Biography
A native of Dallas, Crow as a child and later as an adolescent earned money through a series of odd jobs, including plucking chickens, cleaning bricks, and unloading boxcars, a task which he began at the age of ten until his father forbade it. He was the fifth of eight children reared in a rented one-bedroom house off Fitzhugh Street in East Dallas. His father, Jefferson Crow, worked as a bookkeeper for Collett Munger – one of Dallas' early real estate developers and the builder of Munger Place subdivision. Unable to attend college at the time because of the Great Depression, Crow worked after high school at odd jobs. In 1933, Crow landed a job for about $13 a week as a runner for Mercantile National Bank in Dallas.
After completing Woodrow Wilson High School in 1932, he worked for a Dallas bank and attended night school in accounting at Southern Methodist University. Upon graduation in 1938, he was at the age of twenty-four the youngest CPA in Texas. He then worked for three years as a Certified Public Accountant before joining the United States Navy in 1940. He utilized his background in accounting and was offered a commission auditing the books of defense contractors. After World War II, he remained with the Navy for another year to handle final settlements with its contractors. He then returned to Dallas and saw opportunities for the growth of the city. He became an agent for North American Van Lines, a moving company. Shortly thereafter, he worked as a wholesale grain merchandiser, tripled the sizes of the warehouses, and erected new loading facilities. Once the grain business faded, he switched at the age of thirty-three to the burgeoning field of warehouse real estate development.
Crow built his first warehouse in 1948 and leased it to Ray-O-Vac Battery Company. The warehouse was larger than what Ray-O-Vac needed, and Crow was able to seek additional tenants. He convinced Decca Records to sign for the leftover space, and began a career as a "speculative builder." This field was a new concept in property development, one in which builders typically designed construction to meet the expressed needs of one specific company, then leased the entire space to that company after the building was in place.
He continued from his start with a single-story warehouse on the banks of the Trinity River in the late 1940s. In partnerships with John M. Stemmons, he became one of the largest developers in the Trinity River Industrial Park. By the middle 1950s, Crow was Dallas' largest warehouse builder.
His company's skyscrapers – including Dallas' 50-story Trammell Crow Center and the 53-story Chase Tower – reshaped skylines in the 1980s in cities stretching from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Atlanta, San Francisco and San Diego, California.
Read more about this topic: Trammell Crow
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