The stars had to align for a massive project like Park District to become a reality, says Scott Krikorian, senior managing director of Trammell Crow Co.’s Dallas-Fort Worth business unit. “It makes me sit back and think about how blessed we really are,” he says, “to have this incredible site, to have the economy we’re in today, to be in the city of Dallas, to have a great capital partner (MetLife), and PwC as an anchor tenant. This doesn’t happen everywhere.”

Krikorian made the remarks at a Friday at an event to mark the groundbreaking of Park District and its anchor lease to PwC. About 800 business and civic leaders, real estate execs, and PwC employees streamed onto Klyde Warren Park to mark the occasion.

The twin-tower mixed-use Park District will add more than 900,000 square feet of office, residential, restaurant, and retail space in Uptown, along Klyde Warren Park between Pearl and Olive streets. Designed by HKS and built by Balfour Beatty, the project is targeting a late 2017 completion.

(Scroll down to see new renderings, plus photos from Friday’s event.)

With its 200,000-square-foot lease, the anchor tenant will get signage on the top of the north and south sides of the office building, which will be named PwC Tower at Park District. The firm is marking its 70th year in Dallas in 2016, and Scott Moore, North Texas managing partner, said he could “not think of a more meaningful way to celebrate and commemorate this anniversary than by announcing our continued investment in Dallas. It’s a real privilege to call it home, and to be part of the tremendous energy around Klyde Warren Park,” he said.

The firm’s new office will house its assurance, tax, and advisory lines. It’s especially designed to appeal to millennials at PwC, where the median employee age is 27.

At the event, Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings took the stage and talked about studying successful cities before taking office. He learned that great cities have two common things: young people and smart people. “Unfortunately, I’m neither,” he quipped, “but we need to have both and PwC is making sure that happens.”

The 20-story PwC Tower at Park District will include about 500,000 square feet of Class A office space and 7,000 square feet of ground-level retail. PwC will occupy floors 12-19. Dennis Barnes, Celeste Fowden, and Clay Gilbert with CBRE represented Trammell Crow and MetLife in the lease.

PwC is interested in “supercharging” its investment in Dallas,” said Tom Codd, vice chairman and US human capital leader. (The former managing partner of the firm’s Dallas office also is the incoming chairman of the Dallas Regional Chamber.) “We’ve always seen the potential of Texas, in general, and North Texas and Dallas in particular,” Codd said. “When I became managing partner of Dallas in January of 2009, we had 59 partners here. Today we have about 135. Our total headcount has gone from approximately 1,000 to 2,000. We’ve grown tremendously here.”

A number of things came into play in PwC’s selection of Park District, said CBRE’s Phil Puckett, who represented the firm in its search. “PwC was very focused on the Uptown demographics and having a live-work-play environment in order to attract the millennial workforce,” he said. Identity also was critical. PwC was the last of the Big 4 accounting firms to have top-of-building branding; its deal also gives them naming rights. Klyde Warren Park was a huge draw, as were the amenities surrounding Park District. Finally, Puckett said, the Park District tower offered efficiency, with floor plates of about 28,000 square feet, along with abundant parking.

Park District’s residential tower is being developed by High Street Residential, a Trammell Crow Co. affiliate, led locally by Joel Behrens. The 33-story highrise will feature 253 luxury units and 13,000 square feet of retail space fronting Klyde Warren Park. The retail space will have 20-foot, floor-to-floor glass on two levels. The two buildings will be connected by a plaza that’s being designed by The Office of James Burnett, the landscape architecture firm behind Klyde Warren Park.

Project renderings provided by Trammell Crow Co. Event photos by Lara Bierner.