This is the thanks Thanks-Giving Square gets decades after planting and maintaining downtown Dallas’ first park: The city of Dallas has decided after 53 years to stop funding the nonprofit responsible for the 3-acre, sunken downtown haven designed by architect Philip Johnson.
That includes the bell tower adorned with the gold-leafed Circle of Thanks. And the fountains. And the 90-foot-tall chapel with the spiraling stained glass – the Glory Window, it’s called – in which someone is taking a photo right now or maybe in an hour but definitely later today to post to Instagram.
I saw seven kids in the Chapel of Thanks-Giving Monday morning. Architecture students. Lying on their backs. Sketching. Taking pictures. Just staring.
A “major national shrine,” President Gerald Ford called Thanks-giving Square in 1974. And now City Hall’s ready to wash its hands of one of the city’s first public-private partners, whose original board of development consisted of hundreds of household names, among them Lamar Hunt, Clint Murchison, Henry S. Miller, Judge Sarah T. Hughes and a lot of people for whom this town named streets and highways.
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Thanks-Giving Foundation was due almost $500,000 on April 1 per the agreement between the nonprofit and the city involving an underground pedestrian concourse the city demanded in the early 1970s. But in a letter City Manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert sent to Thanks-Giving Foundation President and CEO Kyle Ogden in November, that money’s no more.
Because the city can no longer afford it, Tolbert wrote. And because of the “lack of public benefit” of the underground walkway the city once demanded. And because the council decided against including it in the most recent budget. Except it did so without public discussion: Council member Chad West, chair of the finance committee, confirmed Thursday that the council told Tolbert during executive session not to fund Thanks-Giving Square.
Which is one heck of a way to break up with your longtime partner. In secret.
“It’s an existential crisis for us, frankly,” Ogden told me Monday.
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Vestiges of a downtown deli remains in the tunnels beneath Thanks-Giving Square, which the nonprofit foundation has been leasing to the city since 1973.
Robert Wilonsky/Staff writer
Because half of the nonprofit’s annual revenue of $800,000 or so comes from the city. And that money goes toward keeping the fountains running and the park clean and the doors to the chapel open to the 300,000 visitors the foundation says it attracts annually, many from out of state based on the copious notes tacked to the chapel’s wall.
“I’m not ready to say that we give up if we don’t get this done,” said Ogden, who was caught off guard by the city’s refusal to pay. “I mean, I’m out in the community trying to raise money to bridge this gap because we don’t know how long we’re going to be without revenue from the city. But it’s a potentially lethal blow.”
This has been a long time coming — two years, at least, when the City Council first wrestled with freezing the foundation’s funding. Now it’s gone altogether, out of the last budget and likely those to come based on Tolbert’s November letter, obtained by The Dallas Morning News, in which she said the city could restructure the deal, terminate the 75-year lease agreement or go to court “to determine the enforceability of the lease.”
The foundation has a proposed fix that involves taking over the rat-infested Bullington Street Subsurface Truck Terminal beneath the park, which was built by the city as part of its 1973 agreement with the foundation. At the moment, the high-rises around the square, including apartments and offices, use the underground terminal for storage, deliveries and trash and recycling collection.
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According to recent reporting, the city collects less than $50,000 in revenue from the surrounding buildings using the terminal. The foundation hopes to assume the truck terminal’s operations from the city to offset some of the lost revenue.
In July 1971, architect Philip Johnson showed off a model of his Thanks-Giving Square, which would include the chapel in which foundation president and CEO Kyle Ogden, far left, and chairman Christopher Trowbridge ran into several architecture students Monday morning sketching, photographing and starting at the spiraling stained glass above.
“But we have not been able to get from the city what their revenue has been for the truck terminal,” said Christopher Trowbridge, chairman of the Thanks-Giving Foundation. “We haven’t seen the agreements between the buildings and the city for the truck terminal.”
With the payment date approaching, Ogden told Tolbert in a Feb. 23 email that without a path forward, he had no choice but to start reaching out to council members and other civic leaders to let them know of the foundation’s pending disaster. Tolbert told him not to do that.
In a Feb. 26 email, Tolbert told Ogden she understood “the willingness of the Thanks-Giving Foundation Board Committee to collaborate with the City on a positive resolution.” But she asked him to “delay outreach to City Council members,” and said she would brief the council on March 4. Which she did, when the council discussed “the purchase, exchange, lease, or value” of the truck terminal. Behind closed doors.
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Five days later, Donzell Gipson — the assistant city manager who has since retired — told Ogden the city “does not intend to reopen the discussion on options for the Thanks-Giving Foundation to operate/manage the Bullington Truck Terminal.” Gipson also said the city no longer wants that access to the disused downtown tunnels, a part of the Dallas Pedestrian Network, where Cafe Momentum and a smaller nonprofit lease office space beneath Thanks-Giving Square.
Far as the city’s concerned, it no longer owes Thanks-Giving Square a cent and is done talking about it. That’s quite the downtown development strategy they got there at 1500 Marilla.
The foundation last year presented the City Council with a plan for a $30-million makeover that expands and brings the sunken oasis to street level. Not only is that plan in jeopardy, but so, too, is the park and the chapel, “developed into a place of beauty as a spiritual expression of thanksgiving to God,” as this newspaper put it in September 1965.
The high-rise apartments and office towers surrounding Thanks-Giving Square use the truck terminal below the park for deliveries and trash collection.
Robert Wilonsky/Staff writer
The square, really a triangle bordered by Bryan and North Ervay streets and Pacific Avenue, was once occupied by retailers and restaurants. But in 1965, Peter Stewart, who formed the nonprofit, saw only “beauty, space, light, leaf, water” — the makings of a “world city” on par with New York and San Francisco. Mayor J. Erik Jonsson, whose Goals for Dallas are being slowly erased, was all-in: “It’s something good that should be here.”
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The Dallas Times Herald’s editorial board agreed on Oct. 7, 1965: “We couldn’t think of a project affecting downtown Dallas that we’d rather see get off the ground (literally) than Thanks-Giving Square … a spiritually consecrated oasis of landscaped solitude among our skyscraper thicket.” In time it would become the place where the city goes to mourn, celebrate and gather for interfaith events. And there’s always Tuba Christmas.
It took years for the $4-million project to take root, in part because of the time it took to get it funded via hundreds of private donors and $475,000 from the 1967 bond program. And just as the City Council was set to approve an operating agreement in December 1972, the Park and Recreation Department bailed on its promise to maintain the square.
On April 1, 1973, the city and the foundation cut a deal: In exchange for that $475,000, the city would construct, own and operate the truck terminal beneath the square. The agreement also called for the construction of a “suburban pedestrian easement” below the park, which the city would then lease from the foundation.
That lease was for 75 years with an option for 75 more and would cost the city $65,000 annually, with future adjustments occurring every three years based on the Consumer Price Index. That’s how this year’s bill grew to $496,399.48, which the city now refuses to pay out of its $5.3 billion budget.
According to the 1973 agreement, if the city fails to pay “any installment of the rent,” the foundation can take back the tunnels beneath the park, which are all but abandoned and disconnected from the tunnel system. The foundation is also “entitled to reasonable reimbursement of expenses” from the city, which isn’t defined in the deal.
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Or, the agreement says, Thanks-Giving Foundation could just take the city to court “to compel compliance.”
The first thing you see when stepping into the truck terminal beneath Thanks-giving Square: the remains of a dead rat, not far from another carcass atop a dumpster. Rats could be seen Monday running around the cage at left.
Robert Wilonsky/Staff writer
Council member Maxie Johnson and two members of the mayor’s staff recently toured the site, including the truck terminal, where rotting rats greeted us Monday morning as live ones scurried about. Johnson told me Thursday he will bring the issue to the government efficiency committee before council’s summer recess, though it will likely be another discussion in executive session as it involves real estate — that truck tunnel. Rats!
“I spoke with the city manager and told her I want to have a discussion about it, and she understands that,” says the newly elected deputy mayor pro tem. “It’s worth a discussion, and I want to be fair to everyone and get all the facts. We are trying to find a solution, and it will take the whole council.”
Nolan Knight, the nonprofit’s treasurer, cautioned me against demonizing the city, my current default setting. And he has a point. The city faces a budget shortfall and eliminating rent for a useless asset sure seems like an easy fix. But that doesn’t consider the long-term ramifications for Thanks-Giving Square.
“Difficult decisions have to be made,” Knight said, which makes sense, as he’s the youngest child of Richard Knight, the late city manager once known as Mr. Fix-It during his tenure at City Hall in the late 1980s. The last thing Knight and his fellow board members want to do is alienate their longtime partners at City Hall.
“One of the reasons I think that my father earned that nickname is because he recognized the assets, the things of real value that make a city livable,” Knight said. “What I think has happened is, because of the way that the communications have played out with the city — all internally, without a particularly robust dialogue with the foundation — that there are very likely people who just don’t fully understand what is going on. They don’t fully understand that this is an irreplaceable asset.”
Or maybe, based on Wednesday night’s vote that signaled the beginning of the end of I.M. Pei’s Dallas City Hall — another one of those irreplaceable assets — they just don’t care.
Hey, maybe Plano’s interested?