“Do we want to save this or not?” That was the question posed by Dallas City Council member Paula Blackmon back in January, during a hearing on the latest master plan for the Kalita Humphreys Theater, the long neglected Frank Lloyd Wright landmark along Turtle Creek.
The answer always seems to be “yes,” but without the action required to back it up. For more than a decade the theater has done nothing but decay, despite a series of stopgap measures. I’ve taken to thinking of restoration plans as I do the Cowboys’ Super Bowl chances: Victory is forever promised but never actually materializes.
That January meeting spelled doom for the Dallas Theater Center’s $300 million dream of remaking the Kalita and its Dean Park surroundings, at least for the foreseeable future. The plan, developed by the New York architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro and a team of preservation and theater consultants, called for the restoration of the Kalita to its original condition and for the addition of four new buildings (a proscenium theater, a black-box theater, a multipurpose building and a five-story tower with education and rehearsal space), along with a pair of underground garages.
The plan was poorly received, to put it kindly. The City Council blanched at the cost, neighbors and park advocates opposed the incursion into Dean Park and preservationists worried that all the new building would overwhelm the Kalita. Frank Lloyd Wright’s grandson, architect Eric Wright, complained that the encroaching buildings would make the Kalita look “like a hood ornament in a used car lot.” An editorial in this paper was blunt in its assessment. “We look forward to the day when this great theater is restored to the vision of its architect,” it stated. “But we can get there on a budget taxpayers can afford without embracing a bigger, more expensive dream.”
Despite the objections, the plan had much to recommend it, in particular the restoration of the Kalita back to its 1959 glory, albeit with a few improvements to bring it up to contemporary standards. Over the years, the theater had been the victim of a series of ill-conceived alterations, among them the addition, in 1968, of a rehearsal space plopped indecorously above Wright’s lobby. That space would now return to its original function as a roof terrace. The plan would also make a long overdue connection to the adjacent Katy Trail, introduce a variety of amenities (a restaurant, a cafe) and green what are now surface parking lots.
The Dallas Theater Center has taken a whipping over the scope of the project — council member Adam Bazaldua, called it a “vanity project” at that January meeting — and while some of that criticism is warranted, the DTC is not the lone guilty party.
When the city renewed the DTC’s lease on the property in 2019, it required the organization to develop a new master plan as part of that agreement. A steering committee with representatives from a variety of interests (park advocates, community representatives, preservationists, members of the theater community, philanthropists, architects, developers, city officials) gave the planners a multi-point directive: restore the Kalita to its original condition, reduce surface parking and add green space, make better connection to the surrounding community, make connections to the Katy Trail and Dean Park, activate the site to attract daytime visitors and create additional theater spaces for the DTC and other arts groups.
So at least some of the added building was a response to those instructions. Adding new theater space was imperative, as the directive (rightly) entailed the removal of the 1968 addition to the Kalita and the demolition of the Heldt Building, a dilapidated, ugly and non-ADA compliant support structure that compromises views of the Frank Lloyd Wright building.
“The DTC was charged not only to restore the Kalita, but also to solve an equity plan,” says Ann Abernathy, founder of the Kalita Humphreys Theater at Turtle Creek Conservancy, a nonprofit that advocates for the theater. “And the equity plan meant that they had to provide all these times and spaces for all these groups that also wanted to use the Kalita.”
The inevitable result: The site became all things to all people.
What now? The DTC claims it’s willing to scale back its goals. “We’re eager to partner with the city staff to collaboratively identify a reduction in the total program for the site,” says Kevin Moriarty, its executive director. “And that would reduce both the total overall cost of the project and the amount of lot coverage.”
But the city isn’t willing to engage in that discussion. “I defer to Dallas Theater Center regarding the master plan,” says Benjamin Espino, assistant director of the Office of Arts and Culture. Translation: The master plan has been placed on a shelf next to the previous unimplemented master plan for the Kalita, produced for the city in 2010.
Instead, with the theater in dire condition, the OAC has budgeted $7.63 million for repairs from its 2024 bond request. The biggest line item in that request ($750,000) would go to the replacement of an HVAC system. Also on that budget is $650,000 for new seats and $75,000 to “remove or replace” broken fountains, victims of poor care by the city. To state the obvious, removal of Frank Lloyd Wright’s fountains is absolutely unacceptable.
In addition to the spending on the Kalita, the budget would put $975,000 toward repair of the universally reviled Heldt Building — the very definition of throwing good money after bad. Unconscionably, even with all that money spent, there still would not be even a temporary connection to the adjacent Katy Trail.
Though some of these repairs are necessary to stabilize the building, there is zero reason to believe that the fixes would be anything but temporary; that neglect and mismanagement will, before long, put the city back in the same position it finds itself in today, with a deteriorating landmark and no plan for its restoration.
There is an alternative, one that Abernathy’s group and other advocates have long called for: the establishment of an independent, nonprofit entity that can raise money, undertake a restoration of the theater and manage the site. This would remove the onus of caring for an idiosyncratic work of architecture from city staff (who have other priorities) and the DTC (which can then focus on theater, not complex maintenance issues).
“It is a property that is owned and managed by different people,” Abernathy says. “And as such, it needs to have an organization that reflects the numbers of people that have an interest in it.”
Until that organization arrives, all the planning and all the spending on the Kalita will get the city exactly nowhere. Which returns us to our original question: Do we want to save the Kalita or not?
