Wednesday afternoon, I tried every single door at the downtown convention center to find an unlocked entrance that might get me into Memorial Auditorium. Thursday morning, I just walked right in.

That’s because I was accompanied by Rosa Fleming, the executive director of Convention and Event Services and the woman tasked with building a new Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center where the old one now stands. Memorial, a landmark long treated like an afterthought, is supposed to serve as one of the convention center complex’s centerpiece, as home to the WNBA’s Dallas Wings.

If the Wings can ever get there. Which seems like a bigger if every day.

“People are excited about this building,” Fleming said, shooing away the naysaying along with the fruit flies that were swarming in Memorial Thursday morning. “We will make a lot of our competitive cities upset, but that’s fine.”

“When we have reached a final decision where we’re going to play the 2027 season,” he said, “the team will announce that.”

This certainly was not the plan. Far from it. The Met Gala’s own Paige Bueckers, Azzi Fudd, Arike Ogunbowale and their teammates were supposed to be tipping off Tuesday’s home-opener against the Atlanta Dream in Memorial. That was the deal the Wings and the city signed in April 2024, for an arena with a practice facility downtown  by spring 2026. 

With the Stars threatening to skate to Plano and the Mavs huffing and puffing to blow down City Hall, the Wings are the only professional team that’s begging to be downtown. But they’ve been told to wait, to do more, to pay more. 

Why the Wings haven’t yet flown to Frisco or Fort Worth amazes me.

“Nothing has gone right with a team that has been very patient and wants to be here,” City Council member Paula Blackmon told me. “And that’s really unfortunate. We cannot get our deadlines right. We just can’t. My confidence has slipped in this project and many others.”

This week I started asking city officials about the likelihood of the Wings actually making it to Memorial in 2028. And – oh, yeah – how much is this going to cost? Because with all things convention center-related, I’ve yet to see a final, for-real figure.

Some council members said they had heard the Memorial makeover is going to cost upwards of $280 million, and some complained that they hadn’t been briefed about Memorial in months. The most recent update was a December memo filled with renderings but no numbers. The Wings said they weren’t sure of the price tag, either, as they’d been focused solely on getting the practice facility built. The team and the city will resume Memorial conversations sometime this month.

Fleming asked to meet to clear up the misunderstandings, beginning with the cost: She said during our meeting that the $280 million figure is inaccurate, and that she’s been calling council members to tell them so. 

“I don’t know where that rumor came from,” she said, “and I can’t control them, right?”

She said the cost right now is closer to $200 million, and that she’s working to get it down to $170 million.

“The construction term is value engineering, but that’s really not what we’re doing,” Fleming said. “People get excitable: ‘Oh, let’s create this, let’s do this, let’s do that.’ And it starts to escalate the price, right? But if we really look at all that history in the building and how it’s worked all this time, if we look at where certain things are located and leave them there and then just run the new infrastructure into them, that saves millions of dollars.”

I asked Bibb if $170 million is enough to remake Memorial into an arena that “meets the requirements and standards of the WNBA,” as he put it. 

“I don’t know,” he said, and that was all he’d say on the subject.

It’s also far from clear when Memorial’s makeover will begin.

A soundproof wall has been erected to separate the arena from FIFA’s International Broadcast Center, and Fleming said they’ve agreed to keep construction noise below a certain decibel level while the World Cup takes place. But so far there’s only been some environmental testing to see if there’s asbestos or mold. A few ceiling tiles have been removed, and a few cherry pickers have been rolled in.

As Fleming put it, “You’ve got to debone the chicken before you can begin the work.”

Eventually, every single seat, all of them original, will be torn out, and the entirety of the old building will have to be made ADA-compliant. The domed roof will have to be reskinned. The catwalk will likely have to come down. All the mechanical, electrical and plumbing will have to be replaced. All the lighting must go. A locker room will have to be built; so, too, a team store, full-service kitchen and any number of other amenities.

For now, you can still stand on the original stage. At present George Dahl’s Memorial looks just as it did when it opened in 1957 and when John F. Kennedy spoke there in 1960 and when the Beatles, Jackson 5 and Elvis Presley performed there or when the Dallas Chaparrals of the American Basketball Association called it home. 

It’s a time machine. And the Wings are running out of it.

Fleming said the architecture firm Gensler is still in the design-development phase of the project, now tasked with reducing the price tag. There’s no timeline on when construction documents will be ready. 

Some council members have raised concerns about McKissack & McKissack, the project manager on Memorial.

The local firm had also been tasked with building the Wings’ practice facility at Joey Georgusis Park in West Oak Cliff. But shortly after last September’s groundbreaking, it became clear that the 70,000-square-foot facility wouldn’t be delivered in time for the 2026 season. When the team finally took control of the project, McKissack & McKissack was fired.

I reached out to the firm for comment but never heard back. So I asked Fleming why she was confident the company could remake a 70-year-old, 9,000-seat arena when it couldn’t build from scratch a practice complex in a park.

“I think just two separate projects in two separate places wasn’t something they anticipated,” Fleming said. “It’s a tough job, and if you slip a little bit, you cost a project time, and that’s just basically what happened. It didn’t work out in this case, so they made a staffing change and brought their A-team, and so we have every confidence in them.”

But with every day that passes, there’s a good chance the wheels fall off. Fleming said she remains confident Memorial’s ready to go come the 2028 season, but …

“I say this all the time: I can’t control tariffs,” Fleming said. “I can’t control delivery. Some things get slowed down because of the cost of fuel right now. All of those things can throw something off schedule.”

But for now, yes, Fleming said: “I’m confident.”

Before I spoke with Fleming, I’d asked Bibb the same question. And this was all he’d say:

Does that sound confident to you?