Black and Blue

For a downtown groundbreaking, it was a little rickety. It opened with a video presentation highlighting the milestones of Dallas nightclub impresario Keith Black. But sound for the video, projected from twin screens and featuring a leggy nightclub minx spewing breathy descriptions of the Black legacy encompassing clubs such as The Spot, The Iguana Mirage, Lime and Spy Club (Black's men's club Be'Be' on Lovers Lane was discreetly omitted), was out of sync. This made it sound like the minx dialogue was chasing itself around the 50,000-square-foot Hart Furniture building on Elm Street (next to the Majestic Theater), where Black's next venture is taking shape. Techs attempted to solve the problem by muting the sound on one of the machines, but this created the weird sensation that your ears were hearing faster than the lips could move--a problem once common with Godzilla movies. The promo video also featured an interview with celebrity chef Stephan Pyles, who was describing the "New Southern" cuisine he was developing for Black's new restaurant Kindal's. But Black later explained that he hadn't yet inked a deal with Pyles, and that maybe his commentary should be disregarded. Nevertheless, Black's Hart Furniture building project, which includes Kindal's and a massive multilevel club called Blue, to be equipped with fountains, plasma screens, state-of-the-art sound and lighting (no mirror balls, we suspect), a stage for live acts, VIP rooms for every level of importance, a subterranean game room and trapeze artists traipsing across wires suspended from above, is generating lots of Godzilla-like buzz. "You know this is the kind of synergy project with downtown that we need to have a lot more of," said Dallas Mayor Laura Miller, heaping lots of praise on Black during the groundbreaking ceremony, which featured the club maestro and his cohorts shoving blue spades into a blue sandbox filled with yellowish clay. Miller went on to explain how Black's project is the beneficiary of more than $1 million in tax increment-financing district funds that will be used to recast the outside of the circa 1888 structure by stripping off the lead paint and restoring the Italianate-style facade to its original luster. In addition, some $110,000 of that loot will be used to refurbish the streets and sidewalks around Blue and Kindal's. "All things are starting to be knitted together to make downtown a fabulous, vibrant 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week destination place," boasted the mayor, stressing that this structure needs to be preserved as there are only 10 buildings in all of downtown Dallas that predate 1900. Black estimates the entire venture will burn through some $5 million, including TIF, funds before it opens--May for Blue, October for Kindal's--out of sync.