Mercantile tower glows with promise
Dallas: Complex emerges from dark as signal of revitalization to come
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The Mercantile tower was once a glowing landmark on Dallas' skyline. They counted down in unison. At zero, they roared. Confetti fluttered above and the beautiful people below in beautiful clothes hugged one another and refilled their glasses.
It wasn't New Year's, but a new era. No glowing ball dropped from a skyscraper, but a skyscraper once threatened with the wrecking ball lit up.
Dallas' Mercantile Bank complex has spent a generation empty and crumbling away on downtown's Main Street, a 33-story monument to urban decay. So a party to celebrate its rebirth Monday as a retail and 400-unit residential center seemed fitting.
"This is the most important, last bowling pin to fall," said Mayor Laura Miller, perched on Main Street's Davis Building several blocks away for an unobstructed view of the Mercantile's clock tower.
Floodlights cast the building's body in bright white while its spire glowed in red and green – the first time in 17 years, city officials said. With dignitaries' flip of a cartoonish switch, Dallas' goal of revitalizing downtown became markedly more attainable, they'd say later.
"It's remarkable to me for us to be on this roof, looking at that building, and being able to save it," Ms. Miller said. "We're about to get a lot of people back on the streets."
For that, thank in particular a "crazy, insane man from Cleveland," the mayor said.
He's David Levey, executive vice president of Forest City Enterprises, which Dallas is giving about $70 million in public incentives to redevelop the Mercantile complex and convert the Continental Building across Commerce Street, and the former Atmos Energy office complex nearby, into apartments and condominiums. The complete project is estimated to be worth a quarter-billion dollars.
Results Mr. Levey acknowledged his initial skepticism – and questioned his own sanity for undertaking a project in a downtown that appeared all but devoid of life.
"Dallas had everything we didn't want," Mr. Levey said.
But the Dallas City Council, he noted, proved a worthy negotiating partner.
Several members, including the mayor, helped salvage the redevelopment deal this year when both sides stood at an impasse over financing, he said. The council voted unanimously this summer to approve the redevelopment pact.
"The government was, for the first time, looking toward its core. They wanted this to happen. The business community wanted this to happen," Mr. Levey said.
Without the Mercantile's redevelopment, Ms. Miller said, "fully half of downtown would not be able to develop the way we wanted it to. It will bring an entirely new feel to downtown Dallas. This had to be done."
Built in 1942, the main Mercantile clock tower will live on as an apartment complex. Forest City plans to tear down three smaller buildings that are part of the Mercantile complex to make way for an apartment tower. Those buildings were constructed between 1949 and 1972. Mr. Levey estimated construction on the apartment tower will last 18 to 24 months.
Today, the complex is cold and dark. Shattered light bulbs and Dr Pepper cans litter its marble floors, and most everything is covered in dust.
The only signs of life in the World War II-era complex – inside which thousands of people once worked – are the gnaw marks of animals and the frozen faces of people depicted in ornate murals set into the complex's walls.
Mayor Laura Miller and Cleveland real estate developer David J. Levey celebrated the redevelopment of the Mercantile Bank complex Monday evening. How to remove the artwork before Forest City begins demolishing three of the four buildings is of particular concern to some city officials. Although details haven't been solidified, Ms. Miller said downtown developers are welcome to take the art as long as they pay for its extraction and removal, then use it within their own projects.
State Rep. Will Hartnett, R-Dallas, was among the last Mercantile complex business tenants, working on the 28th floor until 1992, when the building shut for good.
"I had my doubts that I'd ever see this. I'm kind of amazed," he said, gazing toward the glowing building on downtown's eastern end.
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