Council member Angela Hunt, whose District 14 encompasses downtown, agrees with the mayor here—a rare thing. And, sure, she acknowledges now may not be the best time to go after building owners and demand they develop—not like they have the spare money to tune up their properties.
"We aren't asking them to create a Taj Mahal," she says. "We are just saying, 'Come on, guys, get them up to code.' I think safety-wise and health-wise it's perfectly reasonable."
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Over the course of the summer, city staff identified the 36 buildings vacant and in need of caretaking. Of those, seven were singled out as the worst offenders. City attorney Tom Perkins says warning letters were sent to the owners; several of the owners say they never received them. On October 14, Leppert and Perkins and other Dallas officials stood before a makeshift podium set up in front of 1604 Main St. and spoke in stern tones of threats to the public's health and safety. Perkins said the city would use "every tool at our disposal" to deal with the buildings' owners, including litigation. Dallas Fire-Rescue Chief Eddie Burns warned that many of the buildings were so far gone that should they catch fire, his folks wouldn't risk life or limb to save them.
Today, the mayor says, "The further we got into those buildings, their problems were even more severe than I had anticipated."
Perkins and assistant city attorney Chris Bowers, who's leading the charge against code violators, will not say how many of the property owners have responded to the letters. They will acknowledge that not all were pleased with the warnings, and they also hint that litigation is imminent in more than one instance.
"Some have said, 'My building sat here for years without the city doing anything,'" Perkins says. "But the very fact you violated the law for years doesn't give you a pass on complying with the code. There are a lot of businesses that have invested heavily in downtown, and we are beginning to see the benefits of that investment. It's fair to those businesses and property owners who have invested in their buildings and in downtown to make everyone responsible for the health and safety of the citizens."
On the day the letters went out, Glazer's spokesman Pat O'Shea was furious with the city, claiming that two months earlier he received, out of nowhere, a call from a code enforcement officer who said he had a search warrant for the property.
"It was crazy," O'Shea said three months before being hospitalized, where he remains today, unable to speak further. "They swore before a judge they made every effort to contact us, and they hadn't. They said they sent a certified letter, and they most certainly did not. Then they called the office a day later to say they had a search warrant and that they could kick down the door if they had to. So I went down to let them in. And we're very much in compliance."
He said in October that the company had already spent $6,000 trying to bring the building up to code. Last week, Realtor Candace Rubin, who's been trying to sell the building for decades, insisted that number was closer to "a million dollars," which city officials don't believe, as the building's on the tax rolls for about one-third that amount. Rubin confirms the owners' desire to tear down the building, for which she's been unable to find a buyer because of the homeless camped on its doorstep. And because 508 Park Ave. sits inside a part of downtown with historic protection, she said last fall, buyers seeking to develop or demolish have stayed away. "The rights of the owner go to hell," she insists.
Not that there haven't been parties interested in the building. Six years ago, Larry Taylor seriously considered the space for his Texas! Music Center; newspaper stories were written proclaiming him the building's savior. But one of Taylor's partners in the museum venture says the Glazers wanted $20 million for 508 Park Ave., which is why Taylor took his project to Fair Park, where it also stalled. The old Brunswick building, says a colleague of Taylor's, "is useless." Why? "Location, location, location. It's literally and figuratively a dead end."
So, after 50 years of letting the building sit and wait and beg for attention, the Glazers now want to tear it down—because they consider it a dead end. Till June 2008, the city never once cited the building for code violations; now, after sinking thousands into a building that may never be occupied again, the Glazers are likely days away from being sued by the city. So, enough already.
"I think it's disgusting they want to tear it down, because I think Dallas needs to hang on to some aspect of its historic past as it relates to music of this period," says Dallas historian and author Alan Govenar, whose book Texas Blues was just published. "This was so critically important to the growth of Dallas culturally and so important to the growth of African-American music and the way it influenced American popular music."
