New York City has its Empire State Building, the iconic skyscraper from atop which King Kong swiped at attacking biplanes in the 1933 film before hurtling to his demise. Los Angeles has the venerable Griffith Observatory, the scene of James Dean’s knife fight in 1955’s Rebel Without A Cause and where swooning lovers swayed among stars in 2016’s La La Land.

And Dallas has — well, Dallas has issues.

Dallas City Hall, the brutalist-style building that once doubled as a dystopian corporate headquarters in the 1987 sci-fi cult classic RoboCop, is hurting. Designed by acclaimed architect I.M. Pei, the famously imposing edifice faces deferred maintenance and repair costs of $50-$100 million, city leaders say.

The site, with its grand plaza, was conceived as an assertion of civic pride under the lingering cloud of a presidential assassination perpetrated on the city’s watch. But if one strategy floated as a possible fix comes to pass, a structure once intended to be forward-looking and bold could tumble into the past.

“The building is a mess of our own doing,” said Reagan Rothenberger, a member of the Dallas Landmark Commission and author of a letter submitted earlier this year asking city officials to begin the process of designating Dallas City Hall as a landmark. “We have failed to demand the maintenance of this building appropriately.”

Decades of deterioration and neglect have produced a potpourri of problems, city leaders say. The roof needs replacing. The air conditioning system is outdated and the reflecting pool leaks into the underground parking garage. Rothenberger cites dirty windows, burned-out lighting, poor signage and dated bathrooms, and last summer, city councilmember Gay Donnell Willis got stuck in an elevator.

“The plaza is literally pulling away from the building,” said councilmember Chad West, who represents Dallas’ District 1.

How did things get so bad? West and others say they’ve been tending to the priorities of city residents, who favor funding needs such as public safety, parks and infrastructure rather 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 hold all of the city’s municipal offices, even though Pei’s design left open the possibility of expanding southward. That has never come to fruition, he said, and as a result, some Dallas services are sprinkled throughout the city.

In recent interviews, West, who chairs the council’s finance committee, has openly wondered whether city leaders should consider relocating operations and “repurposing” the site. Some fear that could lead to the building’s sale — and even its demolition to accommodate 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 reimagined 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 job is to determine whether the city needs to stay in this building.”

The council’s finance committee will meet on Oct. 21 to review potential maintenance and repair costs and discuss possible next steps, he said.

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 leg through Dallas’ crowd-lined downtown. The president was killed and the governor seriously wounded.

The crime shook a grieving nation and saddled Dallas with the moniker “City of Hate.” Several years later, as part of concerted efforts to remake the city’s reputation, Mayor Erik Jonsson recruited 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 promoting preservation and revitalization of historic city sites. The new municipal structure, leaders hoped, would symbolize “the city’s strength and resilience,” he said.

The seven-story, $70 million project broke ground in 1972 and opened in 1978. Its seemingly gravity-defying facade slopes outward at a 34-degree angle with each floor more than nine feet wider than the one below, according to Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, formerly I.M. Pei & Associates.

“The building is a fascinating amalgam, equal parts raw truth and magic,” Architecture Week wrote in 2009.

The mayor’s incredulous reaction to the building’s top-heavy form, the author wrote, evidently prompted Pei’s team to add three cylindrical pillars that appear to — but don’t really — “bear the load,” instead lending visual support. While Pei, who died in 2019, went on to design renowned landmarks such as the Louvre Pyramid in Paris and Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Dallas City Hall has proved to be a love-it-or-hate-it affair: Some consider it art, others a monstrosity. One publication ranked it among the nation’s most beautiful city halls.

But its appearance as an “architectural bully,” as the Paris Review once put it, “dwarfing the individual and threatening to crush all who dare enter,” made it an ideal stand-in for Omni Consumers Products’ fictional Detroit headquarters in the film RoboCop, a cautionary tale about a cyborg police officer in a futuristic corporate police state.

“In RoboCop, it’s even more dystopian,” said Blake Kimzey, whose 2022 short story about a retiring Dallas City Hall maintenance worker gifted a replica of the RoboCop suit was published in D Magazine. “It’s not a beautiful building, but it’s memorable.”

Now Dallas-based executive director of a creative writing school program, Kimzey grew up in small-town North Texas, where “we thought we were going to get snatched by satanists or die from killer bee stings. RoboCop seemed to tap into those bad headlines. It hammered home the point of the city being more foreboding and that things were going to get worse.”

A landmark’s fate in the balance

For Dallas City Hall, they certainly have.

Ultimately, West said city leaders will have to balance the costs of the site’s maintenance and modernization with preservation interests.

“We’ve got a duty to make that hard decision on what happens with it,” he said.

The available options likely won’t be popular, West said, whether it’s a bond election or a tax increase. While the city could sell off some of its unutilized real estate holdings, that would only partially cover the costs, he said.

“We may have to find other offices,” Blackmon said. “There’s tons of real estate downtown. I’m going in with an open mind. But if we’re going to stay here, we need to fix it up.”

Katrina Whatley, a local realtor and community organizer who ran against West for the District 1 seat, believes the building has architectural and symbolic value and says talk of repurposing the site “is nothing more than Dallas City Councilspeak for enriching developers.”

Another civic activist who’s expressed cynicism about the site’s possible sale is Rudy Karimi, a member of Dallas’ park and recreation board. He hopes city leaders can strike a balance between preserving Dallas City Hall’s significance while modernizing it for today’s operational needs.

“With thoughtful planning, it can serve the city effectively without losing what makes it unique or demolishing it entirely,” Karimi said.

While the building holds special meaning for RoboCop fans, Johan Hoff, the Sweden-based moderator of two related fan sites, told USA TODAY: “We are not oblivious to the fact that time moves on. Movie locations come and go. If Dallas City Hall is ultimately torn down, it will be a sad day for Robo fans, but the building will live on onscreen.”

While preservationists hope it doesn’t come to that, Rothenberger said when he asked the commission to act, “I did so with an eye toward this very day.” The landmark process began in March.

Dallas, he said, has a long history of moving on to the next shiny project.

“Dallas City Hall looked like an easy target,” Rothenberger said. “I hate to say that I was right. The greatest historic buildings survive today because someone spoke out for them…. The future residents of Dallas deserve an iconic building for their seat of government — not an office tower.”

His Jan. 15 letter to Dallas’ office of historic preservation said the structure, while just 46 years old, meets multiple landmark eligibility criteria. Rothenberger noted that Boston City Hall, another brutalist-style building with its own share of detractors, will soon be designated a Boston landmark.

“There’s the old phrase, ‘You can’t fight city hall,'” he wrote. “Perhaps it’s time to fight for city hall.”