After appearing in sci-fi classic RoboCop, may Dallas City Hall’s days be numbered? – New York City has its Empire State Building, the renowned skyscraper from atop which King Kong swiped at attacking biplanes in the 1933 film before plunging to his demise. Los Angeles features the venerable Griffith Observatory, the location of James Dean’s knife fight in 1955’s Rebel Without A Cause and where swooning lovers swung beneath stars in 2016’s La La Land.
And Dallas has — well, Dallas has issues.
Dallas City Hall, the brutalist-style structure that once doubled as a dystopian corporate headquarters in the 1987 sci-fi cult classic RoboCop, is struggling. Designed by celebrated architect I.M. Pei, the notoriously towering edifice faces deferred maintenance and repair expenses of $50-$100 million, city administrators believe. The site, with its enormous plaza, was planned as an assertion of local pride under the lingering shade of a presidential assassination perpetrated under the city’s watch. But if one idea proposed as a possible cure comes to be, a structure once designed to be forward-looking and bold could slide into the past. After appearing in sci-fi classic RoboCop
“The building is a mess of our own doing,” said Reagan Rothenberger, a member of the Dallas monument Commission and author of a letter submitted earlier this year asking city officials to begin the process of designating Dallas City Hall as a monument. “We have failed to demand the maintenance of this building appropriately.”
Decades of decay and mismanagement have produced a potpourri of problems, city leaders say. The roof needs replacing. The air conditioning equipment is obsolete and the reflecting pool spills into the underground parking lot. Rothenberger notes unclean windows, burned-out lighting, insufficient signage and old restrooms, and this summer, city councilmember Gay Donnell Willis got stuck in an elevator. After appearing in sci-fi classic RoboCop
“The plaza is literally pulling away from the building,” said councilmember Chad West, who represents Dallas’ District 1. How did things go so bad? West and others say they’ve been tending to the priorities of city residents, who value funding things like as public safety, parks and infrastructure more than city hall upkeep. “It’s like when you’re a mom,” said six-year councilmember Paula Blackmon, who represents the city’s District 9. “You take care of everything else and forget to take care of yourself.”
Additionally, West said, the structure isn’t big enough to contain all of the city’s municipal offices, even though Pei’s design left open the potential of expanding southward. That has never come to fruition, he added, and as a result, some Dallas services are dispersed around the city.
In recent interviews, West, who chairs the council’s budget committee, has publicly asked whether city leaders might consider transferring activities and “repurposing” the facility. Some fear it may lead to the building’s sale — and potentially its demolition to enable new development given the ongoing $3.7 billion renovation and expansion of the nearby convention center, a voter-approved project that will free up land for development as part of a rebuilt downtown Dallas.
“City Hall could utilized in addition to part of that, either to be part of the expansion or for the land to be used for something else,” West told USA TODAY. “It’s not for the city council to decide on demolition. Our task is to decide if the city needs to stay in this building.” After appearing in sci-fi classic RoboCop
How Dallas City Hall came to be
On Nov. 22, 1963, shots were fired from a sixth-floor window at the Texas School Book Depository as a motorcade ferrying President John F. Kennedy, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, Texas Gov. John Connally and his wife Nellie made its final trip through Dallas’ crowd-lined downtown. The president was killed and the governor gravely wounded.
The tragedy rocked a grieving nation and slapped Dallas with the label “City of Hate.” Several years later, as part of deliberate attempts to restore the city’s reputation, Mayor Erik Jonsson engaged Pei, a rising star who Jacqueline Kennedy had tapped to design her husband’s memorial library in Boston, to fashion Dallas’ new city hall.
“A dark cloud loomed over Dallas for many years,” said Greg Johnston, board chair of Preservation Dallas, a nonprofit supporting preservation and regeneration of historic downtown buildings. The new municipal structure, authorities believed, would embody “the city’s strength and resilience,” he remarked. After appearing in sci-fi classic RoboCop
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