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TexasTowelie

(111,303 posts)
Fri Oct 13, 2017, 10:27 PM Oct 2017

Harvey Offers Stark Warning: Dallas Should Build a Trinity River Preserve, Not Park

In the lead-up to the unveiling of the grand plans for a future Trinity River Floodway designed by renowned landscape architect Michael van Valkenburgh, the project’s designers and backers weren’t shy about their inspirations. They traveled around the country, looked at examples around the world, and found that a great model for how to turn a muddy Texas river prone to flooding into a grand urban park lay only a few hundred miles south of Dallas.

Houston’s Buffalo Bayou is the most obvious model for the current iteration of a 285-acre park with a $250 million price tag currently planned for a strip of floodway between the downtown bridges. Leading up to the unveiling of the van Valkenburgh plan, the Dallas Morning News’ architecture critic Mark Lamster practically gushed over what Houston accomplished in its floodway:

The centerpiece of that project, the $58-million, 160-acre Buffalo Bayou Park, will be completed over the summer, bringing a wonderland of verdant landscapes, scenic bridges, bike and pedestrian trails, restaurants and cafes, watersport facilities, a skate park and performance and art spaces to Houston’s downtown.

If it seems like a bit of nirvana, that’s because it is. Dallasites may rightly wonder how their neighbor to the south has managed to achieve so much, so quickly, while plans in their own city have stagnated.


Oh, what a difference a trillion gallons of rain makes. In an article in Houston Press last month, Diana Wray takes stock of what happens to a “wonderland of verdant landscapes” when the harsh reality of Texas’ temperamental torrents – super-sized by climate change — come down hard. The photos look much like the Trinity does after a episode of flooding: massive deposits of silt, debris, trash, and sewage. The parts of the park that echo the natural ecology of the Texas landscape have fared okay, but any designed, architectural, or park-like features have been devastated:

Buffalo Bayou rose to a record 38.7 feet at the Shepherd Drive bridge during the course of the hurricane, and while the upper portions of the park weathered the storm and the subsequent torrent of water that rushed down the bayou, with little damage to the perennial gardens, upper-level trees and trails on the higher portions of the park, water swallowed the bottom two-thirds of the park. That has made it difficult for the Buffalo Bayou Partnership, the entity that oversees Eleanor Tinsley and the rest of the 160-acre Buffalo Bayou Park system below Shepherd Drive, to actually assess the damage that has been done, let alone to start making repairs. Johnny Steele Dog Park, wiped out in every major flood in the past two years, is still underwater post-Harvey and an odor, a mix of brackish water and a heavier stench of manure, permeates much of the area near the bayou banks throughout the park.


Read more: https://www.dmagazine.com/frontburner/2017/10/harvey-offers-stark-warning-dallas-should-build-a-trinity-preserve-not-park/
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