David Preziosi, FAICP, Hon. AIA Dallas
Executive Director, Preservation Dallas
When Exchange Park opened in 1956 just a few miles north of downtown Dallas it was ahead of its time. Exchange Park broke barriers with its relatively new concept of mixed-use development with office towers, shops, restaurants, and even a bowling alley in one connected, temperature-controlled indoor environment. It was really the precursor to the modern indoor mall. NorthPark Center was still nine years away.
While it was a groundbreaking development, Exchange Park has quite a fascinating history that will soon be lost.
UT Southwestern, the site’s current owner, is planning to level the massive complex of over 1 million square feet in early 2022 for some as yet unknown future development. They, of course, could hold on to the historic buildings and work to reuse them when they have a new plan for the site. There are plenty of historic tax incentives available that could help them with the rehabilitation of the buildings.
Historic tax incentives? Dallas is no stranger to that, with over $1.5 billion in tax incentives used for the rehabilitation of historic buildings in Dallas in the past 20 years.
The Man With The Plan
William Blakely was the man with the vision that transformed the 120 wooded acres near the intersection of Harry Hines Boulevard and Mockingbird Lane into a completely planned mixed-use commercial development landscaped as a park.
Blakley proclaimed, “Exchange Park will be a self-contained business community – America’s first completely integrated and weather–controlled commercial development.”
It took three years of planning to develop the project with architects and engineers at the Dallas firm of Lane, Gamble & Associates preparing the plans. What was built was only a small portion of a much larger planned development that was to include additional office buildings, more retail shops and services, two department stores, a hotel, and residential towers.
The press labeled the development as a “city-within-a-city” and the “city of tomorrow.” Even though the complete development was never fully realized, the portion that did get built was definitely ahead of its time with unique features that set a trend for similar future development across the country.
Banking on The Future
Exchange Bank occupied the first office tower completed in Exchange Park in 1956. The 14-story building was a clean-line modern design that featured continuous strips of windows with bright yellow panels in between floors since painted a charcoal gray.
Taking the environment into account, projecting sun visors were designed into the façade, a new concept for the time, to reduce the direct sun on the windows that would heat up the interior in the summer.
Just as cutting edge as the exterior was, a new concept of movable wall partitions, which could be rearranged overnight to create new office spaces, snap-in air outlets and light fixtures were used along with unique floor construction, which allowed wiring and outlets to be easily rearranged to meet the requirements of new tenants.
According to The Dallas Morning News, Exchange Bank was the first office building in the country to incorporate this complete modular flexibility.
Braniff Airways was the next major tenant of Exchange Park when they moved into the site’s second office tower in 1958.
The 10-story building was strikingly similar to Exchange Bank and used the same sun visors on the main facade. However, the Braniff building differed with bright blue panels, which still retain their original color, a rear façade with a different shading system and a top floor that featured a landscaped terrace for Braniff executives with views to nearby Love Field. The interior featured the same flexible wall system as the bank tower.
The two office towers were connected with an enclosed air-conditioned space that contained shops, services, and restaurants. The developer called it a “weathered conditioned street.” It had a surface of brick and exposed concrete scattered throughout with interesting patterns of varying shades and sizes of exposed aggregate.
A series of large skylights provided natural light to the space and the built-in planters below, which contained lush foliage. This concept served as a forerunner to the modern mall, and one can see similar concepts in the original section of Northpark.
Built to Grow
Ample parking was provided around the complex with heavily landscaped parking lots and a parking garage. To reduce commercial traffic around Exchange Park, a 3,600-foot-long tunnel system was built under the complex, which provided space to unload delivery trucks and allow service vehicles to operate without being seen on the site or interfere with the automobile traffic movement at the ground level.
The third and final office tower constructed at Exchange Park was for the new corporate home of Frito-Lay. It opened in 1966 with much fanfare that included Joan Crawford appearing for the ribbon-cutting. She was married to the former CEO of Pepsi-Cola, which merged with Frito-Lay in 1965. He passed away in 1959, and after his death, Crawford was appointed to the Board of Directors. Her picture hung in the board room of Frito-Lay at Exchange Park.
For the Frito-Lay Tower, Lane, Gamble & Associates departed from the design of the earlier towers by eschewing the attached sun visors for a clean glass-walled cube of 17-stories connected to the mall. The building featured a private rooftop club, a medieval pub, and a large cafeteria. The tower also included an elaborately landscaped garden area with a five-ton copper water sculpture by Wilbert Verhelst.
Over the years, there were many establishments located in Exchange Park. However, two became well-known after they opened in 1959.
The first was La Tunisia, which was one of the most unique restaurant concepts in Dallas. Guests entered through a loggia surrounded by an exotic garden of tropical plants and palm trees into the main dining room. Hundreds of yards of hand-woven silk fabric hung from the ceiling and adorned the walls to give the effect of being inside a huge tent in the Arabian desert. There were even lights built into the ceiling that changed throughout the evening to represent desert lights.
The same Los Angeles firm who supervised the building of Disneyland designed the restaurant space, which was touted as having the “romantic charm of a North African desert oasis” and hailed as “one of the best examples of interior design in the nation.”
The other establishment was the Mickey Mantle Bowling Center which featured 32 lanes and was the first to carry his name. Mantle even moved his family to Dallas to be close to the new center. Over 10,000 people came for the opening, including notable figures like Whitey Ford, Yogi Berra, Billy Martin, Dorothy Malone, and more.
Today, Exchange Park remains very close to the original design with slight changes and updates over the years for modern conveniences. However, the use has changed dramatically.
Braniff moved their headquarters to D/FW airport in 1976, and Frito-Lay moved theirs to Plano in 1985. Exchange Bank was bought out and became Texas American Bank before it closed, and now Chase Bank occupies that space. La Tunisia was replaced in 1972 by Arthur’s West restaurant, which eventually closed, and the Mickey Mantle Bowling Center has been long gone.
Exchange Park changed hands several times, and in 2008 UT Southwestern purchased the complex and expanded their campus with offices for the UT Southwestern Medical School. Gone from the mall are the shops and services, replaced by medical offices and a food court; however, the original skylights and “street” of brick and patterned concrete remain.
Cutting Edge Regardless of Era
When Exchange Park opened, it was cutting-edge with its concept of mixing retail and office space and its architectural design featuring an exterior sun shading system and modular flexibility for the office towers. In 1956, Architectural South magazine heralded Exchange Park as “an entirely new concept of the business community of the future — a city within a city, containing all of the facilities necessary to provide goods and services under the most favorable conditions-comfort and convenience without congestion.”
Soon, Exchange Park will be a footnote in history and another significant loss of an important piece of Dallas’ architectural history. Unfortunately, UT Southwestern only sees the dirt as valuable and not the office towers and retail space complex. They are taking the familiar road that many developers do here with old buildings by scraping the site clean for new development.
In the process, our architectural heritage is lost, and copious amounts of building materials, a staggering amount due to the sheer size of the over 1 million-square-foot complex, are carted off to the landfill, taking up valuable space. The energy and raw materials that were used to create the massive complex will be lost, and precious new raw materials and energy will be needed to build something new.
It is a shame for an organization that cares so much for people’s health to not to work harder to care for the environment’s health by working to reuse the existing buildings of Exchange Park and not wasting so much to build new ones eventually.
