Dallas’ old Trinity Industrial District is getting a hip new look

One of Dallas’ oldest warehouse districts is set to undergo a transformation, as Quadrant Investment Properties builds two new office and retail buildings, the Dallas Morning News reported.

During the 1940s and 1950s, hundreds of small warehouse and office buildings were constructed beneath the river levees, turning the old Trinity River floodplain northwest of downtown into a thriving commercial district.

A view of the old warehouse district

Enter Quadrant, the local investor and developer behind many of the projects in Dallas’ Design District– a nearby area also built from vintage industrial space. Now, the firm has landed on the old Trinity Industrial District as the next ‘It’ neighborhood.

“We were thinking about what’s next and what’s cool,” Quadrant founder Chad Cook told the Dallas Morning News.

The developer began eyeing the area for development in 2018 and has spent the last three years picking up mostly small properties.

“We started buying small buildings and pooling them together,” Cook said. “We call it the Lego strategy.”

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Now the company has enough to get the ball rolling with its first new neighborhood project called the Manufacturing District– a block of repurposed old warehouses at Irving Boulevard and Manufacturing Street.

Contrary to its name, the neighborhood will be filled with high-end offices in buildings that were once vintage carpentry and metal shops. One old rail spur behind the buildings has even been landscaped into an adjacent urban park. The almost 90,000-square-foot office complex will include outdoor meeting areas, a coffee shop and a second-floor tenant lounge with views of the Dallas skyline.

The project is already attracting tenants, including transportation firm Alto. Commercial property firm Transwestern is leasing the project with additional plans in the works involving several more tenants.

“Our target market is that company that’s in Uptown or elsewhere nearby,” said Cook. “You can get rents literally half the cost of some new buildings in Uptown. Quadrant aims to attract its ideal tenants with cheaper rent and more amenities, “with return to the office, they need cool space — someplace their employees will want to come back to.”

The sequel project will be a $2 million renovation to the International on Turtle Creek showroom and office complex on Irving Boulevard. Quadrant teamed up with Maryland-based investor FCP late last year to buy what will be one of the largest properties in the district. Built in 1949 as a warehouse for International Harvester, the 155,000-square-foot building was redeveloped in 2005 into a modern office and showroom for home furnishings, creative and design firms.

The two firms are getting ready to commence a ground-up construction of two office buildings and one big restaurant in front.

The first building at 1333 Oak Lawn Ave— called Thirteen Thirty Three —will open next year. Quadrant is already in talks with a full-building tenant, says Cook.

The other planned office is on Riveredge Drive and would have more than 140,000 square feet of office and retail space across five stories.

With Dallas’ Merriman Anderson Architects as the designer, Quadrant plans to stick to small-scale, boutique buildings to keep the area’s “unique personality,” as Cook calls it.

“We don’t want to see this become Uptown,” he said.

[Dallas Morning News] – Maddy Sperling