The Trinity River Project

The Bridge

The opening of the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge in Dallas has been a major event this month.  The bridge is a work of art, designed by famous architect Santiago Calatrava, and spans from downtown Dallas into West Dallas, an extremely low-income and under-served neighborhood.  West Dallas was historically a neglected andabused region of Dallas, where minorities were relegated to frequent flooding and no public utilities.  Dallas has frequently been accused of having a highway system that cordons off low-income neighborhoods and bypasses unsightly areas of town, but this new bridge marks a change.  I drove down to the area on Tuesday morning to check it out.

The new bridge and the old one

The west side of downtown is a more industrial district, marked with courthouses, jails, and bail bond shops.  However, with the bridge not yet open to the public, I couldn’t find a safe place to park where numerous police cars wouldn’t take undue notice of me.  I crossed the Commerce street bridge over to West Dallas and located a “scenic overlook” spot that might have been scenic only in an alternate reality.  It looks out over the Trinity River, which is really more of an unsightly flood plain designed when levees were finally built to keep West Dallas from flooding.  This side of the river had significantly less traffic and visibility, so I parked my car and decided to walk down an embankment into the flood plain.  There was nothing but mud to discourage me, so I took about a half-mile walk through the plain to the bridge and got a chance to observe it up close.  Returning to my car, I took the long way back, taking a brief tour of an area of Dallas I have almost never been to.  It was striking to see how, right next to the business hub of Dallas, trailer parks and derelict houses that looked like they could have been photo-shopped in from a post-Katrina picture of New Orleans were the norm and small businesses provided scant groceries for the neighborhoods.  Crossing the Trinity River again at a different point, I saw a soccer field that looked like it was a broken ankle waiting to happen.  It is a far cry from the massive Trinity River renovation project that Dallas had been planning since 1959.

The Trinity River under the bridge

The proximity of striking poverty to downtown Dallas is an amazing sight to see.  All over Dallas, the distance between fabulous wealth and dire poverty is small, but this one is significant because the line is a river, a long-standing symbol of division in Dallas.  It is very encouraging to see the city making a major investment in the vicinity of West Dallas – for a long time all the investment has been north.  But as I was walking around the bridge, I realized that the bridge itself is not going to change West Dallas.  The bridge itself is actually a pretty minor roadway – it’s not a route that a lot of traffic will be taking.  If anything, the majority of the traffic will be West Dallas residents leaving the area to head north and east.  While this is significant in its own way, the reality is that development that spreads into West Dallas because of the bridge would likely be more gentrification, where low-income people are displaced by an influx of wealthier people.  This has long been a problem in urban areas.  What I realized while walking around the bridge was that the greatest opportunity for development in the area was the ground I was walking on.

The Continental Street bridge

The space between the levees is ugly and useless land. The river itself is small most of the time: the divider is actually the floodplain. While Dallas has long been talking about revitalizing the floodplain and developing something like a modern Riverwalk, funding for this has been consistently hard to come by and possibly even misappropriated. Perhaps the most encouraging thing about this bridge is that it is the first major success of the Trinity River restoration. If the Trinity River corridor could be renovated in the way that the master plan describes, it would be a world-class attraction that would put Dallas on the map and, the supporters argue, strongly build the city’s case for things like the Olympics and Super Bowls. It would also, I realized today, turn the dividing line between downtown and West Dallas into an attractive area that would be useful by people from both sides of the river, providing an opportunity for cultures to mingle and benefit from each other. The soccer fields and recreational facilities would be quickly accessible by low-income high-community people living in West Dallas, while entertainment and retail establishments would be desirable to high-income people living in Downtown and Uptown. Most city renovation projects “reclaim” land “spoiled” by low-income slums, but this one could develop currently wasted land into something beneficial to all. This bridge is a centerpiece of the end product. If the city of Dallas continues to put a priority on this project, the final corridor – to stretch from south Dallas almost all the way up to LBJ Freeway – would herald a new day for Dallas and its residents.

Future beautiful view?

I really enjoyed the opportunity to check out this part of Dallas that I rarely experience.  It reminded me that the work of development  in urban areas requires work from multiple angles.  The low-budget community development organizations working to rehabilitate individual families are essential for the task, but the government investing millions into large-scale renovations are also essential.  This experience encourages me to be a voice for the Trinity River project when I have the opportunity, because this project, if Dallas residents get behind it, could make a big difference in the city.  Key to this goal, however, is collaboration on both sides of the river.  Both communities have to be willing to participate and come to enjoy the end product.  Both communities also have to be open to experiencing the other side’s culture as exposed by the end product.  As I wiped the mud off my shoes near the Commerce street bridge, I knew that I wouldn’t be entirely wiping away the memory of walking through a space that someday may be a beautiful place where different communities come to meet.