Editor’s note: This is the eighth installment in a series of essays by architecture critic Mark Lamster that tells the history of Dallas through the buildings that define the city.
I will admit that I am biased, because I lived in it for three happy years after moving here from New York, but my favorite building in Dallas is the Republic National Bank tower, the aluminum-clad skyscraper with the spike tacked to its roof. This affinity is born, in part, from our shared origins — it is also a New York product, designed by the architects Harrison & Abramovitz — but it’s more than that. The Republic was the first genuinely modern skyscraper in Dallas, an impeccable work of innovative design and craftsmanship that is an unapologetic symbol of the city’s progress and arrival.
It is the rare building that somehow manages to be both ineffably cool and decidedly quirky, the architectural equivalent of a Miles Davis solo. Its entire front facade is a windowless wall of stamped aluminum, a brazen and counterintuitive gesture. Somehow, it works. When the Texas sun shines on that immense textured surface, it practically glows. There are really no other buildings like it, anywhere.
When it was introduced to the public, on June 18, 1950, it was front-page news. A rendering showed what this newspaper described as a “strikingly modern” tower that would rise 36 stories, surmounted by a 150-foot can-opener spire. A marquee spelling out the bank name would run down its entire front facade. At 440 feet, it would top the nearby Mercantile Bank Building as the city’s highest and become the tallest building in the Southwest. The price tag was $15 million, then an enormous sum.
According to Fred F. Florence, the bank’s longtime president, the building was a testament to the company’s “utmost confidence in the future growth of Dallas and the Southwest.” There was every reason to be enthusiastic about the city’s potential. Just across the front page from the story announcing the new bank building was another headline reporting that the city’s population had grown to 432,805, a staggering 48% increase from where it had been a decade earlier.
The ‘Day and Night Bank’
Republic had done much to finance the city’s economic expansion. Like the city, the bank had rapidly emerged from humble origins. It was founded on Valentine’s Day in 1920 as the Guaranty Bank and Trust Co., advertising itself as the “Day and Night Bank” because of its long hours, from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. on weekdays and 10 p.m. on Saturdays. It rechristened itself as the Republic National Bank in 1922, and four years later moved into its own bespoke tower on Main Street. The design was by Charles D. Hill, architect of what was then the city’s municipal building, and it rose 20 Italianate stories to an ornate cupola. It was expanded in 1930 to keep up with the bank’s growth. (The building remains standing today, though it has been converted to residential use and is now known as the Davis Building.)
Florence was the unlikely figure responsible for the bank’s ballooning success. The son of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania, he was born in New York City in 1891 and the next year moved with his family to the East Texas town of Rusk, where his father ran a store. At the age of 16, he got his first job sweeping the floors at a local bank for $15 a month. Five years later, with no college education, he was the president of Alto State Bank.
Florence’s career was delayed by service in the U.S. Army during World War I, but when he returned to Alto, in 1919, he resumed his position at the bank and was elected the town’s mayor; for the rest of his life, he would balance banking with an array of civic responsibilities. Ever ambitious, in 1920 he left Alto for Dallas to join the fledgling Guaranty Bank as vice president. By 1929, at the age of 37, he was made Republic’s president, his rise fueled by a famously relentless work ethic. Florence was at his desk by 8 every morning, dressed in urbane suits that belied his humble East Texas roots. “Sometimes I play a little golf, but I don’t let it get in the way of my banking,” he said.
That 1929 was an inauspicious moment to become the head of a bank is a major understatement, but Florence managed to navigate Republic through the crash and subsequent years of the Great Depression. By 1950, it was the largest bank in the South, with some $27.5 million in capital. He achieved that through a philosophy that combined conservatism with aggression. “It is not enough in our dynamic society for bankers to wait for business to come walking in; we should go out and find the need where it exists,” he said. That sense of optimism was a hallmark of his career. “I think his middle initial must stand for ‘future,’” said his friend Willis M. Tate, the president of Southern Methodist University. (In fact, his middle name was Farrel.)
His role in civic affairs was equally effective. In 1931, he became the city’s treasurer, and in that position helped lead Dallas through the Depression, just as he had with Republic Bank. He was instrumental in the winning bid to bring the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition to Dallas, and then became its president. By mid-century, he was serving on a laundry list of civic organizations and charities. According to historian Darwin Payne, Florence was “the single individual whose support was deemed most important and most necessary for the success of any civic project.”
His success was especially important for the city’s Jewish community, of which he was an active member. (His father-in-law, David Lefkowitz, was chief rabbi of Temple Emanu-El.) While the city had its share of Jewish business leaders — Stanley Marcus being the most notable — they came from the retail trade. Florence was an anomaly in that he had penetrated the inner circle of the blue-blooded banking world.
A gentlemanly architect
Florence was the guiding force behind Republic’s new tower, but he was not the man who selected its architects. That was Karl Hoblitzelle, who had made a fortune developing vaudeville and movie theaters across the Southwest. Personable and outgoing, he was among the city’s leading philanthropists when he became chairman of the Republic board in 1945. Hoblitzelle and his wife had a summer home on Cape Cod, and it was there that he got to know Wallace Harrison, a gentlemanly architect who was then leading the team designing the United Nations complex in New York. Keeping that group of contentious egos, among them Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer, on track took all of Harrison’s considerable diplomatic skills — and landed him on the cover of Time magazine.
Harrison, born in 1895 into modest circumstances in Worcester, Mass., began his career working at McKim, Mead & White, the preeminent American architects of the beaux-arts era. That career was accelerated in 1926, when he married Ellen Milton, daughter of a distinguished family (she was a descendant of Meriwether Lewis) but more critically had familial ties to John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, parents of future New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller.
Harrison secured a reputation for managing grand projects in the 1930s. He was among the group of architects responsible for the design of Rockefeller Center, arguably the most successful urban development project of the 20th century. At the same time, he designed the iconic centerpiece Theme Center exhibition of the 1939 New York World’s Fair, the linked spire and sphere known as the Trylon and Perisphere.
In 1941, Harrison elevated Max Abramovitz, a junior architect in his firm, forming the partnership Harrison & Abramovitz, which would continue on for 35 years as one of the most successful corporate practices in the country, its work including the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center, LaGuardia Airport, and the headquarters of the CIA in Langley, Va.
At about the time Hoblitzelle met him, Harrison was at work on an office tower in Pittsburgh for Alcoa, the aluminum conglomerate. (Harrison had endeared himself to the company by using its aluminum during the making of Rockefeller Center.) The tower he designed for Alcoa would be an innovative showcase for that material, the first skyscraper clad in thin aluminum panels that had the ancillary benefit of reducing the load on its steel frame. Architectural Forum, the leading professional journal of the time, lauded it as “America’s most daring experiment in modern office building” and “the beginning of true industrial design in architecture.”
The Alcoa building was the model for the Republic Tower, which would also be skinned in lightweight aluminum panels. For the Dallas building, these were produced on a 750-ton hydraulic press at a factory in Minneapolis, the panels just one-eighth of an inch thick and stamped with a star pattern that increased their structural stiffness while nodding to Texas history. (A fiberglass or concrete backing provided insulation.) The effect was quite different and altogether more elegant than at the Pittsburgh original. While projecting windows give the Alcoa facade a sturdy, modular effect, the Republic is more sheer, its flatness accentuating its verticality.
That height was originally only to be 18 stories, but the continuing growth of the bank forced that number to be doubled before the groundbreaking ceremony, on Nov. 30, 1950. The city’s leading dignitaries were all on hand to watch a clearly delighted Florence, wearing a gray suit and homburg hat, sitting in the cab and pulling the levers of a steam shovel. For a brief moment, the phlegmatic, workaholic banker looked like a 9-year-old on Christmas morning.
Sidewalk engineers
All of Dallas seemed to be interested in the construction of the city’s tallest building. It was hard to avoid hearing the work: It took 100,000 sticks of dynamite to clear out the rock to build its foundation. To accommodate the curious, the bank put up elevated bleachers with an awning and red seat cushions, vending machines and telephones. Spectators were encouraged to join the Society for the Promotion and Encouragement of More and Better Sidewalk Engineers (SPEMBSE), with “sidewalk engineer” being a euphemism for the looky-look construction watcher. Some 40,000 people signed up, according to the bank, nearly a third of the 112,000 recorded visitors to the bleachers.
Construction was slow going, delayed first by a steelworker strike (the building required 12,587 tons of it) and then a fire that required replacement of the horizontal beams on the 19th and 20th floors. The costs went up with the building; the projected $15 million budget ended up at $25 million.
When it was finally complete, at the end of November 1954, it was celebrated with a four-day extravaganza that included a dinner for 4,500 guests at Fair Park and a show headlined by Bob Hope. On Dec. 1, this paper celebrated its public opening with a 28-page section that detailed virtually every question one might have about the building:
- Each of the 2,735 windows of blue-green Solex glass could be pivoted so both sides could be washed from the inside. (Extremely handy, trust me.)
- There were 23 elevators, each with teak paneling, aluminum trim and call panels on either side of the doors for maximum convenience.
- The safety deposit vault door was 30 inches thick and weighed 40 tons.
- A pair of 1,000-ton refrigeration units kept the building cool in the Dallas heat.
- Woods used for interior paneling included northern maple, Appalachian oak, Honduran mahogany, American walnut and birch.
- A staff of “attractive women in page jobs” wore gray gabardine uniforms with blue piping.
If, as the architect Mies van der Rohe averred, God is in the details, the Republic was going to be one holy building.
The general public’s principal experience of the building, at least from the inside, would take place in the five-story annex attached to the tower’s southern flank that was home to its immense banking lobby. More than an acre in area, that column-free space had 23-foot ceilings and was circled by a balcony decorated by some 3,000 square feet of gold leaf.
That room, and the other public spaces of the building, were strikingly modern. The executive offices, however, were not, a fact that surely irritated the architect. The board of directors’ room, for instance, was furnished with copies of Chippendale and Queen Anne design (along with reproductions of the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence). The executive dining room, on the 33rd floor, had a Chinese theme, with red lacquer detailing. Florence had his own dining room, in 18th-century style.
A unicorn in a crate
Harrison had his way with one element, at least somewhat: the tower’s 150-foot spire. Given the option, Harrison would have eliminated it altogether to maintain the purity of his pristine modern box. But Hoblitzelle, with his movie-theater background, was adamant that the building have a signature marquee, and he wanted it to be a giant torch modeled on the one held aloft by the Statue of Liberty. That kind of corny affectation would have ruined the building.
Years later, Harrison recalled the incident with his biographer, Victoria Newhouse: “What do you do in a case like that? Tell him he can’t have it? If he wants it, he’ll have one put up anyway. All you can do is present what you consider superior designs as forcefully as you can, and hope your arguments will sink in.”
Hoblitzelle conceded, the result being the streamlined, aluminum-sheathed spire built by the Federal Sign Co. and anchored to the tower’s roof. At its tip was a rotating beacon that spun counterclockwise 12 times per minute, its beam of light created by a 2,500-watt short-arc mercury lamp with a 5-foot-wide lens. The bank said it could be seen for more than 100 miles, its visibility limited only by the curvature of the Earth. Those claims were never completely verified, but it did reach Cleburne, some 50 miles distant.
Whether the spire compromises the building or adds a quirky bit of character is a matter of opinion (I lean to the latter). On a visit to the city not long after its completion, the writer Ludwig Bemelmans quipped that the spire made the building look like a “unicorn crated for shipping.” Today, its fingerlike shadow landing on neighboring buildings looks like it’s flipping the bird toward City Hall — a true Dallas sentiment.
The battle for the sky
The story of the tower might have ended there, but the bank kept growing, and so did its chief rival, First National Bank. Before Republic put up its new tower, the city’s two leading banks had been neighbors on Main Street, their respective buildings separated by a narrow slot known officially as Exchange Alley but colloquially as “Money Alley.”
By early 1961, both banks were planning new towers, with Republic hoping to regain its status as the city’s tallest (it had been overtaken by the Southland Center in 1959) and First National looking to surpass it. In April, Republic formally announced its plan for a new tower directly behind its current home, and linked at their respective bases. “The treatment of the new structure will harmonize with the present bank building,” The Dallas Morning News reported. No height was listed, prompting speculation as to whether it would try to top the 50-story tower First National had announced in January.
The steel frame of the new Republic tower was already four stories out of the ground when bank president James W. Aston (Florence had died, of hepatitis, on Christmas Day in 1960) announced that the building would be 50 stories, rising 596 feet above ground level, the maximum height possible given Federal Aviation Administration restrictions protecting the flight path to Love Field. This meant that First National had won the height war, though on a technicality: Its new tower capped out at the same height above sea level, but because First National was on lower ground, its building could be slightly taller, at 628 feet. In so doing, it reaffirmed the classic real estate dictum: location, location, location.
As for the design, the new Republic tower would be a copy of the earlier tower, but square in plan and with windows on all four sides. A grand new lobby would face St. Paul Street and be linked to the earlier building. The architects would be Harrell & Hamilton; Thomas, Jameson & Merrill; and Grayson Gill. (George Harrell and Grayson Gill had been partnered as the local architects under Harrison & Abramovitz on the original tower.)
A landmark demolished
Republic wasn’t quite done building. In 1966, the bank acquired the neighboring Medical Arts Building, giving it control of the entire block bounded by Ervay, Bryan and St. Paul streets and Pacific Avenue. For a decade, it made no announcement of its intentions for the historic building, a handsome, 19-story cruciform structure built in 1923 as an office for doctors and dentists. But by the mid-1970s, amid a wave of banking mergers, Republic was aching for more space. When the bank conducted a “study” to determine what to do with the building, the writing was on its buff brick walls.
In April of 1977, Republic announced it would demolish the building and gave tenants until the end of the year to vacate the premises. The city’s small preservation community was ill-equipped to fight what was, arguably, the city’s most powerful bank. The Texas Historical Commission moved to have the building named to the National Register of Historic Places, but even that would not have had any statutory force.
It came down the following January, replaced by an eight-story extension, designed by Omniplan, that seamlessly integrated into the tower complex, with its distinctive starred aluminum paneling.
Republic, which had grown steadily since its origins as the “Day and Night Bank,” came to a precipitous end during the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s, its demise hastened by a downturn of the Dallas real estate market. By the middle of 1988, it ceased to exist.
For much of the next decade, like so much of the city’s downtown real estate, the complex stood vacant. But in 2003, its prospects changed when it was purchased by Gables Residential, which would go on to spend $40 million converting the original Republic Tower into an apartment building with more than 200 units. (The rest of the complex is now leased as commercial space.)
Today, the Republic stands as part of a broader trend in the remaking of downtown as a residential community, as do many of the other bank buildings that it sought to surpass and was then surpassed by, among them the Mercantile and First National buildings. Even its own precursor, the Davis Building, is now a residential building. In the wake of the pandemic, which emptied out downtown commercial real estate across the country, these conversions have given Dallas a leg up on other cities only now trying to make such projects work.
As it has aged, the complex has received the protected status that Republic balked at giving to the Medical Arts Building. In 2004, it was made a Dallas landmark, and in 2005 added to the National Register of Historic Places. In 2023, the Texas Society of Architects honored it with its Landmark Award, given to exceptional works of architecture more than 50 years old.
Those accolades are richly deserved. Long live the Republic.
The essays in this series will be collected in a volume to be produced by the nonprofit publishing house Deep Vellum. Read earlier installments on Millermore Mansion, the Adolphus Hotel, NorthPark Center, the Hyatt Regency and Reunion Tower, Fountain Place, City Hall and the Nasher Sculpture Center.
