Rendering of a new vision for Dealey Plaza, with Memorial Promenade and Overlook situated above the Triple Underpass. (Stoss Landscape Urbanism)

Reinventing Dealey Plaza

A new proposal to transform Dealey Plaza, the Triple Underpass and Martyrs Park into a space for memory, reflection and celebration

Rendering of a new vision for Dealey Plaza, with Memorial Promenade and Overlook situated above the Triple Underpass. (Stoss Landscape Urbanism)

By Mark Lamster | Architecture Critic

Published Oct. 20, 2022

The time has come for Dallas to redesign Dealey Plaza and the Triple Underpass, which together represent one of the city’s most profound urban failings.

These spaces define Dallas. They are where the city began, and the site of several of its most tragic moments in history, from the lynchings of the Civil War era to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Today, they are centers of tourism and public gathering, and a principal point of access to downtown.

And yet in their current state, they do not meet their many vital civic obligations. This represents a sad decline from the grand ambitions that characterized their invention.

At the time of their introduction, in 1936, they formed a celebratory and gracious gateway into a city on the rise. But they are now something quite different: perilous to navigate, marked by tawdry vandalism and utterly inadequate to both their historical gravity and to the functional demands of the city.

Dealey Plaza and its downtown environs. (Donald Huff/Staff Artist)
Dealey Plaza and its downtown environs. (Donald Huff/Staff Artist)

It is a deplorable state of affairs, but also a great opportunity; a chance to transform this site into a space of civic memory and understanding that embraces the past and points to the future.

The Dallas Morning News commissioned a team of distinguished designers to present a bold new vision for how this space might be reimagined. That group was led by Chris Reed of Stoss Landscape Urbanism in Boston and Monica Ponce de Leon of MPdL Studio in Princeton, N.J.

The News presents this speculative proposal — a big idea, complete with renderings and architectural drawings — to show how these spaces could be transformed; to suggest what is possible if the city can summon its collective will.

And we'll be reporting on the public response. How might it be implemented? How might it be improved? What would it cost? Next month, The News will host a community event with the proposal’s designers to address these questions, and others. All are welcome.

Editor’s Note: Read about the design team and how this proposal came together.

The reimagining of Dealey Plaza is a speculative proposal developed for The Dallas Morning News by a team of leading designers working pro bono.

That team was led by Chris Reed of Boston-based Stoss Landscape Urbanism and Monica Ponce de Leon of Princeton, N.J.-based MPdL Studio. Lauren Cantrell of Dallas-based Delineator Landscape + Planning + Urban Design provided local support.

The project was initiated by architecture critic Mark Lamster and germinated from a January 2020 column that proposed closing Dealey Plaza and the Triple Underpass to vehicular traffic and the development of a memorial park linking the plaza with Martyrs Park and other sites of memory in the downtown area.

That column sparked a conversation between Lamster and Stoss' Reed about how such a project might be developed. Reed was well-acquainted with the Dealey Plaza area, Stoss having won the 2013 Connected Cities Design Challenge, a competition that seeded design ideas for a park between the Trinity levees. That commission eventually went to Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates of Cambridge, Mass.

Reed invited Ponce de Leon and Cantrell to join the design team.

Work on the proposed design for Dealey Plaza was completed over nine months between 2021 and 2022. During that time, Lamster and the design team consulted with a variety of local stakeholders and authorities, including Dustin Bullard and Scott Goldstein (Downtown Dallas Inc.), Jerry Hawkins (Dallas Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation), George Keaton (Remembering Black Dallas), Nicola Longford (Sixth Floor Museum), Tony Moore and Marcus Shropshire (Trinity Park Conservancy), Krista Nightengale (Better Block Foundation) and Willis Winters (co-author of Dealey Plaza and former director of Dallas Park & Recreation Department).

The Dallas Morning News presents this plan to help visualize what is possible for this space. It is up to the people of Dallas and the city’s leaders to move these ideas forward.

Change is both necessary and inevitable. In the coming years, the path through Dealey Plaza and the Triple Underpass will become the primary conduit between downtown and the $250 million Trinity park.

That route passes two of the city’s most significant spaces of memory: the John F. Kennedy assassination site and Martyrs Park, a neglected bit of green space that will soon be home to a $100,000 memorial to victims of racial violence, designed by the artists Shane Allbritton and Norman Lee.

Tawdry X’s mark the points where bullets hit President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963. (Juan de Dios Figueroa/Staff Photographer)
Tawdry X’s mark the points where bullets hit President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963. (Juan de Dios Figueroa/Staff Photographer)
A car travels along the Elm Street corridor toward the Triple Underpass.  (Juan de Dios Figueroa/Staff Photographer)
A car travels along the Elm Street corridor toward the Triple Underpass.  (Juan de Dios Figueroa/Staff Photographer)
A crossing sign along the path adjacent to Martyrs Park. (Juan de Dios Figueroa/Staff Photographer)
A crossing sign along the path adjacent to Martyrs Park. (Juan de Dios Figueroa/Staff Photographer)
Pedestrians cross Elm Street in front of the Triple Underpass. (Juan de Dios Figueroa/Staff Photographer)
Pedestrians cross Elm Street in front of the Triple Underpass. (Juan de Dios Figueroa/Staff Photographer)

To make this trek now, especially if you are a pedestrian, is an unpleasant, ugly and life-threatening experience. It entails the crossing of highway on- and off-ramps and sprawling intersections with scant protection from traffic or the blistering Texas sun. There is no — zero — accommodation for cyclists.

It should not and does not have to be this way.

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The new vision presented here would:

– Introduce a memorial overlook and promontory linking Dealey Plaza and Martyrs Park.

– Turn Elm Street into a space for pedestrians and create memorial pools marking the points where bullets hit President Kennedy (removing the vulgar white X’s painted by assassination theorists).

– Install a lighting program beneath the Triple Underpass that would reference its history as the original course of the Trinity.

– Transform Houston Street in front of Dealey Plaza with new paving to calm traffic and better accommodate public events.

– Remake Commerce Street as a multi-modal landscaped boulevard leading to the Lew Sterrett Justice Center and Trinity Park, allowing for the accommodation of pedestrians and cyclists in addition to motor vehicles.

“The design creates a new entryway to downtown and more graciously acknowledges these important moments of Dallas history within the experience of the urban fabric,” says Reed, who is also a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

“We are trying to create a new way of thinking about commemoration in America,” says Ponce de Leon, the dean of the school of architecture at Princeton University. “One that is not based on grand gestures, but thinks of public space as providing the context for education.”

In the proposed redesign of Dealey Plaza, the curving path to the Memorial Overlook forms an amphitheater facing Dealey Plaza, a place for gathering, education and reflection. (Stoss Landscape Urbanism)
In the proposed redesign of Dealey Plaza, the curving path to the Memorial Overlook forms an amphitheater facing Dealey Plaza, a place for gathering, education and reflection. (Stoss Landscape Urbanism)

Where Dallas began

The very origins of Dallas can be traced to the area around what is now Dealey Plaza. It was here that, in 1841, John Neely Bryan built a cedar cabin at a ford in the Trinity River, which then flowed through the space now occupied by the Triple Underpass. (A reproduction of that cabin stands in Founder’s Plaza.)

Long before Bryan’s arrival, Native Americans knew the ford as a place to cross the river they called the Arkikosa. Ferry service linked the two sides until 1851, when Alexander Cockerell constructed a wooden bridge extending across the Trinity along Commerce Street. In 1871, his widow, Sarah Cockerell, replaced it with a double-arched iron suspension bridge.

A 1925 photograph of the demolished Commerce Street viaduct over the Trinity, as seen from the roof of the Old Red Courthouse. In the foreground are the tops of buildings razed in 1935 to make way for Dealey Plaza. Visible in lower center is a gargoyle perched on the courthouse roof.
A 1925 photograph of the demolished Commerce Street viaduct over the Trinity, as seen from the roof of the Old Red Courthouse. In the foreground are the tops of buildings razed in 1935 to make way for Dealey Plaza. Visible in lower center is a gargoyle perched on the courthouse roof.

The wooded banks of the Trinity were then, as that same space would be a century later, the site of egregious violence. On July 8, 1860, three enslaved black men, Patrick Jenkins, “Uncle Cato” Miller and Samuel Smith, were lynched in the vicinity of what is now Martyrs Park, wrongly accused of involvement in a rebellion allegedly fomented by abolitionist ministers, who, according to contemporary accounts, were let off with beatings.

The waterfront location rapidly developed into a bustling center of business and industry. A courthouse was constructed in 1850 on Houston Street, and as the city grew it was replaced by successors of increasing scale and grandeur, culminating with the flamboyant 1892 pile known as Old Red.

There were a pair of mills, various wholesalers and retailers, businesses selling farming equipment and a three-story hotel, Crutchfield House, that was the first building in Dallas with glass windows. In 1901, the Southern Rock Island Plow Co. replaced a warehouse that had burned down with a seven-story red brick structure on the northwest corner of Elm and Houston. It changed hands several times before it was leased by the Texas School Book Depository in 1962.

The Triple Underpass under construction in 1935. The elegant moderne design, produced by highway department engineers, echoed the architecture of the contemporaneous Centennial Exposition at Fair Park. An aerial view of Dealey Plaza and downtown Dallas in 1961. In this view, the area behind the turreted Old Red Courthouse has yet to be cleared to make way for Founder’s Plaza and the JFK Memorial.
Left: The Triple Underpass under construction in 1935. The elegant moderne design, produced by highway department engineers, echoed the architecture of the contemporaneous Centennial Exposition at Fair Park. Right: An aerial view of Dealey Plaza and downtown Dallas in 1961. In this view, the area behind the turreted Old Red Courthouse has yet to be cleared to make way for Founder’s Plaza and the JFK Memorial.

The area’s growth continued with scant interruption until the rain-soaked evening of May 25, 1908. In a three-hour span, the Trinity’s crest rose to more than 50 feet, inundating the city, including its nascent downtown. In response, city leaders brought in the distinguished urban planner George Kessler, who was based in Kansas City. A disciple of Frederick Law Olmsted, Kessler had spent much of his youth in Dallas. His proposals included shifting the Trinity to the west, channelizing it between levees, and corralling the tangle of railway lines choking the business district.

A banner <i>Dallas Morning News</i> headline celebrating the opening of the Triple Underpass on May 2, 1936.
A banner Dallas Morning News headline celebrating the opening of the Triple Underpass on May 2, 1936.

Dealey Plaza and the Triple Underpass were the product of Kessler’s ideas, though they were not built for several decades, delayed because their scope seemed too grand. In 1928, the city bond-funded the project, which would take Main, Commerce and Elm streets and cinch them together as they moved west from Houston Street, funneling them through a landscaped park and under a railroad bridge that would route trains to Union Station.

The three-roads-into-one concept followed Kessler’s plan but was conceived by the distinguished architect Otto Lang, a member of the city’s Plan Commission and a partner in the firm Lang & Witchell. Their work in the downtown area already included the Magnolia and Kirby buildings and the Majestic Theatre.

It was Lang’s plan that introduced the gentle slope (about 3 degrees) to the plaza, allowing automotive traffic to slip beneath the train lines crossing the Triple Underpass, that incline forming what was dubbed the “grassy knoll” after the Kennedy assassination.

Demolition of two full city blocks (from Elm to Commerce, west of Houston) to make way for the new plaza and underpass began in September 1934. These were the very first two blocks (numbered 1 and 2) on the city plan Bryan had commissioned in 1846, and were still occupied by some of the city’s most historically significant buildings.

Among them was the 1890 Fire Station No. 5, which had been converted into a Ford dealership. But none of the destroyed structures was more beloved than William Apperson’s New Idea Saloon, notable for its ornate hand-carved woodwork and large mirrors behind the bar. The establishment’s design claim to fame, however, was less its decor than Apperson himself, who sported a carefully maintained beard that ran down to his belt.

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The design of the Triple Underpass was the product of anonymous highway department engineers, but the result was a work of refined moderne style, the same idiom as the buildings of the contemporaneous Centennial Exposition at Fair Park.

The Underpass opened to great fanfare on May 1, 1936, before a crowd of several thousand who had come out for festivities culminating with a square dance competition. Among the speakers that day was Episcopal Bishop Harry T. Moore, whose prayer, asking that “danger and carelessness and death not lurk on this enterprise,” turned out to be an ominous premonition.

The finished design of Dealey Plaza did not come until 1941. Initially left as open park space, it was given a City Beautiful makeover by the landscape architect Herbert Hare, a partner (with his father) in the Kansas City firm Hare & Hare, a frequent collaborator of George Kessler.

Hare produced the Dealey Plaza we know today, with fountains backed by peristyles flanking Houston Street, and curving pergolas behind the knolls along Elm and Commerce. The statue of plaza namesake George Bannerman Dealey, longtime publisher of The News, was added in 1949.

This is largely how the plaza remained until the afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963, when Lee Harvey Oswald pointed his rifle out of a sixth-floor window of the School Book Depository and shot Kennedy as his limousine traveled down Elm Street toward the Triple Underpass.

The view looking north from the corner of Main and Houston streets before and after the construction of Dealey Plaza. In this undated photograph, Dallas Fire Station No. 5, built in 1890, is in the foreground, with the Southern Rock Island Plow Co. building in the distance. In this 1966 photo, the former Souther Rock Island Plow Co. building, occupied by the Texas School Book Depository, appears with a Hertz billboard on its roof, as it did on the day of the Kennedy assassination three years earler.
The view looking north from the corner of Main and Houston streets before and after the construction of Dealey Plaza. In the undated photograph on the left, Dallas Fire Station No. 5, built in 1890, is in the foreground, with the Southern Rock Island Plow Co. building in the distance. In the 1966 photo at right, that building, occupied by the Texas School Book Depository, appears with a Hertz billboard on its roof, as it did on the day of the Kennedy assassination three years earler.

“This is what we have become”

The Hertz billboard that sat atop the Book Depository on that fall day is gone (it was removed in the 1970s), but in most respects Dealey Plaza is very much as it was.

Mortified by the assassination and wishing to shed its reputation as the “City of Hate,” Dallas wanted nothing more than to move on. A memorial, former Mayor R.L. Thornton argued, should be in Washington, D.C., not Dallas. Wishing that history would simply disappear, the city has treated the space with a kind of intentional negligence. The Sixth Floor Museum was not opened until 1989, more than 25 years after the assassination.

The JFK Memorial of 1970, an austere box designed by architect Philip Johnson on a site cleared for urban renewal. On the date it was unveiled, County Judge Lew Sterrett made no mention of Kennedy.
The JFK Memorial of 1970, an austere box designed by architect Philip Johnson on a site cleared for urban renewal. On the date it was unveiled, County Judge Lew Sterrett made no mention of Kennedy.

In 1966, a small marker was placed in Dealey Plaza, but its function was as much informational as memorial, and there was no civic ceremony at its installation. A second plaque was added in 1993, after the plaza and its environs were designated a National Historic Landmark District.

The memorial the city did build, grudgingly, was completed only in 1970, and would not have been completed at all without pressure from the retailer and civic leader Stanley Marcus. Even then, it was placed several blocks away from the assassination site. A drab white concrete box designed by architect Philip Johnson, the memorial has been subject to periodic vandalism and has never captured the public’s imagination.

At its dedication, County Judge Lew Sterrett, the ceremony’s keynote speaker, went out of his way to not mention Kennedy or his assassination, only the urban renewal benefit represented by the clearing of “37 flophouses, beer joints and whisky stores” from the site.

In the intervening years, Dealey Plaza has been a place for occasional demonstrations and politically charged artistic performances. In 1975, the art group Ant Farm staged The Eternal Frame, an unauthorized re-enactment of the Kennedy assassination, complete with a customized convertible Lincoln limousine.

More recently, in 2010, Dallas native Erykah Badu used the plaza as the setting for a music video for the song “Window Seat.” Filmed in cinema verite style, it tracks Badu as she walks through the plaza while progressively disrobing, before apparently being shot and falling to the ground. “This is what we have become,” she intones in voiceover as she lies naked and prostrate on Elm Street, surrounded by gawkers.

By that time, the site had become so degraded that the city feared further embarrassment as the nation turned its eyes to Dealey Plaza for the 50th anniversary of the assassination. A restoration was undertaken timed to that event.

It was only then that the first serious memorial to Kennedy was placed on the site. A steel plate roughly the size of a large door, it was set in the ground above the grassy knoll with an excerpt from the speech Kennedy was to have given at the Dallas Trade Mart.

An aerial view rendering of re-envisioned Dealey Plaza, with Elm closed to vehicular traffic. The curving path to the Memorial Overlook above the Triple Underpass is at right. In the foreground, Houston is repaved to calm traffic and create a more flexible public space. (Stoss Landscape Urbanism)
An aerial view rendering of re-envisioned Dealey Plaza, with Elm closed to vehicular traffic. The curving path to the Memorial Overlook above the Triple Underpass is at right. In the foreground, Houston is repaved to calm traffic and create a more flexible public space. (Stoss Landscape Urbanism)

A new vision

This is the right time to rethink the space stretching from Dealey Plaza to the Trinity, and not just because it is dangerous to pedestrians and cyclists and functionally inadequate, although those are reasons enough.

The call for reinvention rests equally on the promise this space offers at a time when political and racial violence are becoming more pervasive and conspiratorial thinking is rampant.

For more than a century, those themes have defined this area. Even now, Dealey Plaza is routinely occupied by fringe-y assassination theorists and even more fringe-y QAnon adherents convinced that John F. Kennedy Jr. is alive.

It is precisely this history that makes the Dealey Plaza area ideal for reinvention. The plan proposed here would transform this site of national tragedy into a welcoming place of forward-looking civic understanding and reconciliation.

This fits with the theme Kennedy was to have addressed in his speech at the Trade Mart. “We can hope that fewer people will listen to nonsense,” he was to have said, words that remain appropriate, albeit with a new context.

A view of the Memorial Grove looking to the south, with Reunion Tower in the distance. (Stoss Landscape Urbanism)
A view of the Memorial Grove looking to the south, with Reunion Tower in the distance. (Stoss Landscape Urbanism)
Pedestrians walk along the Memorial Overlook as it descends toward Martyrs Park. (Stoss Landscape Urbanism)
Pedestrians walk along the Memorial Overlook as it descends toward Martyrs Park. (Stoss Landscape Urbanism)
The side walls of the path direct views toward Martyrs Park and screen roadways. (Stoss Landscape Urbanism)
The side walls of the path direct views toward Martyrs Park and screen roadways. (Stoss Landscape Urbanism)

The plan would give Dallas a dramatic new destination for visitors, a vital space linking institutions dedicated to history, justice, memory and community. “The intent of the project is not just to create a place for Dallas itself, but also to begin to generate a national conversation,” says Princeton’s Ponce de Leon. “What better place than this site?”

This reinvention would begin with Elm Street, the curving stretch of road where Kennedy was struck by bullets fired from the School Book Depository. That street would be left as is (which is essentially as it was in 1963), to preserve its historical context. But it would be closed to automotive traffic, allowing visitors to safely explore the space.

“The intention is to recognize the sacred importance of what happened here, and not have cars tread over that on a daily basis,” says Reed.

The points of impact, now informally marked by crudely painted X’s, would be appropriately memorialized with small, bubbling pools that would glow in the evenings. Their oval forms would point axially toward the sixth-floor window of the Book Depository, tracing the line of Oswald’s shots.

“The idea is to do this in a way that offers hope as much as remembrance,” says Reed. “You can think about the water here as the shedding of tears, but also as a source of renewal — new life that springs forth from tragedy.”

Closed to traffic, Elm Street would become a site for memory and reflection, with memorial pools marking points where President Kennedy was struck by bullets. Gently undulating illumination in blue and white under the Triple Underpass references the original course of the Trinity River. (Stoss Landscape Urbanism)
Closed to traffic, Elm Street would become a site for memory and reflection, with memorial pools marking points where President Kennedy was struck by bullets. Gently undulating illumination in blue and white under the Triple Underpass references the original course of the Trinity River. (Stoss Landscape Urbanism)

A new lighting program for the spaces beneath the Triple Underpass would illuminate the Depression-era structure while encouraging safe passage through what are now dank, dark tunnels. Soft, undulating blue and white light would recall the Trinity River, which passed through this location before it was rerouted in the 1920s.

“We’re trying to create an allusion to the natural resources that aren’t there anymore,” says Reed. “It would highlight this beautiful structure in a very elegant but simple way and reference the presence of the river that had such a role in the founding of the city.”

While most of the plan’s contributions are alterations to the existing city fabric, there is one dramatic exception: a sweeping elevated promontory that would ramp up from Dealey Plaza, reach out over the Triple Underpass and gradually descend into Martyrs Park on the opposite side of the tracks.

This would achieve the critical goal of uniting Dealey Plaza and Martyrs Park, encouraging exploration, and for the first time making it feel as if they’re part of the same space.

A path forward

The most visually prominent section of this three-armed structure would be a memorial overlook projecting out above the Triple Underpass. Visitors to this point of gathering and reflection would have panoptic views of the city, with Dealey Plaza and the downtown skyline in one direction and the future Trinity park in the other.

A view of the banks of the Trinity in 1893. Courtesy Dallas Municipal Archives. A sectional view of the Memorial Overlook.
Left: A view of the banks of the Trinity in 1893. Courtesy Dallas Municipal Archives. Right: A sectional view of the Memorial Overlook. (Stoss Landscape Urbanism) The rake of the trees and pillars of the Memorial Overlook references those historically angled trees, and suggest the destabilizing events at this location.

The center of the overlook would be occupied by what the designers call a Commemorative Grove, which would provide shade, a link to nature and space for reflection. The trees here would be a blend of cedar elm, native to Texas, and river birch, commonly found in Massachusetts, making a connection between Kennedy’s home state and Dallas.

The trees would be planted at a slight angle, mirroring the incline of the steel columns supporting the deck structure, the aim being to introduce a subtle sense of instability. “There's not a distinction between architecture and landscape in this project,” says Ponce de Leon. “The structure and the trees above the structure, they speak the same language.”

“This is not a place where everything is normal,” says Reed. “We want to acknowledge the activities that went on in this place and not pretend that everything’s OK.” Over time, however, the trees would “self-correct,” naturally re-orienting themselves in an upward direction, a metaphor for the healing this space represents and promotes.

The oval memorial pools seen in section (left) and plan (right). Water would gently bubble up and over LED lights, providing a glowing luminance. (Stoss Landscape Urbanism)
The oval memorial pools seen in section (left) and plan (right). Water would gently bubble up and over LED lights, providing a glowing luminance. (Stoss Landscape Urbanism)

To reach the promontory, visitors coming from downtown would ascend a promenade that hugs but does not impinge on the historically protected Hare & Hare design of Dealey Plaza. The curve of the promenade would create a stepped amphitheater facing the plaza, providing a seating area that does not currently exist, and a space for educational and community events.

This property is now surface parking that is mostly unused due to challenges presented by its awkward and confusing ownership structure, with parts controlled by Dallas County, Dallas Area Rapid Transit and the Union Pacific railroad.

The deck itself would be constructed of a cedar that would weather to gray and be fully ADA accessible, accommodating individual walkers and groups, people with strollers, joggers and cyclists. “We decided that it should be a wooden deck precisely so that it will keep good company with the landscape around it,” says Ponce de Leon.

The deck would wrap up along its sides, creating benches and railings along its edges. High sides would screen adjacent highway intersections and provide moments of visual drama where views to the city are revealed.

“There’s a choreography here,” says Reed, “an attention to detail along the edges that is really about helping to craft that experience and situate people, but also create an experience that's honorific.”

Pedestrians and cyclists enjoying the final descent into Martyrs Park. (Stoss Landscape Urbanism)
Pedestrians and cyclists enjoying the final descent into Martyrs Park. (Stoss Landscape Urbanism)

Bringing a sense of inviting and dignified grandeur to the entry into Martyrs Park is among the principal virtues of this plan. The park, which was dedicated in 1990, is currently accessible from Dealey Plaza only through a forbidding, narrow sidewalk running beneath the Triple Underpass.

The journey from the west is even more menacing, forcing pedestrians to navigate unsignaled freeway ramps and broad, highly trafficked intersections. The homeless regularly use this trash-strewn corridor (and the park itself) as an encampment. (On a recent walk, I came across, of all things, a discarded wig.)

An abandoned wig was found on the Elm Street sidewalk adjacent to Martyrs Park.
An abandoned wig was found on the Elm Street sidewalk adjacent to Martyrs Park.

“Dallas has a problem recognizing and trying to memorialize the unfortunate parts of its history,” says George Keaton, founder of Remembering Black Dallas and an advocate for the memorial artwork to be placed in Martyrs Park.

Jerry Hawkins, executive director of the advocacy group Dallas Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation, describes the impact of the park’s sad state in no uncertain terms: “If Martyrs Park is a reflection of the city’s will to address its past wrongs, then the mirror is broken.”

This is no way to treat such an important part of the city’s history, and the plan presented here would rectify this gross oversight.

From downtown, Martyrs Park could be reached in two equally compelling ways: either via Elm Street through the Triple Underpass, with its glowing new lighting program, or down the curving promenade from the Memorial Overlook, which would deposit visitors to the rear of Martyrs Park’s lush landscape. That path would provide stirring perspectives of the memorial to be placed in the park, as well as the towering line of post oaks that date to the city’s earliest days.

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Access from the west would be improved as well. The corridor linking Dealey Plaza to the Trinity through the Triple Underpass would be remade as a tree-lined boulevard. A central feature of this transformation would be the addition of a path for pedestrians and cyclists along the south side of Commerce Street, infrastructure that will be essential for access to the new Trinity Park from downtown. It would also create a far safer and more appealing route for those traveling to or from the Lew Sterrett Justice Center.

Highway interchanges would be essentially untouched, though their edges and ramps would be lined with forest. “The idea is not to make them go away, but to put them within a softer, greener, lusher context” and introduce biodiversity while reducing heat island effects, Reed says.

To accommodate the closing of Elm to motor vehicles, Main Street would be converted to one directional flow. Commerce Street would be altered to accommodate pedestrian and cycling paths leading from downtown to the Trinity. (Stoss Landscape Urbanism)
To accommodate the closing of Elm to motor vehicles, Main Street would be converted to one directional flow. Commerce Street would be altered to accommodate pedestrian and cycling paths leading from downtown to the Trinity. (Stoss Landscape Urbanism)

At Houston Street, a new striped paving system would front Dealey Plaza, both as a traffic calming device and to distinguish it as a flexible space that might be used for public gatherings. This system might be extended, as well, to create a memorial district encompassing Dealey Plaza, Martyrs Park, the Sixth Floor Museum and the Kennedy memorial in Founder’s Plaza.

Where does the traffic go? To accommodate the afternoon rush hour, Main Street would be converted to one-directional flow, moving from east to west. This would alleviate the notorious bottleneck where Elm and Houston meet, one of the more dangerous intersections of the city.

But “Where does the traffic go?” can no longer be the primary and determinative urban planning question in Dallas. For far too long, Dallas has had its imperatives reversed, and it has suffered the consequences: empty, dangerous streets, disinvestment, infrastructure needs that can never be met.

The question the city must ask is, “How do we make spaces where people want to be?” This plan demonstrates how that can be accomplished.

The view from the promenade leading into Martyrs Park, with the Memorial Overlook above the Triple Underpass at right. Contoured benches provide seating and direct views.  (Stoss Landscape Urbanism)
The view from the promenade leading into Martyrs Park, with the Memorial Overlook above the Triple Underpass at right. Contoured benches provide seating and direct views.  (Stoss Landscape Urbanism)

That reorientation, moving away from our auto-centric past and toward a multi-modal present, is essential as the city looks forward. If the pandemic has shown us anything, it is that we both want and need more pedestrian-oriented public spaces. Downtown is becoming a dynamic residential community, not just a place to commute in and out of.

What would it cost? We do not present a financial plan for this proposal here. The goal is to suggest what is possible, to begin a conversation about what could be. For reference, the recently completed redesign of downtown’s Carpenter Park cost $20.1 million.

Dallas has demonstrated an admirable ability to leverage private resources to build and manage new public spaces. Within the past decade alone, the city has opened Klyde Warren Park, the AT&T Discovery District and four new neighborhood parks under the auspices of Parks for Downtown Dallas. A new community park will soon replace what is now a concrete surface lot at Fair Park. The Southern Gateway Project will place a new deck park over I-35E in Oak Cliff. The planned Trinity Park promises to be among the most transformative urban landscapes in the nation.

Which is to say, Dallas is more than capable of achieving this plan. And the time to do it is now.

Please join us for a community presentation and panel discussion on the plan to reimagine Dealey Plaza and the Triple Underpass at 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 15, at the Sixth Floor Museum.

To RSVP, please visit reimaginedealeyplazaandthetrip.splashthat.com.

Mark Lamster

Mark Lamster, Architecture Critic. Mark Lamster is the architecture critic of The Dallas Morning News and a Loeb Fellow of the Harvard Graduate School of Design. His 2018 biography of the late architect Philip Johnson, "The Man in the Glass House," was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography.

Credits

Stoss Landscape Urbanism

  • Chris Reed, Design Director

  • Mateo Yang, Project Manager

  • Albert Chen

  • Grace Jiranuntarat

  • Gemma Hoult

MPdL Studio

  • Monica Ponce de Leon, principal

  • Kristen Gandy

Delineator

  • Lauren Cantrell, principal

The Dallas Morning News

  • Editor: Christopher Wynn

  • Copy editing: Allison Stewart, Leslie Snyder

  • Interactive design: Sawyer Click

  • Print design: Jeff Meddaugh

  • Map: Donald Huff

  • Photography: Juan de Dios Figueroa

  • Drone photography: Brandon Wade

  • Digital producer: Ashley Slayton

  • Research: Jennifer Brancato

We thank the following individuals for sharing their perspectives and expertise during the design process:

  • Dustin Bullard and Scott Goldstein, Downtown Dallas Inc.

  • Jerry Hawkins, Dallas Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation

  • George Keaton, Remembering Black Dallas

  • Nicola Longford, Sixth Floor Museum

  • Tony Moore and Marcus Shropshire, Trinity Park Conservancy

  • Krista Nightengale, Better Block Foundation

  • Willis Winters, co-author, Dealey Plaza

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