History
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.
In 1997 Crescent Real Estate Equities, in partnership with the financer Trizec Properties, bought the Bank One Center from Cigna and the Teacher Retirement System of Texas for $238 million.
On December 14, 2006, Crescent sold the structure for US$216 million to Los Angeles-based Metropolitan Real Estate Developers.
On August 13, 2007, Comerica Bank announced that it would move its corporate headquarters to the building. The decision to move the company's headquarters from Detroit, Michigan was made on March 6, 2007.
Read more about this topic: Comerica Bank Tower
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