KATHERINE SEALE:

Preserving Dallas landmarks like a boss

By KERI MITCHELL

Neighbors sounded the alarm when interior demolition began on the historic Lakewood Theater a few years ago. Emergency response came in the form of Katherine Seale, the 41-yearold Landmark Commission chair who is changing the way Dallas views its own history relevant to new development.

In what was an unusual move at the time, Seale put in a formal request to initiate the two-year landmark process, halting demolition on the circa 1937 building.

Seale, the former executive director of Preservation Dallas, has made bold moves for preservation since Mayor Mike Rawlings appointed her to the Landmark Commission in 2012.

But she is no taxidermist when it comes to saving community landmarks. She cherishes history, but she believes there has to be some value to the public in saving old buildings from demolition.

This belief is exemplified in her decisions to begin the landmark process for buildings even when the owners were reluctant or flat-out opposed.

Historically, the commission rarely sought to landmark structures over owners’ objections. Seale says she was simply “tapping the breaks” on the Lakewood Theater until neighbors and the owners could meet to make their respective cases.

That tactic worked. Within a few days, the new owners agreed to seek landmark designation for the theater’s façade and its iconic tower, and also save the interior lobby’s art murals by the late Perry Nichols, one of the famed “Dallas Nine” artists whose regional work made a national impact in the ’30s and ’40s.

“This is something you ought to be very proud of as a city,” Seale told City Council members at the fall 2016 meeting when the theater became an official landmark.

Since then, the commission has employed the same tactic with success.

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In one instance, the prospect of initiating landmark status led to a deal to move and save a 137-year-old Victorian house along Interstate 30. It also persuaded the new owners of the circa 1955 Meadows Building on Greenville Avenue.

Now the commission is hoping it will work with two properties in West Dallas: A late 1800s Victorian farmhouse and an early 1900s schoolhouse where Bonnie Parker, of Bonnie and Clyde fame, attended.

Dallas Morning News columnist Robert Wilonsky, who calls Seale his “hero,” points out that this didn’t happen very often before she came onto the scene and “grabbed the city by its wrecking balls.”

Perhaps her greatest accomplishment so far is a new city ordinance that puts much of downtown and northern Oak Cliff in a protected zone that requires a 45-day waiting period before a developer may obtain a demolition permit. The initiative sprung out of a grim Sunday in 2014 for the preservation community, when a wrecking ball razed several histor- ic downtown buildings with no warning.

Before the ordinance, if a building was historic but not protected, the city offered same-day turnaround for demolition permits — the same reality that spurred Seale to action on behalf of the Lakewood

Theater when she saw theater chairs being carted out to the dumpsters. When it comes to Dallas’ historic resources, the preservation community needs time to work with owners to see whether a deal can be brokered, Seale says.