"Three visits to the Dallas Public Library surprised me, pleasantly. Young Street—the whole strip between the Library and City Hall—is not a thing of beauty. At best it’s a serviceable, charmless thoroughfare. On hot sunny summer days, it has something of the effect of an eerie De Chirico painting: even with people present, you feel that the vast expanse of concrete dehumanizes pedestrians.
Once inside, the scene changes."
Willard Spiegelman, 2009, for D Magazine
https://www.dmagazine.com/publications/ ... c-library/Would be pretty visionary, you know, to go over here near East Quarter and build a new public library and city hall along the west side of Central Avenue. That's the restored north-south cross-street of Elm, Main, and Commerce -- Blind Lemon Jefferson, the best selling country bluesman of his generation, "got his start singing at the intersection of Elm Street and Central Avenue, where crowds would gather to hear him. Those crossroads today are under I-345, the elevated highway that was built through the center of Deep Ellum in the 1970s. That erasure offers one explanation for Dallas’ forgotten sense of its own role in the history of American music—a lack of care that has eroded many of the connections between this city and its past."
Peter Simek, 2019, for D Magazine
https://www.dmagazine.com/publications/ ... s-history/In fact, I've looked at the roll plots of the hybrid I-345 replacement option. I think if the DOT could eliminate exit ramps and onramps between I-30 and Live Oak, or even just between Canton and Live Oak, then the civic space with better city hall and library could become a cost-effective reality. That's because most of our New 345 Express mainlanes for this segment could be built offsite in precast concrete modules with integrated stormwater channels, then rapidly laid like an at-grade causeway within the right-of-way currently being used up just for frontage roads and access ramps.
Most of the big pillars upholding 345's current mainlanes could remain intact, actually, and help support the civic boulevard deck level that would be Central Avenue.