by Barbara Ballinger
Mockingbird Station
Dallas developer Ken Hughes has always been fascinated by trains. Hughes’ passion, instilled in part from living in Paris, helped spark his interest in a 40-acre site 5 miles north of downtown Dallas. The property, which fronted Mockingbird Lane, was adjacent to a 1997-built station for the Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART), a hybrid system of light rail and underground subway.
“I was captivated by the potential of a building by the train station and making this the first [contemporary] mixed-use, transit-oriented development in Texas,” says Hughes, president and owner of Dallas-based Hughes Development, which developed the project with Denver-based Simpson Housing Group.
The site featured a World War II, Art Deco-style assembly plant for the Western Electric telephone company and a 1960s office building. Hughes says the location was a big draw. For one, the site is bordered by the Central Expressway, one of Dallas’ few freeways, which is undergoing a costly rebuild. What’s more, the development is across the street from Southern Methodist University and borders two unincorporated cities, Highland Park and University Park. “Since 1968, the area has become one of the densest garden apartment
districts in the region,” Hughes says.
It was also ripe for transit-oriented development (TOD), a.k.a. transit-oriented design, a variation of traditional neighborhood design. TODs are attracting attention because of increased interest in public transportation due to global warming and a concern over rapidly rising gasoline prices. They favor pedestrians in a compact, denser urban or downtown suburban setting. They rely on a local mass-transit system that pares the use of cars and are often located near stations that are both functional and eye-catching.
Mockingbird Station, named for the street and DART stop, has been recognized by the industry as a prime example easy. Hughes and his partner bought the plant from Southwestern Bell in 1997 and the office tower the following year from the Dallas-based REIT Prentiss Properties. Instead of razing both, the partners remodeled and enlarged the buildings for mixed-use development, the latter a concept Hughes long favored. While Hughes remained confi dent that the project would succeed, others were skeptical.
“People thought I was certifiably crazy,” he says. “At that time, trains represented a socioeconomic issue—people had visions of poor people riding them. Because it was hard to finance the project in 1997, we developed it with equity.” Though he declined to provide numbers, Hughes adds, “it was a very low price relative to today.”
Hughes didn’t give up on his plans, though. “By persistence, we were able to get our first tenants, and things gradually fell into place,” he says.
MOVING FORWARD
Hughes hired the Baltimore-based architecture firm RTKL and the Dallas-based landscape firm Enviro Design to transform the site. Ground was broken in early 1999 with phases one and two completed in 2001. These first two phases added 178,000 square feet of retail space and restaurants; almost 150,000 square feet of office space; an eight-screen independent film center and café; 211 apartment-style lofts; and almost 1,600 surface and below-ground parking spots to the area. The third and final phase, which was completed in March 2008 under a new owner, delivered an additional 23,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space and 51 more parking spots.
All Aboard: Nearly 3,500 daily riders of the Dallas Area Rapid Transit system pass through Mockingbird Station.
Hughes liked the idea of retaining the warehouse’s industrial grittiness as a springboard for the project’s overall aesthetics. But rather than use materials, windows, and proportions in the same way throughout the site, he and the designers took a more urban approach, giving each building a slightly different personality. “I wanted the project to look like it was built over time and by different developers,” Hughes says.
On the upper levels, blond brick is most prominent, not the plaster and metal panel system used to construct the warehouse. Meanwhile, the theater incorporates the same palette of materials, but at its front entrance the most visible material is the horizontal metal paneling. Interior columns were retained where
possible in the existing structures, and the original brick, roof trusses, industrial sash windows, a wood-and-steel awning, and a smokestack were salvaged and reused on the site, says Randy Shortridge, RTKL’s lead architect.
Dallas city councilwoman Angela Hunt praises the project’s aesthetics. “It’s brought a modern sensibility to the area but also pays homage to the 1920s and 1930s East Dallas architecture,” she says. The development team gave the same careful attention to detail when planning the outdoor areas. Those spaces, though tight due to the site’s small size and compact density, include grassy expanses, paths, and trees. Residents enjoy a fourth-level Olympic-style outdoor pool featuring two 25-meter lanes. Other prime outdoor gathering spaces include café seating by restaurants and, in the European tradition, a grand staircase with a fountain located between the theater and train platform. (The platform is below grade and connected to the project by a bridge.) “The movie theater was treated as if it’s a civic center with a big lobby, open-air space covered by the awning recycled from the telephone plant, and a large marquee,” RTKL’s Shortridge says.
The development’s commercial portion has attracted a mix of national retail chains, local boutiques, and business firms. Mark Meyer, a principal with Austin-based TBG Partners, a planning and landscape architecture company, located an office at Mockingbird due to proximity to restaurants and the DART line. “Dallas traffic is a huge concern,” he says.
Four years ago, Hughes sold his partnership interest to Simpson Housing Group. In 2005, Simpson, in turn, sold its interest to Mockingbird Station’s current owner, New York City-based Real Estate Capital Partners, which oversaw the completion of the third phase. The development’s residential portion is currently 98 percent occupied.
TRENDSETTER
Mockingbird is expected to inspire more TODs to become hot gathering spots. More than 700 train stations nationwide are in the works, on top of the country’s existing 3,300, all of which reflect a mix of subway, commuter, light-rail, and streetcar systems, according to Scott Bernstein, president of the Center for
Neighborhood Technology, a nonprofit urban sustainability organization in Chicago. “Stations should be planned as destinations and mini-town centers, not just as points of origin. Mockingbird has done this well,” he says.
The Urban Land Institute in Washington, D.C., agrees. ULI honored the development with an award of excellence in 2006, recognizing the project’s quality design and its signifi cant contributions to the community. “Mockingbird has been instructive in showing how people can change their habits in an auto-oriented culture,” Hughes says. “It’s given residents and workers a chunk of urbanism in a suburban setting and a sense of surprise.”
The development was also featured as a case study of a successful “urban village” in the book The New Transit Town (Island Press, 2003). In spite of the real estate slump, properties near transit stations in walkable neighborhoods and near urban centers are holding their values better than many nontransit ones,
says Gloria Ohland, the book’s co-author and vice president for communications at Reconnecting America, a nonprofit based in Oakland, Calif.
“It’s only anecdotal so far,” Ohland says. “But I think why Mockingbird got so much attention—and convinced other suburban cities around Dallas to have rail—is because it was a place like no other in the area. It has hip restaurants [and] stores such as Texas’ first Urban Outfitters, plus residential loft development.”
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Mockingbird Station, a 10-acre mixed-use, transit-oriented development in North Dallas, is located 5 miles from the city’s downtown. The site may be compact, but it’s filled with shops, offices, and rental lofts. A
busy commuter hub, the community also offers residents and employees the option of taking a train rather
than driving. For more information, visit www.mockingbirdstation.com.
