I never heard of Raymond and Patsy Nasher until recently. Raymond was born in Boston and graduated from Duke University. Somehow he met Patsy Rabinowitz, the daughter of a Dallas, Texas, businessman and that was that. Nashers’ became leading citizens of Dallas and world class art collectors. 20th century sculpture was their speciality. Raymond said “it was cheap in the 60s and 70s - nobody else wanted it.”
The Nasher collection became well known in the museum world: the Guggenheim, the National Gallery in Washington, DC, and the San Francisco Museum all jockeyed for the collection.
Patsy died first and Raymond, known as a loner and a man who liked control, purchased 2.4 acres in downtown Dallas right across the street from the Dallas Museum of Art (1997). He hired architect Renzo Piano to design the Nasher Sculpture Center (Piano designed the new Whitney Museum, NYC.) and landscape architect Peter Walker as designer of the outside sculpture park in which the Center sits. The $70 million dollar complex opened in 2003, the lynchpin in the Arts District of Dallas with museum, sculpture center and park, an opera house and a performance hall clustered in approximately 19 blocks.
So far, so good. Then a new player entered. Financed by police and firemen’s retirement funds, Museum Tower was built a few blocks away and opened in 2013.
This is NOT a retirement home for public employees. The tower is 42 floors filled with 115 condos priced at approx. $825 per square foot. Every amenity is included in this version of an urban gated community including a dog “park” for residents. It’s surrounded by a stone wall and people can live totally separate from the city at their feet. Museum Tower is the “mean girl” of the neighborhood.
In Dallas, Texas, the sun shines bright - all day, every day. And it bounces off the 42 story glass clad (I’m sorry…it looks just like a giant penis). And the reflected sun zeros into the Nasher Arts Center and is killing outside planting and affecting the art inside.
A mediator picked by the city’s mayor tried to find a reasonable solution between these two factions but failed. At this writing, Museum Tower is hoping for a technological invention that will magically …what? bend the light? It’s too easy to say “Mean Girl” is to blame for all this mess. And mostly, it is!
But I have a few unanswered questions. I suspect that Dallas - like every U.S. city these days - nearly wet their pants when Museum Tower was proposed! All that tax revenue! All that prestige that would come with all those rich people living downtown! I’ll just bet the town even gifted the Museum Tower developer with a few “incentives”…maybe tax abatement, or site prep at city expense or bending of a few “smallish” rules. Did they require a substantial escrow account to cover eventual “problems?” Probably not.
Dallas made a huge mistake - one being repeated everywhere - Rochester too - with the need to SAVE THE CITY AT ALL COST. Sometimes the costs are just way too much!
No comments:
Post a Comment