A developer based in Texas plans to breathe new life into the site upon which the historic Ambassador Hotel used to stand in Dallas by building a luxury apartment community.
The preliminary plans for the $113 million multifamily residential project were announced through a filing prepared by builders OHT Partners, according to The Real Deal.
The Ambassador Hotel — known as the Majestic Hotel when it opened in 1904 — stood at 1300 S Ervay St. for over a century.
Serving as an elite hotel, a retirement home, and a Christian ministry, the Ambassador became a landmark that bore witness to countless joys, scandals, and tragedies in Dallas, according to The Dallas Morning News.
In 2015, Jim Lake Companies bought the Ambassador with plans to convert it into a mixed-use development, but a late-night fire broke out in May 2019.
The four-alarm fire caused too much damage to the building for it to be salvaged, with a wrecking crew called in to finish the job a few months later.
Speaking to The Dallas Morning News at the time, then-owner Jim Lake Jr. expressed genuine grief at the loss of the historic landmark.
“The Ambassador was just iconic to the city, and not a day goes by where somebody doesn’t tell me that exact same thing,” Lake told The Dallas Morning News.
Even without the hotel, the site is ideally situated in the Cedars neighborhood of Dallas, not far from Downtown and Old City Park.
Larkspur Capital similarly announced this month that it plans to build rental townhomes in the same neighborhood.
As The Dallas Express reported, the Dallas developer has worked extensively to construct rental properties in West Dallas.
OHT Partners’ new apartment community on the site of the Ambassador Hotel is sure to attract prospective renters.
The project is set to begin later this year and is hoped to be finished by 2025.
OHT Partners — known for developing rental communities in cities across Texas — purchased the land last summer.
The new multifamily residential community will consist of three connected buildings, ranging from five to seven floors, for a total of 299 units.
Dallas-based architecture firm Corgan will design the complex, which will span over 320,000 square feet.
As The Dallas Express has extensively covered, the City’s permitting process has struggled to process residential permit applications for new constructions of single-family dwellings in Dallas. This problem was exacerbated this week by a ransomware attack that resulted in a network outage throughout the City’s government systems, The Dallas Express reported.
It is currently unclear what impact the attack will have on the commercial end of permitting.