Take a look at the towering block of light-colored brick on your right, distinguished by a stark, flat facade that wraps around to glass windows on the corner, all topped with a slender, white mechanical spire pointing at the sky. That is Corrigan Tower.
This place is another monument to Leo Corrigan. Remember him from the cool blue building at 211 North Ervay? The guy who hustled newspaper ads and clawed his way up to become a national landlord? In the early nineteen fifties, he wanted a headquarters to anchor his booming empire. He dropped five million dollars on this project, which is about sixty million dollars today.
To design it, he brought in Wyatt C. Hedrick, a superstar architect of the American South. If you pull up the app on your phone, you can see an older shot of what Hedrick came up with. Hedrick was famous for Art Deco... that flashy, highly decorated, geometric style of the nineteen twenties and thirties. But for Corrigan, Hedrick totally shifted gears. He embraced Mid-Century Modernism. He stripped away the heavy ornaments and went with the clean vertical lines and practical masonry you are looking at right now.
But the design was not even the wildest part of the project. There was a massive, fifteen hundred seat movie palace called the Tower Theater sitting right on this plot of land. Corrigan did not want to tear it down, but he also did not want to lose out on rental space. So, the engineers essentially built this giant skyscraper directly over and around the theater, in an L shape. They pulled off this insane high wire act of construction while the theater stayed completely open. Moviegoers were down below eating popcorn and watching films while thousands of tons of steel were being hoisted right over their heads.
Decades later, the building caught the eye of Rita Sweeney, a fierce developer from Toronto. She looked at this modernist tower and just saw a roadblock. She aggressively lobbied the city to demolish the whole thing so she could build a staggering seven hundred foot mega tower in its place. She went head to head with the Dallas mayor over the rights to do it. But her ambition collided with reality. Sweeney passed away unexpectedly in two thousand seven, and when the two thousand eight recession hit immediately after, her dream tower was completely scrapped. Corrigan Tower was left entirely abandoned, rotting for over a decade.
It took an unlikely hero to save it. John Kirtland, the drummer for the nineties rock band Deep Blue Something, bought the decaying tower. He poured fifty million dollars into completely gutting it. He cleared out the asbestos and turned it into an environmentally sustainable green certified apartment building, packed with public art galleries and music studios. Now, the old corporate fortress is a haven for local artists.
Let us keep moving. Our next stop is about a three minute walk away, where we will check out a historic department store born from a tragedy and shared grief.
