Dallas ISD has issued a request for proposals in the hopes someone can salvage the former W.H. Adamson building.
By Robert Wilonsky
Dallas Morning News
https://www.dallasnews.com/
John Ruiz thought the war was won 15 years ago — June 8, 2011, to be exact. The day Tom Perkins, then Dallas’ city attorney, signed the ordinance that declared the East 9th Street campus of W.H. Adamson High School “an area of historical, cultural, and architectural importance and significance to the citizens of the city.” The day the former Oak Cliff High School — Dallas’ second-oldest high school, built in 1915 and designed by the man hailed a century ago as the “master mind” who reshaped houses of education — became an official Dallas landmark.
Never did Ruiz, the longtime president of the Adamson Alumni Association, imagine that in 2026, at the age of 77, he’d still be worrying about the what-next for his alma mater, fenced off and boarded up today and still no closer to resurrection than in 2008 or when I found it battered and shattered one year ago.
“I don’t know why someone hasn’t recognized the potential of the building,” Ruiz said Wednesday. He let out a long sigh. I said he sounded exhausted just talking about it. He laughed and said members of the alumni association, still connected to their old school by funding projects and scholarships for students in the gleaming, sprawling campus next door, keep asking what’s to become of the 111-year-old Adamson. And he doesn’t want to be the man who let them down.
“All these people in their 70s and 80s want something to happen before they leave this earth,” he said. “We’re doing the best we can. We have a foot in the door. We’re doing the best we can. But it’s becoming a tough go, and the outlook isn’t all that great.”
But Ruiz didn’t know when I called Wednesday that the district is now seeking requests for proposals from anyone willing to take the building for free — that’s right, gratis, zippo, nada — and turn it into housing or a health clinic or an arts center or … well, it doesn’t really matter, does it? So long as the building’s saved. And it doesn’t cost DISD a penny.
Preservation architect Marcel Quimby, who helped the alumni association add Adamson to Dallas’ list of landmarks, directed my attention to the RFP on the district’s website. Quimby’s been waiting on it for months.
“We’re glad to see it finally hit the streets,” she said. “We’re all positive.”
The district says it’s seeking “qualified governmental entities, non-profit organizations and Low-to-Moderate income affordable Housing Developers” to step up with plans to repurpose old Adamson. Yes, the same district that in October went to City Hall to convince preservationists that Adamson had become an “imminent threat to public health or safety” that should be remedied with a wrecking ball, only to back off at the last minute.
DISD now says it wants “a redevelopment partner capable of preserving the historic significance of the building.” The school board will even “consider donating the former school building to the entity/organization that presents a redevelopment proposal that best preserves the building’s historical significance.”
Said Quimby of old Adamson, which the district once promised to turn into an arts magnet, “the building obviously needs to be protected and have a happy ending with something that’s related to the community, and this is a good opportunity for this.”
And that would absolutely be the best-case scenario. For the district. For Oak Cliff. For the alumni association. And for a city whose most visionary mayor, J. Erik Jonsson, created Dallas’ modern-day preservation movement by insisting that old buildings alongside the new offered us a “sense of history, identity, diversity and beauty.”
Except, here’s the problem: The district just spent a few months trying to sell the building, and could find no takers. It also offered old Adamson to the alumni association, which couldn’t take it either because it doesn’t have the kind of money needed to salvage a building the district has long maintained would cost more than $100 million to rehab, in part because of a “shallow foundation system” — per architecture firm Corgan — that has long caused the building to shift and sink.
“Leaving the building in its current condition is not in the best interest of DISD,” reads a Corgan report that accompanies the RFP. “The building will continue to move, and conditions will worsen with time, and possibly even a collapse of the entire southern end of the building.”
That report was from 2023. And not once before or after did the city ever crack down on the district, which had turned a blind eye to the vandalized, broken-windowed eyesore of its own making, seemingly with the hopes that it would fall down while no one was looking. The city never so much as warned DISD about Adamson, even though it had clearly violated that 2008 ordinance, which says “no person shall allow a structure in this district to deteriorate through demolition by neglect.”
The district’s now offering Adamson “as is, where is, with all latent and patent defects and faults.”
In other words: Taker, beware.
“The Adamson issue has been discussed for years, for decades,” said Preservation Dallas’ executive director, Sarah Crain. “It has been brought to DISD’s attention repeatedly. I am so glad they’re finally putting out the RFP. But we’re also years late in the process, and only the community pays for it. I just hope the alumni association hasn’t lost their optimism. I want them to maintain their hope because we’re on the precipice of being able to find the next life for this important historic building.”
I asked DISD trustee Ben Mackey, whose district includes Adamson, what happened if no one stepped up with a viable proposal by the Oct. 15 deadline. Simple, he said: The district will just extend the deadline. And if no one ever comes forward, well, it’s hard to say.
The only thing certain is that the building will just continue to deteriorate. And maybe the district, which just convinced voters to approve a $6.2 billion bond package allowing for 26 new schools and renovations on every campus, will again try to get it demolished.
Or maybe, as Corgan warns, it just falls down.
“I don’t buy — and wouldn’t support the idea — that it’s all or nothing, that it’s either restored or demolished,” Mackey said. “If we can’t find someone who wants to restore and utilize the building, the next action will be to see what we can do that honors the building, its history, its legacy. Can we make this a greenspace that keeps an element of the building, its facade, to carry on the legacy? That would all be in play. But it’s not all or nothing.”
So how about a community center, maybe. Or apartments. Or an office complex for nonprofits. Or or or. And and and. What ya got? Give the district a shout. Lines are open.
Editorial Columnist
Robert Wilonsky is Dallas Morning News editorial columnist.
This story, originally published in The Dallas Morning News, is reprinted as part of a collaborative partnership between The Dallas Morning News and Texas Metro News. The partnership seeks to boost coverage of Dallas’ communities of color, particularly in southern Dallas.
