A wide McKinney Avenue with a heritage streetcar running down the center lane, and the Crescent's parking garage that RoboCop used as OCP's future Detroit headquarters.
What Uptown Dallas looks like
McKinney Avenue is Uptown's spine, a wide street with a single heritage streetcar track running down its center lane. Mid rise apartment and office blocks line both sides, brick and glass fronts with restaurants and sidewalk patios at street level. Storeys run six or seven over most of the strip, climbing past fifteen near the hotel towers toward its southern end.
The M-Line trolley works the length of the avenue on restored cars, among them one built in 1909 in Porto and another built for Dallas in 1926. Its fleet is kept at a two storey brick car barn on Oak Grove Avenue, garage doors and rails running straight into the building.
is a block of retail and apartment buildings at the avenue's north end. The Katy Trail, a paved running and biking corridor, runs along Uptown's western edge close by. follows that same edge farther south, where the mid rise blocks give way to the tollway approach.
Maple Avenue runs south toward the Crescent, a limestone and glass complex of three office towers, a hotel and a retail arcade set around a stone plaza and a below grade parking garage. Its towers step up around a central drive, pale limestone walls under dark mansard roofs on the top floors.
Shot in Uptown Dallas
During final construction in 1986, Orion Pictures used the below grade parking garage under the Crescent's Building 100 for RoboCop. The scene plays out as OCP's own headquarters garage in the film's future Detroit.
RoboCop, 1987
Played OCP's parking garage, Detroit, Michigan, near future
RoboCop is shot down by a squad of police officers here after escaping ED209, in the garage under Building 100 of the Crescent. The garage was used largely as it stood, an underground office car park already reading as a corporate basement. Street View
What Uptown Dallas can double for
South Lake Union in Seattle, Washington
South Lake Union's own streetcar runs down the middle of Westlake Avenue past the same kind of new build mid rise glass and brick blocks, so the two streets share a rare piece of street grammar most cities do not have. Seattle's streetcar cars are modern low floor vehicles rather than restored antiques, so a shot that includes the car itself gives the difference away. Frame tighter on the street and buildings alone. Try searching streetcar down the middle now.
Atlantic Station's mid rise apartments sit over ground floor retail along a walkable grid of streets, brick paving and storefronts at a scale close to McKinney Avenue's own blocks. The mix of brick and glass fronts reads the same in a wide shot. Atlantic Station's blocks are a little wider and the paving reads newer underfoot, so close street level frames work better than a wide establishing shot. Try searching mid rise apartments over retail now.
Legacy West in Plano, Texas
Legacy West's own apartment towers sit over restaurant and retail rows on streets built the same way as McKinney Avenue's, without the parking and service lanes a real Uptown block still has behind it. The two are twenty minutes apart in the same metro, so a wide shot risks a familiar Dallas skyline in the background. Keep the frame close to the block. Try searching apartment towers over retail now.
.jpg)
