The man living beneath the Houston Street Viaduct said Thursday morning he hadn’t been there long. “Just got here from East Texas,” he said, snap-buttoning up his plaid, short-sleeved shirt to cover up tattoos spread across his narrow chest. “Addiction issues,” he said, explaining why he didn’t want to give his name. “I don’t like to think of myself as homeless.”
There was a small fire going in his encampment, one among several beneath the bridge that serves as dividing line between the old Reunion Arena parking garage and the former home of the Dallas Mavericks and Stars that was razed in November 2009. A woman who said her name was Callie rushed over to show us a piece of trash she’d found on the ground, a piece of an old ballpoint pen bearing the word “Harmony” written in pink cursive.
As we spoke, a shirtless man scuffled down the stairs leading to the bridge and the garage, pulled on a T-shirt and ambled down Hotel Street in the direction of the Hyatt Regency hotel.
There are numerous encampments beneath the Houston Street Viaduct, which runs between the old Reunion Arena parking garage, at left, and the old Reunion Arena site, at right.
Robert Wilonsky
I hadn’t intended to spend the morning down here, in the hind-end of downtown. I just got sidetracked on the way into work – a head full of what-ifs about building new arenas and razing old city halls. A couple of right and wrong turns later, I was parking along the spot on Sports Street where Reunion stood until 2009, when it was torn down so it wouldn’t compete with an American Airlines Center the Stars and Mavs are already so eager to abandon.
I was also staring at one of the things I hate most in this city: that languishing Reunion parking garage.
Opinion
The 4.6-acre structure has been allowed to rot for nearly two decades — a sprawling code violation city attorneys would have long ago sued into rubble were it not taxpayer-owned.
In case you’re new here or just forgot, the city owns that garage, which is actually and easily the biggest municipally maintained eyesore downtown, in case you were under the assumption it was City Hall itself. Far as I can tell, the last time anyone paid the Reunion garage any attention was in 2016, when WFAA-TV (Channel 8) reported on its “history of unresolved code violations” and that it could cost $10 million to make it usable again.
No one has made deliveries to what was once Reunion Arena in a long, long time.
Robert Wilonsky
A city spokesman told me Thursday that the Convention and Event Services Department spent a little more than $42,000 last fiscal year to maintain the fences and gates around what’s called the Reunion Parking Center. But from the looks of some videos and photos posted to Instagram two weeks ago, that doesn’t mean it’s inaccessible. Far from it. It’s actually a pretty good glimpse at an earth without people.
Taxpayers only own the physical structure, along with the barren stretch behind it called Lot E. Everything above it belongs to billionaire oilman Ray Hunt, who owns some 41 acres on the west side of downtown, including the old Reunion Arena site. That land was acquired in a swap with City Hall that was supposed to lead to new corporate relocations and redevelopment. Hunt owns the air rights above the parking garage for the next century, give or take.
Thirty years ago, there was some hope that the Mavs and Stars might actually stay on the Reunion land in a new arena full of suites and seats they couldn’t stuff into an arena built in 1980. The City Council had commissioned a $500,000 study that said “the best place for a new arena is right next to the old one,” according to a front-page piece in this newspaper on Oct. 19, 1994.
The new signage for the Reunion development, announced at the end of 2023, as it runs along Hotel Street in the former shadow of Reunion Arena
Robert Wilonsky
Which suited then-Mavs owner Don Carter just fine, until things went cattywampus with the Mavs man and Hunt. As pre-mayor Laura Miller reported in the Dallas Observer in August 1995, “Carter wants Hunt to relinquish all the parking lots and air rights around Reunion Arena. Hunt, who has them tied up for 100 years in a sweetheart deal he cut with the city two decades ago, likes things the way they are.”
Six years later, one Ross Perot Jr. and $420 million later — twice the originally estimated cost — the AAC landed not even two miles north of Reunion, sold by then-Mavs owner Perot to voters as Dallas’ Times Square. More than two decades later, the Reunion land waits to be reunited with people. Meanwhile, the city has hired Perot’s Hillwood Urban Services to recommend new sites for the Mavs.
If you haven’t figured it out by now, Dallas is very good at telling the same story over and over and over.
It costs the city about $50,000 each year to keep the old Reunion Arena parking garage fenced in.
Robert Wilonsky
Take, for instance, this story from 1973, when Hunt pitched the Dallas City Council on a vision for this land that included what became the Hyatt Regency and Reunion Tower. There was meant to be more: “specialty shops, entertainment centers, a pedestrian mall and an esplanade,” The New York Times reported. And “office buildings, more parking, and another pedestrian mall.” And “high rise residential buildings, more office space, a motor hotel and a pedestrian mall.” And “more office space, parking, a pedestrian mall, space for shops and parking garages.”
All of that, priced at a mere $210 million, was intended to reshape this stretch of downtown, which The Times said suffered from “visual poverty.”
Now, 52 years later, the fencing surrounding the old Reunion Arena site has been adorned with new vinyl signage that reads, in all-capital letters, “Reunion A Development For All of Dallas.” A few workers parked along what’s left of Sports Street were finishing the wrap job as I drove around that barren, busted-up end of downtown. They were trying to decide if they really needed to go all the way around, toward the parking garage and the encampments.
Standing in the old Lot E, a view of the Reunion parking garage through the Jefferson Street Viaduct.
Robert Wilonsky
You’d be forgiven for having forgotten that Hunt Realty Investments says it plans to plant some $5 billion worth of apartments, hotels and offices over there. At least, that was the plan announced 10 days before Christmas in 2023, and a presentation given to the Harvard Business School Club of Dallas in March 2024. Those big decals are the first proof of life in that barren patch of downtown since, oh, I don’t know, since Weezer kicked off Texas-OU weekend in 2015?
Thursday afternoon, I sent a list of questions to Paul Schulze, Hunt Consolidated’s vice president for public affairs, asking about a potential groundbreaking for the new development and the fate of the Reunion parking garage.
“We do not have any updates to share at this time,” he wrote back, “but we appreciate you reaching out.”