When Matt Weiss began raising money for his Austin-based AI startup, he wanted to tap the vast network of wealthy Texas investors. As he made calls and lined up meetings, one address in Dallas came up time after time.
“We kept hearing about this mecca of family offices,” Weiss said.
It’s called Old Parkland and it’s become perhaps the most exclusive location in Dallas finance — an array of investment shops tied to Texas billionaires such as Michael Dell and Darwin Deason, as well as the local digs of Citadel and the New York Stock Exchange. And it’s expanding: Real estate scion Harlan Crow, who founded Old Parkland in 2008, recently added three new office buildings.
Inside, Old Parkland resembles a college campus, with towering oak and magnolia trees and a brick bell tower flanked by statues of Aristotle and Adam Smith. Artifacts such as dinosaur eggs, a death mask of Napoleon Bonaparte and a painting by former President George W. Bush (who keeps an office there) make the complex into a kind of Disneyland for history buffs. Tenants must be invited to lease space, and Crow has been known to recruit them personally.
“He doesn’t worry about an ROI,” said Kyle Bass, founder of Hayman Capital Management, who also has an office in Old Parkland. “The ROI is putting it together and everyone wanting to come meet there.”
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Crow, now in his 70s, spends less time on office development and more on politics than he used to. He donated to several opponents of President Donald Trump during the Republican primary, and his colleagues say he’s increasingly worried about the state of political debate in America. His solution to the problem is fitting for a history-loving commercial real estate heir: a democracy-themed office park.
Harlan Crow photographed with a large bust of Winston Churchill at his home on Sunday, April 16, 2023, in Dallas.
Smiley N. Pool / Staff Photographer
The development will host about 450 events this year, many of them debates or lectures in an underground debate chamber. Recent visitors include former President Joe Biden and Rahm Emanuel, a former U.S. ambassador to Japan and longtime Democratic leader currently weighing a 2028 presidential run. The visitor log also includes signatures from Republican political consultant Karl Rove, former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke and Bill Belichick, who led the New England Patriots to six Super Bowl titles before coaching at the University of North Carolina. The events are one perk of tenancy.
Fostering an atmosphere of dealmaking is another goal for Crow, whose father, Trammell Crow, amassed a fortune developing real estate projects. Weiss said he raised “a couple million” dollars for his AI startup from a lunch he organized in April for about 45 people at Old Parkland. He also walked away with contacts and his company, Circuit, has returned several times for more meetings.
Crow Holdings is based in a once-decrepit hospital building at the center of Old Parkland. Rocking chairs line the porch behind a row of columns, and the front door opens into a double-height, marble-accented atrium with banisters.
The walls are covered in an array of artifacts, including a portrait of President Ronald Reagan meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and a tile from the Baltimore & Potomac Railroad Station in Washington where President James Garfield was fatally wounded in 1881. Outside, a historical marker explains that a newer version of Parkland hospital was where President John F. Kennedy was pronounced dead in 1963 after his assassination in downtown Dallas.
Old Parkland has expanded from the old hospital to 16 buildings with 842,000 square feet of office space. The complex covers its operating costs, said Michael Levy, chief executive officer of Crow Holdings. But curiosities adorning the boardroom such as the fossilized eggs of a Hadrosaurus, a dinosaur that roamed North America some 80 million years ago, don’t exactly hold down costs.
Harlan Crow estate on Preston Road, Highland Park. Principal Leaders of the Italian Renaissance by sculptor Gabbrielli Donatello. Depicted are: Dante, Machiavelli, Ghiberti, De Medici and possibly Niccolo da Uzzano. Italian, early 20th century.
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“If you were a fiduciary for third-party capital, you would not do what we did,” Levy said. “This would make no economic sense to a third-party investor.”
If the accoutrements are a bit over the top, they also make Old Parkland distinctive in a struggling real estate market.
The Dallas-Fort Worth area has more finance jobs than Chicago and Los Angeles but many of its aging office buildings lack the amenities of trophy real estate in other parts of the country. Illustrating the interest in new high-end space, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is building a $500 million campus in Dallas while Bank of America Corp. is putting up a tower nearby.
Family offices and private equity outfits want similar bells and whistles but with a smaller footprint. Crow Holdings declined to share exact rents at Old Parkland, but it’s known to charge among the highest per-square-foot rates in Dallas at a time when the office vacancy rate hovers near 25%.
The three towers of the new East campus are around 80% leased. The new office taken by NYSE’s Texas operation will cover 28,000 square feet. It “will connect us with neighboring industry leaders,” said NYSE Texas President Bryan Daniel. The new development also includes a restaurant and a speaking hall across the street. Crow Holdings hopes to attract more technology companies and health-care investors, and it owns more land nearby for future growth. The clubby recruitment process is still in place.
“It’s kind of a foreign concept that an office project is not trying to lease itself up as quickly as possible,” said Steve Triolet, senior vice president of research and market forecasting at Partners Real Estate. “It’s basically a country club.”
Crow stepped down as CEO of the firm in 2017 and has spent much of the time since donating to conservative political causes and candidates (he also donates occasionally to Democrats). Critics have assailed some of his political activity, such as his gifts to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, as an inappropriate use of his wealth for influence. Crow has dismissed allegations of impropriety. Crow Holdings declined to make him available for an interview.
He remains chairman, though, and his fingerprints are all over the new campus. It’s the type of place that not only has a library in the men’s room, but if one pulls out a weighty tome such as John McPhee’s Annals of the Former World, a handwritten letter from a one-time adviser to Bush is apt to fall out.
Marketing gimmicks are a dime a dozen in commercial real estate, of course. But Old Parkland is probably the first to build a replica surgical amphitheater.
The Ether Dome, modeled after 16th and 17th-century anatomical theaters, is the center of the new campus. Crow plans to host speakers inside, offering narrow bench seating to generals, ex-presidents and other luminaries who may suddenly look a little more human in such a tight environment.
Citadel relocated to Old Parkland from the Crescent, another finance hot spot in Dallas. BNY Wealth moved into Old Parkland’s new campus in March after more than a decade in a street-level office further north.
The new address has helped the firm position itself as more exclusive, said Chris Gold, BNY Wealth’s Dallas market president.
“If you say you office in Old Parkland, I think it’s one of the few addresses in Dallas where people on both coasts would understand where that is and what that means,” he said.
Gold added that he’s still noticing little details that would have been hard to find if he’d signed elsewhere, saying “there are probably not a lot of places with a parking garage that plays classical music.”
– Joe Lovinger for Bloomberg