Mike Hopkins got out of his car Thursday afternoon just past 3 wearing a plaid long-sleeved button-down, a thin jacket, tan cargo shorts and a bright, wide smile. “This is fun!” beamed the 72-year-old as he opened an umbrella to shield him from the cold drizzle. “I like to have fun!”
Two minutes later, his eyes grew glassy with tears, and when he spoke, the words came out in small, choked-back sobs. No, this wasn’t fun. Not at all.
We were standing in front of one of Hopkins’ real-estate holdings — what used to be the Marsh Lane Plaza shopping center on the northwest corner of Marsh and Walnut Hill Lane. Some 90 days after The Tornado, it remains a tangled, boarded-up ruin sprawled across a giant, empty parking lot.
Debris has been cleared, tossed into the long, overflowing dumpster still sitting in front of what used to be Planet Fitness. But it’s still a mangled hulk, its insides mostly on the outside.
And in the back, where the center meets those tattered townhomes along Walnut Hill, it’s even worse – because of the trash-dumpers, scrap-metal-pickers, looters and homeless who keep moving the chain-link fence and prying open doors to businesses closed since their roofs caved in. Behind the townhomes, it looks like the tornado tore up this town 15 minutes ago.
On Wednesday I called Hopkins, for 50 years a developer and owner of shopping centers across this city, to see when this heap of depressing God awful might vanish and to ask, again, what might replace this aging strip of crumpled beige. He told me it’s not going anywhere any time soon.
Last week he received the structural engineer’s report that says only 60% of the shopping center should come down — from the Planet Fitness to what remains of the old Posh Cleaners along Walnut Hill. Hopkins believes it would be less expensive to raze and rebuild. He fears a battle looms with his insurance company — a sentiment echoed by friends and strangers who own homes and businesses in the tornado’s path.
“By now I thought we would have settled with the insurance company,” Hopkins said. “I don’t want to get into a lawsuit with anybody. But I know that if it’s not a fair settlement, that’s the only course of action.”
He then began talking of the mom-and-pops erased by the storm — the Sunshine Donuts, the dry cleaners, the washateria, the Ecuadorian restaurant, the nail salon.
“It’s crushing to think about,” he said, his eyes again watering. “I’m used to handling s---. But this is big s---.”
The shopping center is like most of this gloomy intersection and much of our northwest Dallas neighborhood — filled with shattered structures, broken glass, trees reduced to stumps. The Thomas Jefferson and Cary and Walnut Hill campuses, Northway Church and the houses of worship next door, the still-shuttered Walnut Hill rec center and Dallas County Government Center, the houses between them — all unchanged since the Oct. 20 storm.
Some structures are still standing only because they’re tangled in insurance companies’ red tape. Jack Perkins, owner of Maple & Motor, lives across Midway Road from Walnut Hill Elementary, in an airy, modern home laid waste by the storm. Perkins, for God knows how long shacked up in a nearby rent house, told me Thursday he has retained an attorney to do battle with the insurance company now offering him a third of what his house is worth.
“It's a public disaster,” Perkins said. “If that’s a whole neighborhood, it sets back that part of the city 10 years. It’s no longer a part of the community on the rise. It’s now a part of the community on the decline and a violation of the public trust on the part of the insurance companies.”
Other buildings, like TJ, remain because they are caught in tussles over whether to rebuild or remodel. Friday morning my inbox filled with a long back-and-forth between fellow members of the TJ alumni association’s board. Trustee Edwin Flores wants the board to get behind a total do-over — now. But some of our ranks want to see the school torn down, while others are demanding the district salvage some of its façade.
Meanwhile, some neighbors say they can barely stomach the drive in and out of our part of town.
“That’s the way I feel,” said Mike Hopkins, whose own neighborhood, at Royal Lane and Inwood Road, was not spared the storm’s wrath.
I was reminded of something a friend said the week after the storm: “You’ll be writing about this for years.” Living it, too, I guess.
“It’s frustrating and depressing,” said Jennifer Staubach Gates, this area’s City Council member. That seems to have become our neighborhood’s motto.
It spreads farther north and east, too, to the Preston Road and Royal Lane intersection, along the Dallas North Tollway, toward the Jewish Community Center and the Home Depot along Forest Lane near North Central Expressway. Some things have been demolished already, like the old KNON-FM studios along Central; some lots are vacant and ready for rebuild. But those are still the exceptions.
At Preston and Royal, two corners are still in ruin, along with what remains of a fire station — one item among many waiting on that presidential disaster declaration that may or may not come. And more than a month after Regency Center said it would demolish the shopping center that housed Central Market, Fish City Grill, Interabang Books and the pizzeria formerly known as Marco’s, the city has yet to sign off on the permit, said the council member.
Gates told me Friday she is again pushing city staff to fast-track those demo permits for businesses and homeowners impacted by the storm — something promised but not yet delivered.
“I want these things gone,” she said. That includes Hopkins’ shopping center.
Not a day passes when the council member doesn’t run into someone who wants to talk about the tornado’s damage, or when her office doesn’t get a call from someone still trying to navigate the bureaucracy.
“It’s going to be my biggest focus of my last 18 months in office,” she said. “The amount of time we spend on the tornado is still very substantial.”
There is some activity on the side of Walnut Hill and Marsh tousled by the winds. Hopkins still owns the shopping center across the street, where the El Rancho and dd’s DISCOUNTS were hammered by the storm. Albertson’s, which holds the lease, has finally begun rebuilding those stores; though, from a distance, it looks like a remodel in slow motion.
Before Thursday, the last time I’d spoken to Hopkins was mid-November. And back then, he would visit this intersection every day after the storm — out of habit, he figured. The Bryan Adams graduate, who famously repainted East Dallas’ Casa Linda Plaza pink in 1984, told me Thursday he hasn’t been back here since our last conversation in the fall.
“It’s too depressing.”
Hopkins told me several developers have offered to purchase Marsh Lane Plaza — “to buy it in the state it’s in right now and pay me as if it weren’t damaged.” He said he has no interest in selling. “Because it’s a good intersection.”
But like all of us stuck in this mess, he has no idea what will come next. Or when.
“I’ve never had anything hit me like this in my life,” Hopkins said. He smiled. But he was crying.
