Comerica Bank Tower is a 60-story postmodern skyscraper located at 1717 Main Street in the Main Street District in downtown
Dallas,
Texas . Standing at a structural height of 787 feet (240 m), it is the third tallest skyscraper in the city of Dallas. (If the antennas and spires of
Renaissance Tower were excluded, Comerica Bank Tower would be the second tallest.) It is also the sixth tallest building in Texas and the 49th tallest building in the
United States. The building was designed by Philip Johnson and John Burgee and was completed in 1987. The structure has 1,500,000 square feet (100,000 m2) of office space.
Originally known as Momentum Place, the tower was built as the new headquarters of MCorp Bank. The site, which included the Woolf Brothers and Volk Brothers department stores, was one of the busiest blocks in downtown Dallas. Adjacent blocks included the
Neiman Marcus Building,
Wilson Building, Titche-Goettinger Building and
Mercantile National Bank Building. The entire block from Ervay to St. Paul was leveled to make way for the new tower. The original design as proposed by Johnson called for several office buildings, a hotel and a large shopping mall designed in an ornate classical style. MCorp Bank instead desired a more restrained office tower without any retail; the design for the banking hall was also scaled down.
Construction began in 1985 and the tower opened in 1987, with MCorp initially leasing 600,000 square feet (56,000 m2) of space after moving from the Mercantile National Bank Building. At time of completion it was the most legally-contested building on the Dallas skyline due to the economic downturn of the late 1980s and the savings and loan scandal. MCorp Bank collapsed shortly after the building's opening and the bank was dissolved by Bank One. Developers and financial backers sued over ownership of the tower. Other parties defaulted on loans, and the building went into foreclosure in 1991 and again in 1995, the two largest in city history. Without a lead tenant, the tower was remarketed into fully leasable class AA office space. Due to the economic downturn, this was the last high-rise to be completed in downtown in the 1980s.
