The Dallas Arts District

SETTING THE STAGE

For over one hundred years, Dallasites have frequented many arts institutions in the city. A concert given by a small orchestra of musicians in 1900 gave birth to the Dallas Symphony. The Dallas Public Library built an art gallery and inspired the creation of the Dallas Museum of Art. A performance by the infamous Maria Callas in 1957 opened the doors of The Dallas Opera. Shortly after, the Dallas Theater Center begins performances out of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Kalita Humphreys Theater.

Looking back today, it’s hard to remember when all these institutions and others, such as Booker T. Washington High School, were not located together in the Dallas Arts District. However, the current iteration of the area is fairly new, only coming together around 2009. The idea of creating an arts district in Dallas percolated for many years. Longtime Dallas residents started talking about it as far back as the 1950s, envisioning a modern arts neighborhood to rival New York City and the cities of Europe. It was not until the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) built its current building on North Hartwood Street and Flora Street in the 1980s that an official arts district began to take shape. 

In 1976, the DMA began planning a new building with more exhibition space and more conveniently located for visitors.  At the same time, the symphony, opera, and ballet were feeling the confines of their current spaces. The museum was promised three important art collections if they could make this new building a reality. So, the board felt the heat to get this thing together. Board members pondered whether a new museum building could lead to something bigger: a whole arts neighborhood. An eight-acre site on Harwood Street was found between Ross Avenue and the Woodall Rodgers Freeway. The museum’s chosen architect, Edward L. Barnes, and their consultants at Carr, Lynch Associates loved the site and began to dream up the idea of something more than just the museum.

Kevin Lynch took this opportunity to start sketching what a complete arts neighborhood on this land might look like. In October of 1977, Carr and Lynch released their ideas for this portion of the Central Business District. They wanted to revitalize this section of downtown into a thriving neighborhood and connect it through the freeways to other parts of the city, such as Uptown.

Everyone got on board, including the City of Dallas.  A financial plan for the Arts District began to take shape. A key component of this plan was a bond sent to city taxpayers on June 10th, 1978. However, the bond failed, and the museum lost the option to the land. The museum scrambled and was able to buy rights but at more than double the expected price. The vision began to fall apart.

Private land developers, chiefly Trammel Crow, realized the Arts District’s potential for a lucrative future. They began buying property around the area in anticipation of its development. However, this threw a wrench into the project and nearly killed it. While the DMA was able to pass a bond several years later and use their land options, the Dallas Symphony and Dallas Opera were priced out of the game. The private landowners did not hold the same vision as Carr and Lynch and were interested in developing their properties primarily for economic gain rather than in service of a thriving arts neighborhood.

The Dallas Symphony didn’t give up. In 1981, they identified a parcel of land at Pearl Steet and Flora Street for the new symphony hall that happened to be right next to the Borden plant. Hoping to help, the current Dallas mayor, Jack Evans, called up an old friend, Eugene Sullivan. Sullivan was a chief operating officer of Borden. Sullivan and Evans met, and Borden decided to give a parcel of land to the city to facilitate the building of a new home for the symphony. The city purchased several smaller plots of land abutting the gift so that the hall could be built. In 1989, I.M. Pei’s impressive Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center was completed.

Two key arts institutions now had homes in the Central Business District but many of the other plots were still owned by private developers. These developers had their own plans: large buildings with large parking lots, without public spaces or a connection to the arts.

Meetings between the developers, the museum, symphony, and the city were attempted to re-imagine the arts district idea with all the current players. Triland Partnership was hired to coordinate this effort, and the stakeholders began meeting in earnest to discuss a new vision of the Arts District. The group established a set of design guidelines for new projects, including a plan for future buildings along Flora Street to create the heart of the District.

Over the next 25 years, Dallas saw the opening of many institutions that are central to the Dallas Arts District, such as the Nasher Sculpture Center (2003), the Winspear Opera House (2009), the Wyly Theater (2009), and Klyde Warren Park (2012), as well as the integration of existing structures such as the Trammell Crow Center, Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, Belo Mansion, and the Cathedral Santuario de Guadalupe. High-end residential, restaurants, and office spaces developed alongside these institutions and began filling out the area. Almost 50 years later, Dallas has the arts district it envisioned so long ago. While the buildings, organizations, and cultural significance that gave the Arts District its name are alive and well, the vision of a thriving neighborhood is far from realized.

THE CURRENT STATE

“Great cities thrive on neighborhoods that encourage pedestrian traffic, traffic that offers many eyes to keep streets safe, and many intersecting actions to keep places interesting. This is best achieved in neighborhoods where a variety of uses—from residential and recreational to office and retail—create a web of interweaving activity. But on the ground, the Arts District looks like it will remain an entertainment destination.” – Peter Simek, D Magazine, October 2, 2019

The challenge facing the Arts District today is how to develop a living, breathing space that is integral to people’s everyday lives, rather than a place to attend a performance every few months. The current configuration of residential and commercial spaces limits the area’s potential by its inaccessibility and homogeneity. The solution is core to the city itself and the economically and racially diverse members of the Dallas community who live outside of the city center.

On the corner of Harwood Street and Woodall Rogers Freeway, the lawn of Klyde Warren Park is filled with people of all ages, races, and income.  They are buying food, playing on the play structures, enjoying music or a movie, and just living. There is a natural flow between Dallas Museum of Art and the park. On busy days, it feels as if there is no difference between the two spaces. This is in part the nature of the thriving park and in part a result of the DMA’s free admission and curated programs. Over the last ten years, the DMA has focused on Black and Latino artists in their special exhibits and permanent collections. The success of these efforts is shown in the increased diversity of visitors to the museum. The combination of affordability, relevance, and accessibility has made this corner a potential blueprint for the rest of the Dallas Arts District.

Past Harwood Street and down Flora Street, the feelings of vitality and warmth fade into a coldness; sharp and unwelcoming. Monuments designed by architectural giants – Renzo Piano, I.M Pei, Norman Foster, and Rem Koolhaas – seem unloved and underappreciated. The buildings call out to have people live, work, and play within them. They need to be seen and embraced as parts of people’s everyday life.

The physical challenges facing the district are not small. All the venues are aging and collectively have tens of millions of dollars of deferred maintenance piling up. Kevin Moriarty, Executive Director of the Dallas Theater Center, which collectively operates the Wyly Theatre and the Kalita Humpries, sums it up from his perspective, “What’s happening in the buildings…is that we have very important and impressive architecture, all of which are now aging and coming into a time where they need increasing amounts of investment to maintain their function and beauty. Individual organizations or people built the venues then gave the buildings to the city, relying on Dallas to maintain. The recent bond issue will help but doesn’t go nearly far enough to address all the issues.”

Moriarty is referring to Proposition E, the $75 million bond issue providing additional funding to the Dallas Arts District passed by Dallas voters as part of the massive city-wide $1.25 billion capital bond program. This money, while significant, will only patch the holes and provide Band-Aids for the most pressing needs. Russell Dyer, Senior Manager of Cultural Venues for the City of Dallas and the operator of the Moody Performance Hall, agrees with Moriarty’s analysis.

“The city is now starting to realize how much ongoing maintenance is required for these buildings,” he says. With several of the buildings at or approaching twenty years old, he’s advocating for more attention to be placed on maintenance. “Right now, it’s an approach of ‘don’t fix it until it’s broke.”

Dyer’s insight is particularly apropos for his pride and joy, the Moody Performance Hall. Unlike the other venues in the district, the Moody does not have a resident professional company. It was built for the sole purpose of fostering small- to mid-sized community arts organizations. The Moody is the only venue to be built solely with public funds and continues to be funded by the City of Dallas. Rental fees are affordable for these groups – a major boon for them but a financial impact to the city’s budget.

Yet with the young Moody now maturing – hitting its stride according to Dyer – one would be hard pressed to find anyone who could challenge its success. Tenants of the Moody include some of Dallas’ most beloved arts organizations: TITAS Dance, Dallas Black Dance Theatre, Turtle Creek Choral, the Dallas Chamber Symphony, and many others. The success at the Moody speaks to both the need and the desire for publicly funded arts.

The overwhelming 3-to-1 support for Proposition E is encouraging and speaks to the public’s interest in the vision of the Dallas Arts District finally coming into its full and greatest form.

LOOKING AHEAD

There is no lack of enthusiasm for the future of the district among those who work there. Leading that vision is Lily Cabatu Weiss, the energetic Executive Director of the Dallas Arts District. She agrees that the future of the arts must be public and local. “American arts don’t have a way forward without American cities,” she says.

Weiss and her team have outlined their vision for the District through the Connect Master Plan, led by the design team of NBBJ Architects and the landscape architecture firm MickelsonStudio. The five primary strategies are:

• Transforming Pearl Street into the “Avenue of the Arts.” Pearl Street separates the visual arts end of the District, home to the Dallas Museum of Art and the Nasher Sculpture Garden, from the performing arts end. “Just Pearl Street alone can telegraph to you, ‘You don’t belong here,’” says Moriarty. “It is a huge barrier.” Safety is the top priority here, with a focus on unifying both ends of the District.
• Reinvigorating Flora Street. Creating a vivid, comfortable, and inviting experience for visitors along Flora Street. The thoroughfare will connect all the venues and allow patrons to explore the businesses in the area. It’s all about the details for Weiss: “If we can shade right, then you can get people to go two or three blocks further.” That could translate into a lot more business from foot traffic.
• Embracing Ross Avenue. Situated a block off Flora Street, behind both the Moody and Wyly, Ross Avenue feels like the back-of-house to the Arts District. The Master Plan envisions new mixed-use development and a key opportunity to bring residents into the area.
• Expanding and updating signage, wayfinding, public art, and gateway experiences. Getting around the District and finding parking is a source of frustration for patrons. “The value of the impact of mobility of people coming into [and navigating] the district is a game changer,” says Weiss.
• Enhancing pedestrian connectivity. Even though the DART station is named Pearl/Arts District Station, it sits more than a quarter mile off Flora Street – not far for New Yorkers, but quite a distance to walk in the Texas heat. Making this journey safe, comfortable, and visually appealing is a start. Weiss sees this as an excellent opportunity for public art installations.

The Connect Master Plan is focused on optimizing the Arts District as it currently exists. Yet there is an opportunity for expansion. Weiss notes that if she could add one venue, it would be a warehouse space, more cutting-edge and experimental than the existing venues.

Dyer is points out that the Moody, in its current state, is only Phase 1 of the complex. The next phases include rehearsal rooms, studios, black bot theaters, and offices, all of which will expand the Moody’s mission to serve more community arts programs.

“The Arts District is an ecosystem, and every venue has its place in the ecosystem and serves its own function well,” says Dyer. This variety and co-existence of both visual and performing arts programming in such a small area is truly rare. No matter how you look at it, the Dallas Arts District is unique and worth the collective investment.

The future of the Dallas Arts District is interwoven with the future of Dallas. While the DFW metroplex has some of the highest in-migration numbers in the United States, the city itself is losing population. Why? Affordability. The people who want to live in the city, identify with it, and want to wake up in the shadow of these monuments, can’t. Unlike New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, Dallas is not so far down the path of expensive housing prices that we can’t turn the car around. What if the Dallas Arts District could compete for young people and families like the suburbs and exurbs currently do?

How does this happen? By making the Dallas Arts District center in the lives of an economically and racially diverse group of people. A package of improvements, including affordable housing, public institutions, and accessible commerce, could create such a shift. By working with private developers, the city could subsidize a number of residential units in each building through local and federal programs to make them affordable for young artists and working families. This could include repurposing or building accessible arts studios and public galleries for artists across mediums. Future bonds could focus on creating public institutions that would draw in and keep people in the neighborhood. A school for younger children and libraries connected to community gardens and parks could continue the success of Klyde Warren. Tax credits and building subsidies could be given to specific business types, such as affordable grocery stores, restaurants, childcare centers, art supply stores, and other needs that residents currently have to travel far distances to meet.

Turning the arts district into a thriving livable neighborhood would transform it from the cold, street of monuments into a space that people want to be in day after day.