The Eclipse of Dallas

Countless American downtowns are struggling to find their identity, and their tax base, after the convulsions of the COVID-era remote-work experiment. But only one major city is poised to demolish its seat of government.

That would be Dallas, where leaders say the monumental I. M. Pei–designed City Hall is in such bad shape that the city might be better off tearing it down and relocating the government into vacant office buildings nearby. That could create an enormous plot for the Dallas Mavericks, whose casino-company owners, the Adelson-Dumont family, want to build what Mavs CEO Rick Welts calls a “full-blown entertainment district” around their new basketball arena. One of the team’s owners, Miriam Adelson, has also been lobbying to legalize casino gambling in Texas, raising the possibility that Dallas City Hall might ultimately be razed for a casino—a perfect symbol for our era of civic impoverishment and gambling addiction.

This half-baked vision may be the nation’s worst downtown-revival strategy, and not only because it would destroy the city’s one-of-a-kind Brutalist colossus. The imagined payoff—a brand-new, suburban-style entertainment district—is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes downtowns worthy of their designation in the first place.

No doubt City Hall needs some work. Dallas began deliberations over the building’s fate this past fall, but the discussion was complicated by staff’s varying estimates of the deferred maintenance bill: The high end was $93 million in 2018, so could it really be $595 million today? Could citizens trust estimates from a government that had just been forced to auction off a new building for its permitting department because it was not up to code? City Hall’s defenders were suspicious to see the eye-watering tab arrive right as the Mavs came looking for a p