Jury Duty at the Old Municipal Building, Not for the Faint-Hearted
Sad and gloomy, yearning for restoration (2007)
by Paula Bosse
Several years ago, I maintained a long-running personal blog (back in the days when everyone had a blog — now everyone has a podcast). A recent comment on my Patreon page reminded me of an old blog post I wrote in 2010, several years before I began Flashback Dallas. I thought I would share it here (slightly rewritten). It’s a different sort of thing than I normally write on *this* blog — it’s pretty long and only tangentially connected with Dallas history — but it made me laugh to reread this 13 years later. (I have to add that since I wrote this back in 2010, the Municipal Building has been lovingly, *dazzlingly* restored by the University of North Texas and is no longer the hellhole I describe below! I haven’t seen the restored interior in person yet, but photos show some unbelievably amazing work! Thank you, UNT!)
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October 27, 2010
I’m one of those people who receives a lot of jury summonses. I swear one year I got at least 3. Maybe 4. Do they keep sending them to me because I always report for jury duty like a responsible citizen is supposed to do? Is this good behavior working against me? So when I got a jury summons last month — a mere 4 months after my most recent jury duty on Cinco de Mayo — several unladylike words spilled out of me as I stood at the mailbox. I scanned the list of acceptable exemptions — there was a little empty checkbox next to the statement “I have been convicted of a felony.” Instant exemption! My first thought was, “Hmm. I’ve got six weeks….” It was tempting.
But I was still felony-free by the time I had to report yesterday (Oct. 26, 2010), so I somehow got myself up at the crack of dawn after only 4 or 5 hours of sleep and pointed my car in the direction of downtown. Most of my jury duty has been at the criminal courts building, which is easy to get to, and the chairs in the central jury room are plush and fairly comfy. This time, though — for the first time — I was summoned to a municipal court, where I guess they try people for non-death-penalty offenses like traffic tickets and zoning violations. If this day had any upside, it was that it would be my first visit to the beautiful Municipal Building. I couldn’t wait to see what that building — arguably the grandest building in Dallas — looked like inside.
But first I had to get there. I had to travel what felt like the entire length of downtown before I was able to turn left on Main and loop back to Harwood. I was sleep-deprived, caffeine-deprived, and just generally cranky, knowing that this whole thing was unnecessary, as I would no doubt be let go by noon, after having sat around for hours doing nothing but thinking unladylike things and wondering the whole time how this inefficient system keeps going.
Convenient parking? Ha! Fend for yourselves, suckers. At least Frank Crowley has a parking garage. Somehow, I found an unattended, cash-only lot along Commerce for the surprisingly affordable price of $2.00. My luck continued when I found that I actually had two one-dollar bills, which I stuffed through the narrow slot.
Despite my lengthy detour, I had arrived a little early and enjoyed a leisurely walk down Commerce. As I passed the building’s parking garage entrance/exit, I wondered if that was where Lee Harvey Oswald was shot. (It was.) I took my time, taking in the lovely, stately Municipal Building, which opened to rapturous acclaim in 1914 — it’s one of those cool old buildings that Dallas loves to tear down. I was really looking forward to stepping inside that grand palace, imagining an interior of marble, brass, etched glass, and ornate, highly polished, hand-carved wooden banisters.
I headed up the elegant, wide steps, walked in, and… oh… my… god. It was awful. AWFUL! But before I was treated to the full force of its awfulness, I was first greeted with the de rigueur metal detector. Which I set off. I stepped back and the officer asked me to raise each pant leg so he could see the tops of my shoes. I must have looked confused because he said, “We just want to make sure you’re not wearing an ankle holster.” Without thinking, I stupidly replied, “Pfft — I WISH,” and I instantly regretted it. But he laughed, and I continued on my way.
The Beaux-Arts-style Municipal Building, designed by architect C. D. Hill, is beautiful and stately. …On the outside. Here’s what it looked like almost 100 years ago:
Inside? Dear god. Depressingly institutional. Last “updated” circa the ’70s/’80s? Cramped and claustrophobic, bad paint, fluorescent lights, drop ceiling tiles, and absolutely no signage. I had to ask three people how to get to the central jury room! It’s a shame I found it, because I am going to have nightmares about that horrible place for a long time. There were about a hundred of us sitting on folding chairs in a room with dingy cream-colored walls trimmed with flat-turquoise paint. It reeked of the thousands of cigarettes which had no doubt been smoked over the past century by thousands of long-dead civil servants. The smell of stale smoke was embedded in every nook and cranny of that room. I think I would have preferred to serve my civic duty by picking up Miller Lite cartons from the side of the highway.
The worst thing about the room? The blaring TV. I don’t know why this has become acceptable, but it’s everywhere: in every waiting room there’s always a TV now — always on, stuck on a program you would never choose to watch. My fellow captive good citizens and I were subjected to a chirpy morning show (“Sweaters: to tuck or not?”) and lurid Hollywood gossip. I wondered if I could leave the room to get a breath of fresh air — it would be sheer relief to stand out in the hallway with the slumlords and the red-light-runners waiting their turn to go before the judge and take on City Hall. But I didn’t see anyone else doing that, so I sat, defeated, involuntarily learning about the finer points of sweater-tucking.
After an hour and a half or so, the marshal — who had a shaved head and wore taps on his shoes — announced that we were allowed a half-hour break. I hot-footed it out of there and left the building (I had to ask how to get out). I walked around the building admiring it, then walked across the street to a new park that’s sprung up since I was last downtown — a whole block of a park, lined with trees and terraced walkways — in downtown Dallas — with grass and everything! It’s cool. Here’s a photo I took of the municipal building from across the park (Main Street Garden):
Oct. 26, 2010 / photo: Paula Bosse
I saw several young hipsters walking their dogs. I bounced across a small playground, built on some sort of weird, springy, spongey surface. I thought how unusual and how nice this whole “open space” thing was. My half hour was up too soon. As I walked back, a possibly homeless man joined me and chatted with giddy enthusiasm about the Rangers being in the World Series, insisting to me that they were Going. To. Win. I laughed and said I believed him. It was such a beautiful day. How sad that I was heading back to the dark dungeon of the central jury room. I waited to cross the street with a couple of women I recognized as fellow potential jurors. They decided to blithely cross against a red light. There were six police cars parked in front of us, but not one cop to bust these scofflaws! I crossed on green, because I’d used up my luck finding a convenient parking spot, and as sure as the Rangers are Going To Win the World Series, I knew I would be instantly cited for pedestrian incivility the second I stepped off the curb to a flashing red light.
Back inside, I set off the metal detector a second time and showed my holster-free ankles to a different officer and followed the trail of breadcrumbs I’d left earlier. In the jury room — where women outnumbered men 4-1, and the median age was 60 — the two women who’d crossed on red were talking about the Laura Bush autobiography one of them was reading. Two other women were talking in excruciating detail about deaths of beloved pets. The guy next to me was nodding off, somehow oblivious to Wendy Williams chattering excitedly about Charlie Sheen and a hooker. A guy behind me had a laptop which kept making clanging sounds and which he’d plugged into an extension cord that snaked its way into the bowels of a mystery room behind an intimidating door marked “Private.”
There was no coffee in the building. (“There is NO coffee in the building,” the marshal had informed us earlier. “If you want a cup of coffee, you’re going to have to exit the building.”) HAD there been coffee, it would have been thin and stale and cold, and the powdered artificial creamer would not have dissolved, no matter how much you stabbed at the globules with a plastic stir stick. Like in the movie “Joe Versus the Volcano.” I kept thinking of that movie, because that godforsaken central jury room I was trapped in could have been the inspiration for the scene in that movie which my brother and I often reference:
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I was so miserable. I contemplated committing some sort of petty property crime to relieve the tedium but reconsidered when I realized I’d only find myself back in the same building when my trial date came up. I was going to have to tough it out like an adult.
A middle-aged woman who looked like she was probably a hardcore, high-powered North Dallas realtor sat a couple of rows in front of me and seemed to be able to read only a sentence or two from her book (Famous Soviet Spies) before she grew bored and slipped her “We the People” bookmark back in and closed it, only to stare off into space, gathering the energy to raise the book again and read from it for 20 or 30 more aggressively-anti-Communist seconds.
The youngest person in the room sighed frequently and played a game on her phone.
An older Black man in a gimme cap and an older white man who had probably left his gimme cap in his truck talked together absolutely without pause for the entire time we were there. I couldn’t hear what they were talking about, but I have a feeling they’ll be spending Thanksgiving together this year.
Throughout my ordeal, I had longed to hear the snappy taps on the shoes of the marshal. He would be our savior — the one who could let us go. Finally, he returned. He called maybe 10 people and sent the rest of us on our way. It was 11:00 AM. I had been there only two and a half hours. It felt like a lifetime.
I got in my car, stopped for a burrito, headed home, and fell asleep on the couch. Civic duty done. I only hope I’m never called back to that depressing, confusing building. Pray you’re never called for jury duty there.
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Sources & Notes
Blog post by Paula Bosse, originally published on Oct. 27, 2010 (revised July 2023).
Photo of the sad, dark Municipal Building at top is from Google Street View, Aug. 2007; photo from 2013 by Paula Bosse.
The City of Dallas and all of us who live here, should fall to our knees to thank the University of North Texas Law School and the team of incredible people who restored and renovated the former Municipal Building. Thankfully, all of my sarcastic descriptions above are no longer accurate. I mean, look at this photo of what a hallway looks like now:
That photo is one of several showing the restoration in the article “Bringing Historic Dallas Back to Life” by Preston Pressley, on LinkedIn, here (possibly behind a subscription wall).
See more photos — as well as the film “Restore” by Mark Birnbaum — on the Phoenix I Restoration and Construction site, here.
Look at this photo of the revitalized building today — more beautiful than I’ve ever seen it. Every inch of its exterior has been cleaned, spruced up, and restored. I kind of wish I could be called to jury duty there now!
UNT Dallas College of Law
How it all began: my Flashback Dallas post “The Elegant Municipal Building — 1914.”
Lastly, if you would like to support me on Patreon, pop on over. I post daily.
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Copyright © 2023 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
Squire Haskins Collection, UTA Special Collections
