In May, I wrote about I-30 and its destructive effect in splitting East Dallas and consigning Fair Park to South Dallas. A number of commenters here and in other places said I should add U.S. 175 to the list for how it split and destroyed South Dallas. (Once again, TxDot is our city’s worst enemy, proposing a solution to its earlier disaster that, in keeping with its usual thinking, is no solution at all.)
We’re not the only city that suffered from the crazy highway-building frenzy of the 1960s that turned neighborhoods into slums. Here’s a blog post from Timothy Lee on “Freeways and the Decline of St. Louis.”
11 comments
too many DOTs (formerly highway depts) learned their highway planning at the feet of Robert Moses
(A) With the technology of the time, what in the world were highway planners supposed to do?
(B) I-30 is the worst highway in America — holes, bad pavement, etc. The waves of earth and asphalt seem to simulate a bad sea… You need dramamine to drive on the thing. And that’s just from downtown to LBJ. East of LJB, it’s the shame of the system — well, except for I-35 which rides like it was built as a farm-to-market road in a corrupt county.
Interesting blog post, particularly as a native to the St. Louis area. Dallas does not quite have the same level of river-crossing volume highway concerns, and I don’t think that anyone there would dream of building a road in their critical levee resources.
Am I the only one that thinks that our new bridge arch makes Dallas look a St. Louis wannabe?
Notable thoughtfulness in the quality of comments to the original STL blog post, even in the dissenting voices.
Most entertaining comment: Dallas and Houston have their Applebees kind of prosperity but who really want to live there?
At least it’s a perspective that doesn’t lean on big hair and cowboys. Now I’m jonesing Imo’s and Ted Drewes.
AGREED. But go see what TxDOT has in store for I-30. Billions of bucks of concrete-growth.
Great articles (yours and Lee’s), and I hope you stay on this subject. Speaking of highways, have you retracted your support for building the Trinity Tollway? What is your stance these days?
My stance is that the Trinity Tollway will never be built. NTTA does not have the money, nor does TxDot. It has become a moot point. The city should abandon the idea. We should proceed with the Trinity project without it. That will cost, by my estimate (which is admittedly rough) an additional $60 million to remove sludge and dirt from the Trinity that was to be used to build the highway. Even in our current financial straits, I think the voters would approve a bond item for the amount IF they saw true progress in construction on the rest of the project.
Missing here are a couple of larger points to support the impact of highway/freeway(s) & the mindset(s) that follow. Like many things,… and everything in Dallas real estate, it seems, …it’s all perception passing as fact.
For starters: I grew up off Henderson Avenue in the ’50s, in what is now the hottest strip between Old Monk & Neighborhood Services Tavern. At that time, the ‘new’ Central Expressway, I-75, was only a few years old built circa ‘47ish. So the entire time I grew up, Henderson had a stigma…it had become ‘the wrong side of Central’ while Knox was ‘Park Cities adjacent/proximity…the ‘good side’. After Central, my neighborhood Cochran Heights became called ‘East Dallas, when if fact, before Central, ‘East Dallas’ was east of Ross Avenue. (Not to be confused with opportunist magic acts of realtor levitation as when Reverchon Park was suddenly moved to ‘Uptown’ when it was always the park of Oak Lawn.)
FYI: That ‘wrong’ & ‘right’ side of Central mentality essentially persisted until Central was widened and lowered so that it lies below eye level instead of rudely blocking the ‘other side’.
Much as the same mental split Wick alludes to here…concerning fair Park…happened in the Dolphin Heights area immediately south of Samuel Tennyson Park. Dolphin Heights had always been part of East Dallas but suddenly cut away & classified as part of ‘South Dallas’ after I-30 amputated it from East Dallas a la Fair Park. Further, this too helps explain why south of I-30…. & farther east of Fair Park until Mesquite, Tx….became inevitably & erroneously referred to as the ‘Pleasant Grove’ area of Dallas when PG’s north border has always been south of Bruton Road, 3 miles south of I-30. Between I-30 & PG are many areas with separate histories, annexed as independent municipalities or private land, with individual names. All suddenly called ‘Pleasant Grove’ collectively because of an artificial ‘border’ created by an invasive preeminent thoroughfare. Much of what is robotically called ‘Pleasant Grove’ was mentally part of Northeast Dallas prior to I-30, no less than Casa Linda, Casa View.
Bottom line: Because of the perceived gerrymandering that follows in life after a freeway is built,: It became convenient to tell me when I was growing up that my area has somehow been moved to East Dallas just as it is common now to tell me that I have lived for decades in Pleasant Grove when my home was built on private ranch land that was ultimately sold to & annexed to Dallas years after PG.
Now this time, even Rawlins has it wrong. The neighborhood just south of I-30 at Dolphin is Owenwood, not Dolphin Heights, but yes we were part of the original East Dallas. But I agree with the rest of what he said and have attend those TX-Dot meetings on 1-30 — 14 lanes with 3 service lanes on each side. So 20 lanes — imagine what kind of barrier that will create. And at every one of those meetings I kept reminding them that so long as they keep asking the wrong question, they will get the wrong answer. So long as you ask, “How do I move cars”, the only answer is build, build, build. If you ask the question, “How do we move people,” you get a different answer. I can only hope that with declining dollars to be spent, this monstrosity will never get built.
And my flame shot — is let those people from Mesquite and East sit in traffic since they don’t want to participate in mass transit.
Oops, Lorlee, knowing that Dolphin Heights is south of Owenwood, your neighborhood, on the other side of Military, I was thinking too fast because a side bar point was exactly that; that the area became lumped together, as South Dallas…and in the case of adjacent-to-Dolphin Heights, Parkdale & Urbandale…going east…lumped into ‘Pleasant Grove’ a couple of miles south.
PS gerrymander Update(s): Love how Dallas media now routinely labels the ‘M’ streets as being in ‘Lakewood’. Even when they are adjacent to Central. So now I grew up in Lakewood?
@Wick
I also think the tollway will ultimately not be built, but clearly some of our civic leaders are interested in keeping the door open, which I understand.
What is your stance on purpose, viability and impact of the tollway? As I understand it, the tollway is supposed to relieve traffic from downtown. Is this a duplication of the purpose of Project Pegasus? Would another freeway create another divide between downtown and Southern Dallas?