NRHP Nomination Form"Originally constructed by architect James Flanders as the State Fair Coliseum, this Spanish Romanesque style building was renamed and remodeled in Art Deco style for the Centennial Exposition. It is to the left or northwest of the Parry Avenue Entrance Gates. It is presently used for maintenance equipment and storage and is now known as the Maintenance Building. During the Exposition, this building housed the Centennial Corporation offices. The Exposition's architectural staff also maintained its office in this building."
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"A large building originally called the Fair Park "Coliseum." This imposing structure was designed by architect James Flanders. In 1910, it was constructed at a cost of $108,000 on land previously used as an outdoor livestock arena and baseball park.
Originally, the building was to be used for horse shows and breeders' exhibits but it became instead an 8,000-seat auditorium. In this capacity it was host over the years to innumerable plays, pageants, speeches, band concerts, and vaudeville revues. In 1915 the Coliseum hosted the Jess Willard Championship Boxing Match.
After the present Music Hall (originally known as the Fair Park Auditorium) was built in 1925, the Coliseum was no longer needed for its original purpose. During the years leading up to the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition, the Coliseum was generally used to host agricultural exhibits during the State Fair.
The building's brick exterior was covered with stucco during the 1935-1936 remodeling of the park, and radically restyled so as to match the "Texanic" Art Deco style of the new structures designed by George Dahl for the Centennial Exposition. It is this "new" exterior, now sixty years old, that visitors to Fair Park see today. Of particular note is the front of the building. Its most outstanding features are a large mural and a statue set into a niche. The statue, some twenty feet tall, is of a beautiful nude young woman standing upon a saguaro cactus (a species, incidentally, which is native to Arizona, not Texas).
In October 2000, the old Coliseum became the Women's Museum after F. & S. Partners renovated both the exterior and the cavernous interior at a cost of about $25 million. Wendy Evans Joseph of New York was the project's design architect. However, although it attracted some 1.5 million visitors in more than a decade of operation, from 2006 onward the museum operated at a ever-increasing loss, until it closed in the late fall of 2011. Currently, the building is unoccupied."