Nate99

Skybridge to 1HC is open.

That's good news. As suboptimal as the particular design may have been, it was going to be awful if left to decay 10% complete as it has sat for the last few months.

Looks quite dormant, there is no activity that you can see from the street.

The end product should work out much better for the area, I think HC was supposed to be some massive mall complex that was cut way short. I'm not sure if the original designs would have held up better had that vision come to pass, but this has some real potential. Add some more residential and whatever else they're doing with the Skanska stuff, and you have the DG walking area radius looking like a really great neighborhood.

Awesome spot. Quoting to get it on the next page in the thread.

As usual, I don't actually know any specifics here, but the first thing that popped into my head in either scenario would be how disruptive it would be to continue the tower upwards on all of the builing infrastructure. Utilities, elevators, etc., would have to have some pretty innovative (expensive) engineering for them to just pick up where they left off and keep going up with everything a hotel takes to run efficiently. In my uneducated mind, seems like some additional work in the footprint of garage portion would make the effort more manageable, but there was talk of building it for the next phase, so there could be Easter eggs of engineering tucked into what is there now that I can't see.

Three half serious thoughts come to mind on this farce: Maybe for the twentieth anniversary of its last functional use, we can have some sort of celebration. It's entirely possible that it will sit unused in stadium purgatory for longer than two successive Rangers stadiums in Arlington were used by the franchise (22 seasons for Arlington Stadium, 26 seasons for whatever they called the thing that opened in 1994), take that Dallas! At this point, it seems the county's plan is to wait for everyone that has good memories of the place to die off so as to minimize political blowback on whoever the county judge is at the time the physical structure succumbs to neglect and gravity.

yep.

It is the Tesla Cybertruck of buildings.

cool. I need to look at that on a bigger screen.

Lots of work going on still. Last time I walked by they were accessing utilities under the street directly in front of it. The awning is coming along, but you just can't see much of the interior at all. Really curious how the layout is going to work for the lobby and rooms without windows.

More not nothing.

IIRC, one or both chains were bought out by/changed their names to Circle K in the area. Not sure what became of Circle K locally, strange things were afoot.

You might have to get confirmation of what is down there to estimate the cost of excavation. Not sure what kind of variation might exist across downtown or block to block, but I imagine that there would be some serious marginal costs to engineer a foundation to the highest possible spec that could be mitigated by checking to see what you're actually going to be working with. Paging Purdue...

I'm thinking that all it means definitively is that someone cares about what's down there enough to spend some money to have it analyzed. That could be: (a) pessimistic - it is for sale and a potential buyer wants to confirm that their is no soil contamination that they would be liable to clean up or (b) optimistic - someone is finalizing the design of their project and needs to verify soil characteristics for the foundation specs Or somewhere in between. FWIW, I recall seeing this lot being sampled before a few years back, closer to the garage in the middle. These guys looked to be working close to the street.

It’s not necessarily something, but it’s not nothing.

Starting in on the diagonal, perhaps.

I retract my bit about no one knowing or caring about the history, that is interesting info. Not that it makes it an interesting building as it sits now to me personally, but to each his own.

It's the only structure on the block, but the rest of the block looks further divided. It would be interesting to know if there are still separate parcels/owners, or if the divisions are just remnants of old foundations hastily paved over. The cost of the demolition would take a long time to recoup through parking revenue, I would think, unless there is some other compelling reason to get rid of the structure and parking lot-itize it like Hines briefly did with the Chronicle building block prior to the tower construction. Apart from 81 five hour chunks of time per year, that area isn't short of parking options, which makes me hopeful that someone has a plan here, but I know nothing. To my untrained eye, the building looks to have been designed explicitly to be immemorable; I thought it was someone's storage warehouse for years, turns out it stored officially unsavory people for the State of Texas. Restoring it to anything interesting would not be faithful history unless it were heavily modified from something else to get to its current state, not that anyone seems to remember or care [edit - see below]. The covered sidewalk on the Preston side is nice for function (and I wish more of downtown had them), but form is pretty basic. This block has 4 adjacent blocks that are surface lots, 2 are part of the MMP grounds and one the back end of 500 Crawford apartments. Other nearby neighbors include the DeGeorge hotel (a homeless veteran outreach type facility if I remember correctly) The Salvation Army, and a bail bonds place.

It's great to have options, and as you point out, this has particular value that other approaches do not. The market can generally work out the kinks, and it is very interesting that it is being considered here.