steel-mesh construction elevator married to the side of the Davis Building on Main Street. Soon the Davis will join the Kirby and Wilson buildings and the former Joske's department store in being reborn as loft apartments. In Pegasus Plaza, a man in a rumpled T-shirt is oblivious to the elevator and what it signifies. He sits on the lip of a fountain, the mist playing across his bowed shoulders, and drinks from an aluminum can swaddled in a brown paper sack.
Over on Elm, the Donut Palace offers more solid fare. With the morning rush subsiding, owner Jimmy Walker takes a few minutes to explain the arithmetic of downtown survival specifically, why the advent of a Corner Bakery in the Wilson Building just down the block is actually good for his business. "The fou-fou people come there, and they notice us," he says. Once noticed, he said, his product moves off the shelf virtually as a matter of natural law. "Everyone wants doughnuts." That's not why he'll still be in business a year from now though, he says. He'll be here because six years ago he bought the building he's in, with 15,000 square feet of ground floor retail space. What he doesn't use, he leases to a Payless shoe store one of the few adjacent shops not draped with banners that announce: "Going out of business."
Downtown rents have nearly doubled in the last year or so, Mr. Walker says, although they remain well below those in trendy districts such as Uptown. "Eighteen bucks a foot is still a deal." He's glad to see new money coming in. But he's been in business on Elm too long 23 years to mistake this flurry for a guarantee of permanent resurgence. "We're not there at all," he says. And what will it take? His answer is out even before the question is finished: "We need the Merc." The Merc. Mercantile National Bank. As the sun climbs overhead, it squats, dingy and despondent, turning a baleful face across Ervay Street to downtown's most genteel and persevering inhabitant, Neiman Marcus. Having recently foiled an attempt to convert it to apartments and shops, the empty, boarded up Merc thrusts its serrated spire into the sky as though in rebuke. For every success, it seems, there is a failure.
And for every failure, a success. Loft apartments at the Kirby and Wilson buildings can fetch more than $3,000 a month, and vacancy rates are in single digits. At 1509 Main, gleaming brass plaques proclaim "The Kirby." The lobby, like the facade, is all intricate gothic tracery. A touch-pad video screen provides a history-lesson-cum-sales-pitch for would-be renters, clearly targeted at the hipster crowd. "I was built with beer money in 1913 by Adolphus Busch," it informs the curious. "Thanks, Bud." Life downtown may be long on attitude, but it's short on groceries and even loft dwellers occasionally need groceries and other necessities. Around the corner, the owners of a sandwich shop called the Granada Market have sensed a niche. Next to the usual selection of subs, pasta salads and gourmet chips, a single set of shelves displays laundry detergent, shaving cream, toothpaste and tampons.
The lunch crowd
With lunch hour approaching, the panhandler patrols are out in force. On Elm, at one end of the newly spiffed-up Stone Street Gardens, three officers stand over a sweating, swearing man who sits on the sidewalk, hands secured behind him by plastic cuffs. He sweats and swears until the paddy wagon arrives and the officers bundle him inside. The owner of the Holiday Shops "Going out of business!" watches this little drama with skeptical amusement, standing amid his marked-down assortment of curios and toys. "The police presence is fairly recent," says Malcolm Senior. Recent, as in when the new, upscale shops and restaurants began to appear. Mr. Senior, who lives in Fort Worth, hopes to find a new location in downtown Dallas. After all, he says, his family has been doing business on Elm since 1957.
He doubts that downtown can sustain the level of chichi to which it seemingly aspires. "They want to make a new restaurant next to Pegasus Plaza," Mr. Senior says. "Why? So people can watch the bums urinate?" This noonday, though, it's not fear of bums but fear of baking that seems to keep most diners indoors. Along Ervay, between Elm and Main, 18 sidewalk tables offer patrons of Quizno's, Porta di Roma and Corner Bakery a view of the Bank One tower across the street. Sixteen are vacant. "Want to sit outside?" a young man asks his companion as they enter Quizno's. "No!" she says. In Stone Street Gardens, where a canvas awning creates an oasis of shade, foot traffic is respectable if not precisely gridlocked. "That place is hopping," a man says appreciatively as he and several companions emerge from Campisi's.
Hopping is relative, however. To see hopping, you'd best hop one level down, to Tunnel World. There, where fast food abounds and the sun does not shine, are the throngs that urban planners dream of luring up into Street World. A pair of impromptu, five-minute traffic counts standing still, counting the bodies that go by tell the tale. Tally: tunnel, 118; street, 42.
Movin' on up
At 1505 Elm, where a one-time S&L is being converted to condos, tunnel access is a selling point right up there with the proximity of the DART rail line, the personal-shopping service (courtesy of Neiman's), the eye-to-eye views of Pegasus and the rooftop putting green. The project's 68 units will be the first residences for sale rather than for rent in the downtown core. On this day, John Dirba and Robert Pilgrim renters of lofts in, respectively, the Santa Fe and Wilson buildings are looking to buy. They're too late to snap up one of the smaller $149,000 units; those that remain, ranging in size up to 2,000 square feet, go for $225,000 to $475,000.
What company will provide the parking valets, they ask the sales reps. What company will do the construction? How many units will be on each floor? Who did the dιcor in the two model units? How much are the homeowners' association dues? Is there a size limit on dogs? Oh, yes, and the question that certifies the questioner as a bona fide downtown insider: "What gossip do you have on 1530 Main?" "Cliff Booth's?" comes the answer. "Well, he still lives on top ..." And everyone has a little snicker at the expense of the developer whose seven-year failure to renovate the building adjacent to Neiman Marcus has become something of a thorn in the side of downtown boosters. Neiman's, however, has survived years surrounded by thorns, and on this day, as always, sales clerks and customers bravely soldier on.
In the ground-floor coffee bar, two very young men in suits show elaborate courtesy to a man who looks easily to be in his ninth decade. While the three of them converse earnestly about the history of Baylor University, an Asian-American man ducks in for a latte to go. He's in town for a convention of Asian-American journalists, he tells the clerk; tonight they're headed for Billy Bob's Texas. Two blocks away, the name Titche-Goettinger still is carved on the stone faηade of the store that, in its last incarnation, was Joske's. It's been more than a decade since you could buy a blouse here, or a toaster, but people are still shopping for a bachelor of fine arts in new media, say, or a graduate certificate in geographic information systems.
Representatives of the six universities that offer classes through the Universities Center sit behind registration tables set up in the lobby. At the Texas A&M-Commerce table, academic adviser Alvin Jackson is huddled with a prospective student who is worried that his test scores will keep him out of graduate school. "What's your GPA?" Mr. Jackson asks. He mulls the answer, then pronounces: "If you can make an A in finance this semester, you should be OK."
Rush-hour toasting
That's the kind of news that calls for a drink another commodity that is becoming readily available downtown. As the evening rush hour crawls by Main Street's newest hangout, the Metropolitan, the upstairs restaurant is relatively empty but the downstairs tavern is doing a brisk business.
Over beers at the bar, Robert and Sam no last names, please mull that age-old question: Has downtown finally turned the corner? "Stuff like this will help," says Robert, waving a hand at the Metropolitan's century-old, cozy-urban exposed brick walls.
"But places never seem to last," protests Sam.
"I love coming down here," he hastens to add. "But I don't think there's enough yet to draw a constant crowd, week in and week out."
"He's being a little pessimistic," says Robert.
"I'm just being honest," says Sam.
A few doors down, with two years under its belt, the "urban brasserie" Jeroboam is fast qualifying as a downtown institution. As darkness settles and the candlelight begins to ricochet from silver candelabra to frosted glass partition to glistening oyster shell, co-owner Brandt Wood surveys his much-lauded creation. "We were told we were crazy," he says, recalling the decision he and his brother made to expand their entertainment company's venues from Deep Ellum into downtown. But, as expatriates of New Orleans, he said, they were hooked by downtown's faded charms. "There's a patina that's not all perfect, and that adds to the experience," he said. "There's a force, a tractor, pulling people downtown."
Last call
The later the night gets, the younger are the people deposited by that beam. Younger, leggier, tighter and lower-cut not to mention more amorous. The crowd in the Jeroboam bar seems to have one hand wrapped permanently around the stem of a wine or martini glass, the other around a partner's neck or thigh. And if the urge to dance strikes, that no longer requires a pilgrimage to Deep Ellum. Just sashay across the street to Umlaut, where assuming that one passes muster with the doorman one can descend to basement level and gyrate the night away. "No athletic wear, no tennis shoes, no T-shirts, no ripped jeans," says manager Barry Smith, rattling off the dress code.
As he speaks, two guys appear in jogging shoes and T-shirts. He waves them in. "It's just an overall look," he says. Pause. Shrug. "They're here with some director's wrap party." Downstairs, the bar in one of the two cavernous rooms is lit from within, showing in merciless silhouette all those buff enough or drunk enough to stand beside it. On the patio, Anabella Edwards, a Guatemalan who has visited Dallas for more than a decade but only recently moved here, pronounces downtown's evolution "wonderful." She lives in Uptown.
By the time the bartenders announce last call, the crowd is starting to thin. Up at street level, there's a modest scrum as swaying couples wait for valets to retrieve their cars. Across the street, drinkers bend their elbows and converse in silhouette inside the Metropolitan. One block over on Commerce, the 2 a.m. silence is broken only by the whoosh of a street-sweeping machine. A young woman with a Dalmatian on a leash makes for Pegasus Plaza.
City's center finding its pulse as the heart begins to beat
08/23/2002
By VICTORIA LOE HICKS / The Dallas Morning News
Dawn has barely begun to fling vivid orange splotches onto the sleeping skyscrapers, but at street level, downtown is yawning and stretching its way into a new day. Leash in hand and cellphone on ear, an elegantly rumpled young loftie accompanies a greyhound across Main Street to the tiny patch of greenery that borders Pegasus Plaza. Like other dog owners similarly employed, he ignores the plastic bags in dispensers labeled: "Keep the scene clean Baggit!" Pegasus surveys the scene at intervals, revolving hugely into and out of view atop the Magnolia Hotel. Inside the hotel's sleek art deco lobby, where the only sound is the clink of silver against china, there's no hint of the sound and fury mounting just a few feet away.
There, on Commerce Street, ever-thickening clots of cars hurtle from stoplight to stoplight. Just as the sun extricates itself from the horizon, a white car extricates itself from the pack. It stops at the curb in front of a Starbucks, where the driver, a woman in a Dallas fire department uniform, abandons it squarely in the middle of a no-parking zone. While the two young women behind the counter concoct her grande latte, they run down the roster of their "regulars." "Where's Alex?" asks one. "I don't know," replies the other. "I think sometimes he has Fridays off." Slowly, haltingly, downtown is starting to resemble a living neighborhood, worth experiencing at closer range than on a picture postcard. If the body is to keep a pulse, innumerable sages agree, the heart that must beat is the eight blocks described roughly by Field, Commerce, Elm and Harwood streets. This is the story of an August workday in that slick, gritty, vital heart.
An awakening city
All over downtown, workers are tramping toward their places of business. A grizzled panhandler plies the sidewalk outside Starbucks' window. As if by magic, his approach seems to inspire even the most dilatory office worker with an urgent desire to reach his or her cubicle. A hotel doorman, white shirt crisp against navy vest, nimbly dodges the outstretched hand. Up and down, up and down goes the steel-mesh construction elevator married to the side of the Davis Building on Main Street. Soon the Davis will join the Kirby and Wilson buildings and the former Joske's department store in being reborn as loft apartments. In Pegasus Plaza, a man in a rumpled T-shirt is oblivious to the elevator and what it signifies. He sits on the lip of a fountain, the mist playing across his bowed shoulders, and drinks from an aluminum can swaddled in a brown paper sack.
Over on Elm, the Donut Palace offers more solid fare. With the morning rush subsiding, owner Jimmy Walker takes a few minutes to explain the arithmetic of downtown survival specifically, why the advent of a Corner Bakery in the Wilson Building just down the block is actually good for his business. "The fou-fou people come there, and they notice us," he says. Once noticed, he said, his product moves off the shelf virtually as a matter of natural law. "Everyone wants doughnuts." That's not why he'll still be in business a year from now though, he says. He'll be here because six years ago he bought the building he's in, with 15,000 square feet of ground floor retail space. What he doesn't use, he leases to a Payless shoe store one of the few adjacent shops not draped with banners that announce: "Going out of business."
Downtown rents have nearly doubled in the last year or so, Mr. Walker says, although they remain well below those in trendy districts such as Uptown. "Eighteen bucks a foot is still a deal." He's glad to see new money coming in. But he's been in business on Elm too long 23 years to mistake this flurry for a guarantee of permanent resurgence. "We're not there at all," he says. And what will it take? His answer is out even before the question is finished: "We need the Merc." The Merc. Mercantile National Bank. As the sun climbs overhead, it squats, dingy and despondent, turning a baleful face across Ervay Street to downtown's most genteel and persevering inhabitant, Neiman Marcus. Having recently foiled an attempt to convert it to apartments and shops, the empty, boarded up Merc thrusts its serrated spire into the sky as though in rebuke. For every success, it seems, there is a failure.
And for every failure, a success. Loft apartments at the Kirby and Wilson buildings can fetch more than $3,000 a month, and vacancy rates are in single digits. At 1509 Main, gleaming brass plaques proclaim "The Kirby." The lobby, like the facade, is all intricate gothic tracery. A touch-pad video screen provides a history-lesson-cum-sales-pitch for would-be renters, clearly targeted at the hipster crowd. "I was built with beer money in 1913 by Adolphus Busch," it informs the curious. "Thanks, Bud." Life downtown may be long on attitude, but it's short on groceries and even loft dwellers occasionally need groceries and other necessities. Around the corner, the owners of a sandwich shop called the Granada Market have sensed a niche. Next to the usual selection of subs, pasta salads and gourmet chips, a single set of shelves displays laundry detergent, shaving cream, toothpaste and tampons.
The lunch crowd
With lunch hour approaching, the panhandler patrols are out in force. On Elm, at one end of the newly spiffed-up Stone Street Gardens, three officers stand over a sweating, swearing man who sits on the sidewalk, hands secured behind him by plastic cuffs. He sweats and swears until the paddy wagon arrives and the officers bundle him inside. The owner of the Holiday Shops "Going out of business!" watches this little drama with skeptical amusement, standing amid his marked-down assortment of curios and toys. "The police presence is fairly recent," says Malcolm Senior. Recent, as in when the new, upscale shops and restaurants began to appear. Mr. Senior, who lives in Fort Worth, hopes to find a new location in downtown Dallas. After all, he says, his family has been doing business on Elm since 1957.
He doubts that downtown can sustain the level of chichi to which it seemingly aspires. "They want to make a new restaurant next to Pegasus Plaza," Mr. Senior says. "Why? So people can watch the bums urinate?" This noonday, though, it's not fear of bums but fear of baking that seems to keep most diners indoors. Along Ervay, between Elm and Main, 18 sidewalk tables offer patrons of Quizno's, Porta di Roma and Corner Bakery a view of the Bank One tower across the street. Sixteen are vacant. "Want to sit outside?" a young man asks his companion as they enter Quizno's. "No!" she says. In Stone Street Gardens, where a canvas awning creates an oasis of shade, foot traffic is respectable if not precisely gridlocked. "That place is hopping," a man says appreciatively as he and several companions emerge from Campisi's.
Hopping is relative, however. To see hopping, you'd best hop one level down, to Tunnel World. There, where fast food abounds and the sun does not shine, are the throngs that urban planners dream of luring up into Street World. A pair of impromptu, five-minute traffic counts standing still, counting the bodies that go by tell the tale. Tally: tunnel, 118; street, 42.
Movin' on up
At 1505 Elm, where a one-time S&L is being converted to condos, tunnel access is a selling point right up there with the proximity of the DART rail line, the personal-shopping service (courtesy of Neiman's), the eye-to-eye views of Pegasus and the rooftop putting green. The project's 68 units will be the first residences for sale rather than for rent in the downtown core. On this day, John Dirba and Robert Pilgrim renters of lofts in, respectively, the Santa Fe and Wilson buildings are looking to buy. They're too late to snap up one of the smaller $149,000 units; those that remain, ranging in size up to 2,000 square feet, go for $225,000 to $475,000.
What company will provide the parking valets, they ask the sales reps. What company will do the construction? How many units will be on each floor? Who did the dιcor in the two model units? How much are the homeowners' association dues? Is there a size limit on dogs? Oh, yes, and the question that certifies the questioner as a bona fide downtown insider: "What gossip do you have on 1530 Main?" "Cliff Booth's?" comes the answer. "Well, he still lives on top ..." And everyone has a little snicker at the expense of the developer whose seven-year failure to renovate the building adjacent to Neiman Marcus has become something of a thorn in the side of downtown boosters. Neiman's, however, has survived years surrounded by thorns, and on this day, as always, sales clerks and customers bravely soldier on.
In the ground-floor coffee bar, two very young men in suits show elaborate courtesy to a man who looks easily to be in his ninth decade. While the three of them converse earnestly about the history of Baylor University, an Asian-American man ducks in for a latte to go. He's in town for a convention of Asian-American journalists, he tells the clerk; tonight they're headed for Billy Bob's Texas. Two blocks away, the name Titche-Goettinger still is carved on the stone faηade of the store that, in its last incarnation, was Joske's. It's been more than a decade since you could buy a blouse here, or a toaster, but people are still shopping for a bachelor of fine arts in new media, say, or a graduate certificate in geographic information systems.
Representatives of the six universities that offer classes through the Universities Center sit behind registration tables set up in the lobby. At the Texas A&M-Commerce table, academic adviser Alvin Jackson is huddled with a prospective student who is worried that his test scores will keep him out of graduate school. "What's your GPA?" Mr. Jackson asks. He mulls the answer, then pronounces: "If you can make an A in finance this semester, you should be OK."
Rush-hour toasting
That's the kind of news that calls for a drink another commodity that is becoming readily available downtown. As the evening rush hour crawls by Main Street's newest hangout, the Metropolitan, the upstairs restaurant is relatively empty but the downstairs tavern is doing a brisk business.
Over beers at the bar, Robert and Sam no last names, please mull that age-old question: Has downtown finally turned the corner? "Stuff like this will help," says Robert, waving a hand at the Metropolitan's century-old, cozy-urban exposed brick walls.
"But places never seem to last," protests Sam.
"I love coming down here," he hastens to add. "But I don't think there's enough yet to draw a constant crowd, week in and week out."
"He's being a little pessimistic," says Robert.
"I'm just being honest," says Sam.
A few doors down, with two years under its belt, the "urban brasserie" Jeroboam is fast qualifying as a downtown institution. As darkness settles and the candlelight begins to ricochet from silver candelabra to frosted glass partition to glistening oyster shell, co-owner Brandt Wood surveys his much-lauded creation. "We were told we were crazy," he says, recalling the decision he and his brother made to expand their entertainment company's venues from Deep Ellum into downtown. But, as expatriates of New Orleans, he said, they were hooked by downtown's faded charms. "There's a patina that's not all perfect, and that adds to the experience," he said. "There's a force, a tractor, pulling people downtown."
Last call
The later the night gets, the younger are the people deposited by that beam. Younger, leggier, tighter and lower-cut not to mention more amorous. The crowd in the Jeroboam bar seems to have one hand wrapped permanently around the stem of a wine or martini glass, the other around a partner's neck or thigh. And if the urge to dance strikes, that no longer requires a pilgrimage to Deep Ellum. Just sashay across the street to Umlaut, where assuming that one passes muster with the doorman one can descend to basement level and gyrate the night away. "No athletic wear, no tennis shoes, no T-shirts, no ripped jeans," says manager Barry Smith, rattling off the dress code.
As he speaks, two guys appear in jogging shoes and T-shirts. He waves them in. "It's just an overall look," he says. Pause. Shrug. "They're here with some director's wrap party." Downstairs, the bar in one of the two cavernous rooms is lit from within, showing in merciless silhouette all those buff enough or drunk enough to stand beside it. On the patio, Anabella Edwards, a Guatemalan who has visited Dallas for more than a decade but only recently moved here, pronounces downtown's evolution "wonderful." She lives in Uptown.
By the time the bartenders announce last call, the crowd is starting to thin. Up at street level, there's a modest scrum as swaying couples wait for valets to retrieve their cars. Across the street, drinkers bend their elbows and converse in silhouette inside the Metropolitan. One block over on Commerce, the 2 a.m. silence is broken only by the whoosh of a street-sweeping machine. A young woman with a Dalmatian on a leash makes for Pegasus Plaza.