Dallas moratorium on downtown implosions claims victim.
Headington Oil Chief Financial Officer Michael Tregoning says a decision’s been made to bring the building down mechanically. And he doesn’t sound too terribly thrilled about it.
“Ultimately, we regret that we’re bringing the building down mechanically,” he says. “We think the implosion would have been the best thing for everyone — the neighbors, the city, everyone — but the time it was taking for us to respond to and address the issues and the fatigue it was creating, we decided the best course was to bring it down brick by brick. It’s unfortunate but in our minds unavoidable. And, again, unfortunate.”
“The issues” to which Tregoning refers are the objections raised in recent weeks by neighbors who insist an implosion, needed to clear space for The Joule expansion downtown, will potentially damage their buildings. Preservation Dallas jumped into the fight at the end of June, asking Mayor Mike Rawlings and the Dallas City Council to permanently ban all implosions downtown — beginning with the Praetorian’s.
Headington was eying an August blow-em-up date for the 103-year-old skyscraper on Main; all it needed to do was submit a full-on demo plan to the city, which more than likely would have reviewed the docs with the property authorities and signed on the dotted line. After all, city officials have said for weeks that this implosion would have been no big deal: Theresa O’Donnell, head of Sustainable Development, wrote in a letter back in April that given the parties involved — the folks behind The Joule, for starters, not to mention the demo company that brought down First Baptist without a single issue — City Hall has “no specific concerns or issues” concerning the Praetorian’s going boom. She told us the same thing in late June: “They know what they’re doing. We’re confident in their abilities.”
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