DART brings new life to maintenance building

The Monroe Shops building, located at Dallas Area Rapid Transit's (DART) Blue Line Illinois Station, has become the new home of the DART Police Department, as of March 21. With the DART Rail system slated to grow to 90 miles over the next few years, the number of DART police personnel will need to expand beyond its current force. Together, with Steven Bourn, AIA, DART architect and project manager, and Ronald Maddox, DART Construction Engineering Manager, the team developed and executed a plan to rehabilitate the building and provide approximately 69,000 square feet to accommodate the police. 

 Bourn admits it was a challenge designing the sensitive conversion of an old trolley repair shop listed on the National Register of Historic Places into a 21st Century police headquarters. DART is applying for recognition of Monroe Shops as the agency's first LEED certified building.
 "Working with a historical building can be tricky, but DART's priority was to preserve the structure while making it useful to the needs of a growing transit system," Bourn added. The new $20 million facility now includes three floors of modern workspace, meeting rooms, staff offices, showers, lockers and an exercise facility. Nobody can remember how it got its name, but there is no denying that Monroe Shops played an important part in Dallas' transportation history according to Stephen Salin, DART Vice President of Rail Planning. 

 "It was the home of all heavy repair work to cars belonging to the Texas Electric Railway, or Interurban, until its final run in 1948," he said. "Prior to the arrival of the railway, Dallas mainly served as a prosperous agriculture-based town. That all changed due to the existence of the Interurban and this historic repair facility." 

 For more than three decades, the Interurban created transportation jobs, brought buyers to Dallas markets and workers to downtown over 226 miles of track on three lines that traveled to Denison, Sherman, Ennis, Corsicana, Hillsboro and Waco. 

 When the Interurban stopped taking daily care of 250 rail cars, their maintenance property became the home of such businesses as Fleming & Son Papermill, U-Haul Company and the city of Dallas before DART acquired the abandoned building in April 1991 as part of the land acquisition for the southern Blue Line segment.