By Jay Firsching
Senior Associate and Historic Preservation Specialist, Architexas
Last year, the DalPark Garage in the heart of downtown Dallas was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Yes, for architecture and history nerds, even garages can be cool, and Dallas’ history includes some pretty great examples. The oldest still standing is the five-story Sanger Garage at 711 Elm (1925). Among the biggest is the I.M. Pei design under the Dallas Municipal Complex.
Bear with me for a few minutes, and perhaps by the time I am done, you too will agree that DalPark is cool.
First, let’s address what many will point out as the number one reason for not liking the DalPark Garage. What should be there, they’ll say, is the Rogers Lacy Hotel.
In 1945, Lacy, a Longview native who had amassed a fortune in East Texas’s oil fields, hired architect Frank Lloyd Wright to design his eponymous hotel. The stunning design was unveiled in 1947, but soon thereafter, Rogers Lacy died, as did his dream. So, we are left with nothing but the drawings and the cold comfort of knowing that of the four Wright buildings in Texas, Dallas boasts two.
Coping With Growth
This city has had a love-hate relationship with transportation since the 1872 arrival of the Houston and Texas Central Railroad. Advances in transportation brought growth; growth brought congestion, and congestion brought with it what you feel on the freeway every day.
Chief among the problems of congestion was parking.
Taller and densely packed buildings populated by commuters meant the streets were choked with traffic. Business owners complained that shoppers had no parking, and drivers complained that the parked cars blocked their way. The city made the controversial decision to install parking meters in 1935, and 10 years later made the even more controversial decision to ban streetside parking altogether.
The pilot program involved banning street parking twice a day during rush hour, and that is what we still have today.
By the mid-1960s, things continued to spiral out of control. Grandiose plans were proposed that included replacing the entire downtown core with multi-layered superblocks, moving sidewalks, sky pods, an underground network of freight tunnels, and even 300-foot-deep mechanical parking pits for cars.
Some solutions were implemented, and some were not.
That loop of snarled freeway encircling downtown was a solution, believe it or not. One that brought even more cars and more congestion downtown while destroying some of our most interesting neighborhoods. A common recommendation of most plans was that we should build a subway and, under no circumstances, place at-grade trains downtown. Of course, we skipped the subway in favor of at-grade rail.
The Age of Parking Garages
Something congestion did accomplish downtown was to make the expense of constructing major parking structures feasible and even profitable.
In 1966, 20 years after the death of her husband, Lawson Lacy announced plans to build a major parking structure on what would have been the site of the Lacy Hotel. After her mother died in 1967, Ann Lacy Crain took over the Lacy Interests and saw the project to completion.
Ann Lacy Crain just so happened to be married to Bluford Walter “BW” Crain, Jr. of Wilson, Morris, Crain, and Anderson. If that name isn’t familiar, the firm was fresh from their 1965 completion of the Astrodome. Longhorn fans will know Crain as the architect of UT Austin’s Frank Erwin Center.
Under Ann’s leadership, BW set about designing an imposing, multi-level, modernist parking garage.
The Dalpark Garage opened on May 1, 1968, and included a 13,000-square-foot home for American Savings Association on the lower floor. Advertisements described it as “the world’s most beautiful garage” and “a calm haven for 800 fidgety parallel parkers.” Also touted were the landscaped gardens and magnificent domed rotunda.
A central theme of DalPark’s advertisements was its proximity and convenience to the Neiman Marcus’ flagship store across the street, a relationship that remains important today.
Although the first floor stands vacant, the garage remains much as it was when it was built, and it has some pretty impressive features. Outside, it appears as a sort of a cube clad in a patterned CMU breeze block. The dark base with smoky recessed storefronts gives the cube a floating appearance. Inside, a complex array of interconnecting ramps gets you where you need to go. Central to this organizing system is a helical ramp at the garage’s core. A circular ceiling over the core is dotted with an array of domed acrylic skylights. These provide light to a ground-level central garden with decorative stone paving, planters of brightly glazed block, and custom light poles.
The garage was a wise investment in a crowded Dallas, but it would face the same problem as the rest of downtown in the long term. As the crowding increased and the suburbs grew, the central business district slowly died under its own weight. Planners continued to plan and make suggestions, but it would be another forty years before we would find ourselves where we are now, with downtown returning to life and bringing with it the problems of the past. What was old is new again, and with renewed development comes renewed congestion.
The current owner of DalPark is looking to the future and slowly putting the polish back on the garage. This is in response to the amazing news that the garage will soon be an integral part of the subway line downtown. An access point to the Commerce Street Station has been approved for the building’s first floor.
So there you have it: Frank Lloyd Wright, a wealthy Texas oil family, nepotism, the architect of the eighth wonder of the world, and “the world’s most beautiful parking garage.” And DalPark will soon become a partial solution to the very thing that made it possible in the first place: congestion. It will be a new station on the subway that planners have been telling us to build for decades.
Pretty cool.
