The building that outraced two team owners' patience

Dallas voters funded an arena to keep two teams

By 1998, the Dallas Mavericks and the Dallas Stars wanted out of Reunion Arena. The building felt old and cramped for two pro teams. H. Ross Perot Jr. owned the Mavericks then and pushed hardest for something new. Dallas voters agreed to a hotel tax and a rental car tax to help pay for it. The two teams covered the rest, including any cost overruns.

The site chosen sat just north of Woodall Rodgers Freeway, near Interstate 35E. An old power plant had stood there before it came down to clear the ground. The location put the future arena inside a planned district called Victory Park, built around it from scratch.

The architect was David M. Schwarz, a Washington, D. C. designer known for traditional buildings. He gave the arena sweeping brick walls and smooth arches instead of glass and steel. Some fans later nicknamed it "The Hangar" for its rounded, Quonset-hut roofline. Construction ran through 1999 and into 2001, racing to open before patience ran out.

American Airlines Center opened where a power plant stood

American Airlines paid $195 million for naming rights in March 1999, two years before the building was finished. The company is based nearby, at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport. American Airlines Center opened on July 17, 2001, on the ground where the old plant once stood. An Eagles concert filled the arena on its first night. Michael Flatley's Feet of Flames tour closed out the next one.

The first sporting event came weeks later, a Dallas Sidekicks soccer match on August 19, 2001. The Mavericks and Stars finally had the home they had asked Dallas taxpayers to build. Twenty-one years later, a 23-foot bronze statue rose outside its doors. It showed the Mavericks' longest-serving player, Dirk Nowitzki. The team paid for it. That same team had once needed a bigger building to keep him.

A 43-story tower nearby never rose past its foundation

A few hundred feet from the arena, developers broke ground in late 2006 on the Victory Tower (Dallas). It was a planned 43-story hotel and condo tower. The firm Kohn Pedersen Fox designed it. It was meant to be the tallest building in Victory Park. It would hold a Mandarin Oriental hotel and 91 branded residences.

The tower never got past its foundation. It never came back. The construction crane came down. Workers whitewashed the fence around the site, covering every trace of the hotel that was supposed to rise there.

A park nearby anchored Dallas's Little Mexico for decades

Land use here has not always meant towers. A half mile southeast, Dallas bought a lot in 1912 and 1913 for a neighborhood park. It was first called Summit Play Park. By the 1920s it served the Mexican-American families who lived nearby. The neighborhood was known as Little Mexico.

In 1927 the city renamed it Pike Park, after park board member Edgar L. Pike. During World War II it became a gathering place for Mexican-American servicemen. These included locals and visitors passing through Dallas. The park still hosts Cinco de Mayo and Diez y Seis de Septiembre each year. The neighborhood around it has been rebuilt since, but the park held its ground.

A Dallas-born racing driver died at thirty-two

Cecil Green was born in Dallas in 1919. He became a racing driver, chasing speed the way this stretch of the city chased new buildings. He died in 1951, at 32. Wikidata records only his birth and his death, thirty-two years apart, both tied to this ground.

The arena's lease already carries an expiration date

The lease that put the Mavericks and Stars in this building runs only through 2031. After that, the Mavericks could leave for a new arena being proposed in Irving. It would be tied to a Las Vegas Sands resort project. The hotel tax and rental car tax that Dallas voters approved in 1998 built a home meant to last. Twenty-three years after it opened, on the ground where a power plant and then an arena once stood, that home already has an expiration date.