UPDATE 5-28-19 1:25 P.M. DALLAS (WBAP/KLIF) – Authorities continue to work to determine the cause of a fire that gutted the historic Ambassador Hotel.
The hotel’s redeveloper said Tuesday morning he plans to continue with some sort of project in the future. Jim Lake said the plan was to renovate the hotel that opened in 1904, but now those plans will be altered.
“The city has asked us to take it down,” said Lake. “So we’re going to demo the rest of the building. We will move forward with a project but it will be much different.”
The Ambassador was Dallas’ oldest hotel.
DALLAS (WBAP/KLIF News) — Around 100 Dallas firefighters responded to a large fire at the vacant Ambassador Hotel in Downtown Dallas Tuesday morning.
The Dallas Fire Department says it began around 1:30 AM, and that the fire was so strong that the roof collapsed twice. Firefighters have since contained the fire and are likely to continue working on hot spots until noon Tuesday morning.
The Dallas Fire Department said they considered it extinguished by around 5:00 AM, hours after it began and eventually gutted the abandoned building.
Embers from the blaze also blew in the wind to two nearby buildings which also caught fire briefly, but those were also contained.
“The wind was taking a lot of the embers north of the fire, and it actually caused a couple of responses we had to make,” said Jason Evans from Dallas Fire and Rescue. “But thankfully, those fires were very small.”
Evans said one of them did not even require a truck — just a handful of firefighters from the original hotel fire. The other one was extinguished quickly.
The department said a caretaker for the building was in a nearby trailer, but that he escaped harms way. No one was injured.
No word on what caused the fire. The Dallas Fire Department is still investigating.
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