Walk Dallas: Parking Lots That Blight And Hold Hope

The first “Walk Dallas” column elicited a lot of comments from people enjoying a trip through downtown. This week, I’m reverting to character and taking a similar three-mile walk through downtown looking at the ugliness of parking garages.

This week’s walk also begins at the Crescent Court because part of this literal exercise is to replace the Katy Trail’s 3.5 miles. The Crescent bumps up the mileage you can’t get beginning downtown. As you can also see, this route has a half-mile bonus for those wanting the full Katy replacement walk.

Ross Avenue and Routh Street

So like last time, walk the Maple-Routh Connection into downtown. Once again, pass the Arts District and you’re met with Ross and Routh. Like many acres downtown, this intersection has two corners taken up by surface parking lots. Be happy they’re here.

Surface parking lots are the definition of “future development.” The owner might make enough money to pay the taxes and expenses while the land waits for the city to catch up. In this case, there’s the Arts District extension to Ross Avenue that’s currently pretending they don’t have a plan while it goes through an Authorized Hearing.  Also, to the left, there’s a yellow flash of a new high-rise being built east of the freeway in the Deep Ellum-y area.

These surface parking lots are being surrounded by development. At some point they’ll be redeveloped – maybe after 35-plus years, Dallas will finally get a new skyline-changing “tallest building” — and not the meek neon box within a big box that is One Arts Plaza.

San Jacinto and Leonard

Anyway, walk to San Jacinto and turn right to Olive. You’ll see the black glass of the Plaza of the Americas complex from last week’s walk, but stop at Leonard. The tidiness of Plaza of the Americas masks a dirty secret – this walloping parking garage on the back side.

Sure there’s a mural pretending to be public art that’s often part of the recipe. Either an artsy-fartsy mural or an ad adorn many a Dallas parking garage. The ads make money off the side of ugliness. The murals, well, let’s just say they’re painted on a canvas that shouldn’t really be there. It’s all just make-up on an architectural corpse.

But back when Plaza of the Americas was built, land was cheaper than underground parking, and the 1980s downtown office park ethos meant no one cared – it wasn’t like anyone hung around once the five o’clock whistle blew.

This is a recurring theme in downtown and an issue almost impossible to reverse.

San Jacinto and Pearl: A Trifecta

Continue to Pearl Street and stop and gawk in amazement at three of four corners being parking garages with nothing pedestrian-friendly at ground level. While I freely admit being an enemy of aboveground parking, large lots on busy corners have to be the most egregious. Corners concentrate pedestrian traffic and all this one does is make walkers feel like intruders.

About the only saving (?) grace in this trio is the center garage. It’s only recently risen from what was a surface lot for decades (which should’ve become a high-rise with underground parking). You can see the green patch next to it. It’s a buildable empty lot (it ain’t a park). I hope/assume the reason for the sheer ugliness of its side is the expectation it will eventually be covered by another building. However, that doesn’t excuse the San Jacinto side that simply frames the pretty cars visible beyond – maybe it’s a nod to One Arts Plaza? And while this garage has restaurants along its Harwood face, San Jacinto simply duals with the older lot facing it (left).

The garage on the right is simply a light-colored, sheer-walled battlement with a dozen levels of slits.

Harwood and Wenchell

Another block along San Jacinto and you reach Harwood. On the southeast corner is a dark 10-story parking that started at Pearl (the left of the trio above). At least at this end of the block there are restaurant spaces carved into the ground floor serving fast food to the lunch crowd.

After a left turn left at Harwood is tiny Wenchell Lane. On your right will be the parking lot above. Note the steel cables (seen below) that keep cars from driving off the edge. As a railing in a home, they’re modern industrial. In a parking garage, it’s the height of cheap and fugly.

The shiplap corner is a splatter of incongruous ambiance nailed up by a restaurant tenant. So well done is the corner column it cut off the street sign. Or maybe I am on “ood” Street?

Right across “ood” street there’s a rather large surface lot. Will it become a better building or another jumbo garage like it’s across the street neighbor? That would mean in the space of another block there would be three more adjacent parking garages.

Campers (not those kind) know to stay away from “leaves of three.” Can’t Dallas stay away from adjoining garages of three?

Harwood and Live Oak

In the last column, I snapped a few pictures from the top of the Sheraton parking lot. Here it is at Live Oak and Harwood. This beauty faces Pacific Plaza – a park. The ground floor is a solid wall of concrete that’s so bad, even muralists (graffiti-ists?) got bored trying to paint it all

Harwood and Elm

And across from that sea of parking there’s this across from The Majestic Theater. I find the casino ad on its side to be fitting. Given the state of the garage’s façade, it’s a gamble whether rust will land in your ice tea.

Bonus Walk: Harwood, Pacific, Main and I-75

Remember this walk is only three miles and the Katy Trail is 3.5 miles?  You can pick up that half-mile walking around this sea of parking. In the lower left is a 10-story beauty at Harwood and Elm Street and there’s another one at Elm and Cesar Chavez Blvd.  The two blue squared are relatively new-ish office buildings.

This will all be redeveloped at some point. Across Pacific there’s the John W. Carpenter Park on the upper right, the DART transfer station in the upper middle and the James W. Aston Park just out of shot in the upper left that connects to Pacific Plaza.

In the meantime, before something hopefully wonderful is built, we’re treated to an enormous eyesore of surface lots and ugly parking towers. Hooray for us.

On the left is the parking lot at Main and Harwood anchoring the “parking district” above. Note the juxtaposition of that garage and the Beaux Arts-styled Municipal Building from 1914. Even more depressing is that the Municipal Building faces the Main Street Garden Park fronting the equally emblematic Statler Hilton.

Jackson and St. Paul Streets

From Harwood, turn right on Jackson and walk a block to St.Paul. Not all fugly garages are relatively new. This is the anchor of another super-block of potential development. Bracketed by St. Paul, Young, Ervay and Jackson Streets, this double block is almost solid surface parking.

On one side it faces the Dallas Central Library that’s across the street from City Hall. It’s also a block from the AT&T complex of buildings. And a third corner at Jackson and Ervay is kitty-corner from another spectacularly ugly parking garage behind Neiman Marcus that was to have been the Rogers Lacy Hotel designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

St. Paul and Bryan Streets

Turn north on St. Paul and I’ll leave you with something to enjoy. The old Post Office and Court House that’s now apartments. Opening in 1930, it replaced the 1889 Post Office on the site of the Mercantile National Bank highlighted in the last walk. Thankfully, a 1984 plan to build a 34-story expansion on top of the old building never came to pass.

Aside from being an overall handsome building, look at the top. You will see terra cotta inserts depicting the different methods mail has traveled – from horseback to stagecoach and all the way to airplane. Kinda cool and worth a look. They were added when critics, who clearly couldn’t see the future, thought the building was too boring. If you love the building and want to be a landlord, it’s also for sale.

Next to the Post Office on St. Paul is the home of First Baptist Church. As a gay boy, you’ll excuse me if I think its central fountain looks like a cross jammed into an exploding boil. Architecture mimicking ideology?

On your way back to the Crescent you will pass many more garages along St. Paul until you reach Akard Street. Make a hard right onto Cedar Springs and up to the Crescent. You’ll pass by the backend of McKinney and Olive and note that while it too has an unfortunate aboveground parking garage, it’s at least left the ground floor to businesses and green space that attract pedestrians.

I’d urge Dallas to adopt some additional urban planning rules to its zoning that would at least eliminate enormous aboveground parking lots from intersections – certainly not allowing multiple garages on the same intersection. The only relaxation of that would be to construct garages that included an active street level and a completely masked garage.

It’ll never happen of course, but I urge it anyway.

Will Ugly Parking Garages Make a Comeback?

Meanwhile parking lots and garages have gotten a lot of press during COVID-19. Some say people will be afraid of public transportation and will drive to work more. Others are happy for the vacant-in-lockdown spaces to be repurposed into wifi hotspots or COVID testing centers. However temporarily useful they may be, we don’t need more of them.