I got kicked off the Cole Manor Motel property Wednesday afternoon. Again. At least this time, the security guard was friendly about it — a quick explanation that media isn’t allowed, a firm handshake, done. Just as well. By then I’d taken a few pictures of the Harry Hines Boulevard motel that city attorneys call an “infamous crime hub.”
Yeah. Time to go.
Which is just what nearby residents have been saying for years. Time for Cole Manor to go — “time to remove this disgrace from our community.”
That’s from a 31-page document stuffed with photos and police reports that residents of the Love Field West neighborhood, off Harry Hines Boulevard and Empire Central Drive, sent to city officials in August 2016. It arrived in my inbox along with several other thick documents, shortly after I wrote last month that the city had sued the motel’s longtime owner, Irving resident Nilam Patel, for owning “a storefront for prostitution, drug use and the sale and manufacturing of illicit drugs.”
The city’s suit was filed in April 2025, almost a decade after residents reached out to City Hall for help.
Opinion
In their complaint, city attorneys included police reports showing that more than two dozen crimes had been committed at Cole Manor between 2022 and 2025, including several aggravated assaults and the manufacturing and distribution of drugs, which resulted in a joint local and federal operation. Police also say a 69-year-old woman was shot to death there on July 5, 2023.
The Cole Manor looked decidedly different on Wednesday than it did last month, when cars filled the lots and residents were hanging out in front of rooms with open doors.
Robert Wilonsky
Bad things didn’t stop happening at Cole Manor after the lawsuit was filed. In court documents filed less than two weeks ago to help secure a temporary injunction, city attorneys added more police reports.
One is listed as “incident of sexual assault.” I learned this week from police and prosecutors that on Jan. 5, a 39-year-old man with a long history of felony charges was arrested for sexually assaulting a child under 15. The suspect now sits in the Dallas County jail on $50,000 bail.
Court documents also include a Dec. 21 police report involving a naked man who police say refused to leave the premises. He was arrested when officers ran his name and discovered a stack of outstanding warrants.
Last week, a Dallas County judge granted Dallas attorneys their request for a temporary injunction. Patel has until Feb. 9 to begin remedying the extensive code violations scattered throughout the motor hotel, where windows are broken, rooms are rusted and rotting and, per the city, there’s not a fire extinguisher in sight. For starters.
City attorneys allege, among many other things, that the Cole Manor Motel is not zoned as a long-term residential motel, though at least one resident said Wednesday she’s been a guest there for a month.
Robert Wilonsky
Lance “Luke” Beshara, Manor Hospitality’s Fort Worth-based attorney, told me in December his client knew nothing about the bad things happening at Cole Manor. He blamed it on a previous operator, and he wouldn’t tell me who was now in charge.
Beshara said Patel had been making changes the city requested. He said the police reports cited “unsubstantiated offenses that supposedly occurred and were somehow related to my client’s property.”
Given the judge’s order, a trial scheduled to begin Jan. 26 will likely be postponed. But in preparation, this week the city submitted its lists of exhibits and witnesses, which include Perry Kilgo, agent for Texas Receivership Group, which city attorneys hope the judge will put in charge of Cole Manor.
That’s not nearly enough for one neighbor with whom I spoke Wednesday morning, a 25-year resident of Love Field West, who called the Cole Manor a “thorn in our side for too long.”
Someone was sleeping beneath a blanket outside the Cole Manor Motel on Wednesday afternoon.
Robert Wilonsky
She said she doesn’t care about code violations. She doesn’t care that it opened in 1946 or that it was designed by a famous architect, Charles Dilbeck, or that it’s on an endangered landmark list. She just wants Cole Manor “knocked down, demolished.”
This week I spoke with several people who live near Cole Manor in the modest neighborhood now besieged by construction crews hammering away at townhomes overstuffing the narrow streets of what’s now called West Love. One 40-year resident, who would only say his name was Nick, was getting into his pickup when I asked about the motel. Nick, wearing a T-shirt for K.B. Polk Elementary’s production of Shrek the Musical, pointed in its direction and said, “Mucha cocaína.”
Everyone with whom I spoke didn’t want me to use their names. That’s how terrified they are of Cole Manor, whose crime, they say, isn’t contained within its white walls.
For years, the residents fought the city to get their hands on police reports, eventually asking Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to intervene in 2016 when open-records requests were delayed and denied. Enrique Carranza, a Love Field West resident who helped lead the charge against Cole Manor, wrote to Paxton that the motel “for years has been at the center of various criminal activities that continuously spill over to our neighborhood affecting the quality of life for the residents.”
One of the biggest crimes at the Cole Manor Motel was the removal a few years ago of the sign planted along Harry Hines when the motor court was renamed decades ago.
Daniel Carde / Staff Photographer
Carranza, who in 2008 led a protest of the club Metropolis on Denton Drive after police said one 13-year-old girl lured another into prostitution, eventually got his hands on the documents. That led to the residents’ August 2016 report, which said, “After years of living with Cole Manor, we are out of patience with the system, and are willing to do whatever it takes to get rid of it. Whatever it takes.”
When Carranza died in July 2022, his obituary noted that in 2010, he’d been named the Dallas Police Department’s Citizen of the Year.
A former president of the Love Field West Neighborhood Association went with Carranza and numerous neighbors to City Hall in July 2016 to beg code compliance, city attorneys and council members for help. That former president told me Wednesday the temporary injunction granted by the judge last week felt like “sort of the light at the end of the tunnel – maybe? Are we allowed to think something good might happen? We’ve been disappointed so many times.”
When I was last at Cole Manor, just one month ago, cars filled its courtyard while residents were perched on patios and huddled around barbecue grills outside their bright-blue doors. But on Wednesday, no one was about, save for a bearded, bedraggled man in a tattered jacket who walked into the office asking to borrow a lighter.
This is where the pool was when the Cole Manor Motel opened in 1946 under the name El Sombrero Motor Courts. The motel was designed by revered architect Charles Dilbeck, and it on Preservation Dallas’ list of the city’s most-endangered historic landmarks.
Robert Wilonsky
There wasn’t a worker behind the glass when I walked up; the neon “Open” sign was turned off, as it always is every night on my drive home. A woman eventually appeared, insisting she was a guest — “for a month” — filling in for the clerk who’d just run across the street. The guard, who’d been sitting in a black truck just beyond the motel’s entrance, said he didn’t know how many people were staying at Cole Manor at the moment.
“But most of the guests don’t have cars,” the guard said.
I walked back to mine, parked across Empire Central in the lot of The Music Box, a recording studio and rehearsal space. Outside was a man who introduced himself as Lincoln — his last name, he wouldn’t give me his first — who said he was an engineer and producer who’d worked with BigXthaPlug, Sauce Walka and other rappers. I asked him about the motel across the street.
“That place is gloomy,” he said on this bright, sunny afternoon. I asked if he’d ever been over there. He said absolutely not.
“When you drive past it, a dark cloud will appear.”