Dallas Power and Light

Dallas’ original electric utility, Dallas Power & Light, owed its beginning to Thomas Edison’s Electrical Bond & Share Company that financed independent utilities throughout America. Its Dallas headquarters was completed in 1931, the year of Edison’s death, and was celebrated as a triumph of art deco design, authored by the prominent local firm of Lang & Witchell. As of 2002, Dallas Power & Light’s successor, TXU Corp., still partially occupied the buildings on a full city block but had moved to a newer headquarters. TXU began looking for a developer to purchase the buildings and re-develop them in the late 1990s. Over several years many suitors failed in the attempt to procure the project. In 2003 TXU selected Hamilton to take on the task, a $35 million mixed use complex of 158 loft apartments, 21,000 SF of retail, and a 5-story new build structured parking deck, which all opened in 2005. It attracted the first national retailer, Jos. A. Bank Clothiers, to return downtown after a twenty-year retail exodus, helping to usher in a new era for downtown Dallas as a 24/7 live, work, and play community. TXU would subsequently convey its other vacant downtown block, the Fidelity Union Life Insurance Complex, to Hamilton that was redeveloped as Mosaic.