A quick excerpt from a Downtown Dallas Inc big-wig glowing in commentary about Boeing's new business division picking Plano as headquarters:
https://www.dallasnews.com/business/rea ... erang-d-fw"If we were where we are today in 2001 when they came here, there is no question they would choose downtown Dallas," he said. "They only thing people can pick on us today is we don't have any mountains and we don't have any oceans. I'm going to work on that before I retire."
Sentiments like this, pervasive and maudlin within Dallas Booster Clubs, has a cumulative impact on me now days. Head scratching a decade ago, and now it just pisses me off.
The first time I ever encountered one of the Grand Vision for the flood channel was at The DMA. An exhibition featuring giant maps in the vaulted gallery presented a fantastic park with a variety of woods, meadows, trails and fields for all sorts of stuff. No Tollroad, of course, since that component hardly ever was given accurate impact in any of the selling materials.
As time went by, the amenities packages for the Trinity River Park continued to skew more toward Amusement Park than Nature Park.
It's like, as quality and variety of life in the downtown area improved, the biggest booster clubs vision for the park was distracted by the absence of mountains or oceans; self destructive envy turned into misguided overcompensation; egocentric comparisons of our river to their mountains and their oceanfronts triggered environmental engineering projects at the forefront of our capabilities; the urges of status seeking decision makers recklessly decreed an experience zone without peer.
So hear we are, AGAIN, complaining about natural attributes of different places, flailing to compensate with ingenuity and ability yet again never quite making it out of bed to get started. Completely ignoring the most compelling natural attributes of the area, hell-bent on molding something other that what we have, a River.
This is how aversion to a desire evolves into a cumulative impact. Instead of taking a river and working with it's nature to provide the best possible experience, those plans want to override it. Not only is that the wrong way to manipulate nature, it's dangerous and destructive.
I grew up enjoying 'going to the river' in a handful of Texas ecosystems, Great Plains, Coastal Plains and Blackland Prairie/Savannah. That's the experience Dallas needs to provide along the leveed flood plain and into the forest.
The Texas experience - going to the river - doesn't exist in Southern California or Northern Georgia. It's only found in North America where the Great Plains ease into the Gulf of Mexico.
What's so bad about that? Give me a break.
The amusement extravaganza belongs in Fair Park, the tailored topiary belong at The Arboretum. How in the world can The Trinity Trust even think about replicating both experiences between The Signature Bridges. The city is being held back by this lingering variation of social retardation.
The mountains and oceans enjoyed by folks in other places are beautiful on the horizon, and the recreation they provide is famous. To the populations that live within the realm of Mountain or Ocean, they are huge in nature, uninhabited and wild. That's what the park in Dallas lacks: nature. While river like The Trinity is not obvious on the horizon, the sated sunsets are telling.