Notice the sleek high-rise on your left, wrapped in miles of dark glass and lined with distinct, vertical strips of bright aluminum molding.
This city has a habit of making giants out of everyday people. Dallas was practically built by self made risk takers who spun vast empires out of sheer willpower, elbow grease, and a whole lot of nerve. Few stories capture that wild ascent quite like James J. Ling.
Back in 1947, Ling was living in the back room of his tiny electrical shop. He was hungry for growth, famously selling shares of his young company door to door and even hawking them from a booth at the State Fair of Texas. Through relentless deals, he built Ling-Temco-Vought into one of America's most powerful conglomerates, which is basically a giant corporate umbrella that buys up and controls dozens of totally unrelated businesses.
This building, opening in 1964 as the city's fifth tallest, was his physical monument. It was futuristic. The ground floor had an innovative drive up bank called Teller-Vision. Customers used closed circuit televisions and pneumatic tubes, those pressurized pipes that shoot physical canisters through a building on a burst of air, to conduct business with tellers hidden safely deep inside. Up on the top floor, the Lancers Club changed the hospitality world by proving that elite business networking and fine dining did not just belong out at sprawling suburban country clubs... it could thrive right here in a high rise.
Take a peek at your screen for a great historical shot of that dark glass facade. That exterior actually held the world's largest electronic signboard. They could individually control thirty windows on twenty five different floors to spell out messages in light, and they frequently lit up a massive LTV for the whole city to see.
But all that towering ambition had a dark side. During construction, a disastrous cost cutting measure led an engineer to skip installing steel supporting angles on every single floor, placing them only on every other floor instead. This lack of restraint caused a catastrophic failure. Tons of bricks broke loose from the facade, plummeting directly through the roof of a neighboring pool hall and tragically killing two men inside.
Ling's corporate empire eventually collapsed under its own weight, too. Plagued by crushing debt and plunging stock prices, 1970 brought chaos. After a bomb threat forced a panicked evacuation of this very tower, Ling was ousted from the empire he built. In a brutal twist of fate, he was demoted and stuffed into a tiny suite on the twenty sixth floor of his own namesake tower, forced to answer his own phone while his former company hummed around him.
Today, the building has found new life as a hotel and apartments. The developers even kept the LTV initials for the residential units, but with a cheerful new tagline... Love The View.
Are you ready to meet another titan who started with practically nothing? Let us take a short three minute walk over to our next stop, 211 North Ervay.
