Take a look at the building on your left. The Mercantile National Bank Building, or just The Merc to locals. You are looking at a monument to pure American grit. Seriously. This thirty-one story giant was the only major skyscraper built in the entire United States during World War Two.
How did that happen? It comes down to one guy. Robert L. Thornton, a man eventually known as Mr. Dallas. Thornton dropped out of school in the eighth grade to be a traveling greeting card salesman. But he had serious drive. In nineteen sixteen, he scraped together twelve thousand dollars in capital, which is roughly three hundred and fifty thousand dollars today, plus a six thousand dollar loan, and started a bank.
Thornton wanted the ultimate physical symbol of his success, a project driven by a relentless hunger for height and status. He hired an architect to design this imposing tower featuring Moderne styling, which is a sleek, streamlined offshoot of Art Deco architecture that emphasizes vertical lines and speed. But then, December nineteen forty-one happened. Pearl Harbor. The federal government halted all private construction to save materials for the war effort.
Thornton was a patriot. He personally offered his huge stockpile of structural steel to the federal government, willing to sacrifice his dream headquarters to build ships or tanks. But the military inspected the steel and declined. It was already pre-cut to the architect's exact measurements and couldn't be easily melted down or repurposed.
So, the government gave him a special waiver. The Merc rose high into the Texas sky right in the middle of severe national rationing, a beacon of homefront resilience. When it opened in nineteen forty-three, the federal government took over ten full floors for various war agencies. And at completion, it was the tallest building west of the Mississippi River.
Look all the way up to that ornamental weather spire on top of the clock tower. It is an iconic local landmark. Above the four giant clock faces, white light rings flash upward when the temperature is expected to rise, and downward when it falls. A star at the very top glows green for fair weather and red for rain.
Over the decades, the bank grew into a financial powerhouse, expanding across the whole city block. But as always in Dallas, the boom was followed by a bust. The bank eventually moved out in nineteen eighty-seven to build the Comerica Bank Tower we saw earlier. Following a devastating financial collapse known as the savings and loan crisis, this magnificent complex sat completely abandoned by nineteen ninety-three, a silent ghost town right in the center of the city.
Thankfully, it did not stay empty forever. It found a second life in the two thousands when developers converted the main tower into apartments, saving those beautiful original exteriors.
The Merc was born in an era of national sacrifice, but soon the war would end, and the country would enter a golden era of excess. We are going to explore that post-war boom next, looking at the arrival of pure modern luxury. It is just a three-minute walk to our next stop, The Statler Hotel and Residences.
