Photo Credit: Breonny Lee
BY Taylor Adams Cogan
Plenty of people aspire to the American dream, but Don Cass has pursued a bit of the Texas version, going from working the fields of a farm as a 6-year-old to developing real estate in the best parts of Dallas.
Maybe it’s the fact that he was picking cotton
and hauling hay around the same time he was learning to read – when you talk to Don, you hear from a humble man who just wants to make communities the best they can be.
“It was a great life,” he says of growing up on the Paris, Texas, farm. “It taught me how to work. Taught me how to see what’s possible when it looks like nothing.”
He came to Dallas in 1955, after three bad crop years. Eighteen years old and looking to send money home to his parents, he found a job – by luck or fate – with Ross Perot.
“Ross was doing all this computer stuff for Blue Cross Blue Shield, right downtown,” Don says. “I worked for him a few years. Then I started doing other things. Taught myself tax law. Then I started working with doctors, setting up corporations at Baylor, had offices in Houston, San Antonio, even California. I just enjoyed helping people.”
Eventually, real estate found him. He and friend Lou Reese started doing building projects on Lower Greenville, later working their way toward North Peak and Bryan Streets.
“I’d buy up what everyone else thought was junk — boarded-up buildings, no roofs, trees growing inside,” Don says. “In Deep Ellum, at that time long-forgotten since the Depression Era, the city kept telling me to tear it all down. But I told them: I’m a farm boy. We fix things. We don’t throw ’em away.”
He asked the city for a month to prove it. They came back, saw a building he restored and already had a restaurant in it. “They said OK.”
He started moving people who were living under I-345 into buildings he rehabbed, offering safer places to live and food to eat.
He built one of the first rooftop patios in Dallas, the first in Deep Ellum.
“The city fought me on it, saying it’d fall through. I showed them how I’d build it, using steel posts from a building they were tearing down. Put them into the foundation and ran them up through the walls.”
That was The Green Room. Before the roof even went on, the place was packed. And, as we know, that was far from the last rooftop patio our city would see. Don liked building what nobody else had.
“I figured people would like being outside. I sure do. I sit on my porch and look out — why wouldn’t people want that in Deep Ellum?”
He owned and remodeled about 70 Deep Ellum buildings over the years. He would build out one or two on Elm Street, then another at the other end, then fill in the middle.
“For a long time, I couldn’t get anyone to go down there,” he says. “But I just kept going.”
Restaurants followed, like Deep Ellum Café at 2706 Elm St.
“Man, people loved going there. It wasn’t about the money, it was life,” he says, “and doing things you had fun doing. That was what we did.”
He also helped Tuyet Davis develop her East Wind Vietnamese Restaurant (later Lemongrass).
“She walked into that space, and it was a wreck — trees growing in it. But I said, ‘Wait, it’s not what you see — it’s about what you don’t see.’”
She gave him a design and he built it exactly as she wanted, even going back to Paris to dig up a redbud sapling from the family farm. It’s still out on the patio.
He helped a lot of people get started. Including Frank Campagna, whom he gave a place to live with his kids behind his office on Commerce Street. He gave Jeff Swaney space when he was still doing underground parties.
“It was never about the money,” Don says. “It was about doing something good, about building something that helped people. That’s what I’ve always wanted to do.”
Today, with his son Rich leading the real estate work, Don still feels that way.
“God first. Family second. Everything else comes after that. People say that’s old-fashioned. I don’t care,” he says. “That’s the way I grew up. You love people. You help people. That’s what matters.”
