The environmentalists had already organized with a few Dallas businessmen who thought spending a billion-plus dollars on gravel barges was a big waste of money. Their slogans ("Your money, their canal") seemed to resonate with voters, despite a half-million-dollar campaign by the Trinity Improvement Association. In the end, 56 percent of Dallas voters rejected the canal, and a majority of the other counties did, too.
The Trinity Canal dream was dead, although not officially until 1979, when the Carter administration dumped it, but echoes can be heard as late as 1988.
Peter Calvin
TrinityFest organizers hope their July 4th party will let city residents see that there's plenty of room for parks and roads in the Trinity River floodway, seen here from Oak Cliff.
Peter Calvin
Bridges over the Trinity such as the Houston Street Viaduct, top, were built with spans to allow barges to pass underneath, if there were ever barges. There weren't. Most of the time, the Trinity in Dallas doesn't look much like a river, unless it floods, as shown in this 1996 photo below.
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"The dream of a navigable Trinity was part of the plan of reclamation and while it has not come into fruition, the idea has not been abandoned and in the minds of many it still is not only possible but probable." That's a caption from the 60th-anniversary commemorative book by Industrial Properties Corp. But guess what? Old Man Stemmons' heirs were already peddling Plan B.
"That levee is about the only place you can do it."
So said Industrial Properties President Lee Halford (he of the duck-sparing bulldozer) to the Morning News in 1985. The article was about a Stemmons-proposed plan for a tollway on the inside of the Trinity floodplain levees to relieve traffic along Interstate 35. Pretty much the same plan Secret Donor and bevy of developers are demanding today, despite the fact that the Army Corps now admits the road could increase flooding and will certainly have "a negative aesthetic effect," according to a 1999 report.
Look around and you'll see more that should be familiar by now. Environmentalists are suing the Corps over its Trinity plans. Community types, including Mayor Laura Miller, are wondering whether a voter-supported park and lake will ever get into the riverbed. A group of boosters (Trinity Canal? Trinity Improvement? Trinity something...) has called us all down to the water for an infusion of river spirit.
It's not a conspiracy, really. Maybe big money is playing a long game on us, but who can blame them when it's so easy to keep using the same moves? This is, after all, a city that can't even remember that it physically buried the body of water where it got started.
TrinityFest's party on the Houston Street viaduct is laudable anyway, because of something underneath that bridge. It's the strangest and, in its own way, most beautiful spot in this city's graveyard of watery dreams.
You can find it off Industrial Boulevard behind a strip club that actually is called Dreams (though probably for different reasons). Down there, between the road and the levee, the Trinity's original channel re-emerges as a wide runoff ditch.
The viaduct was built after the 1908 flood as a super-bridge that would never wash away. Its concrete arches repeat one after another across the floodplain, except right over the old riverbed, where there's one high span. That was so the tops of barges could make it under there. You know, just in case any showed up: a real bridge that makes way for ghost barges on a ghost river.
But it's not all ghosts. Down where the old riverbed's greenish water enters a culvert under Industrial, I once saw a family of turtles lined up on a slab of concrete. Their four bodies sat motionless in the sun. Cars and trucks rushed by overhead. The smallest turtle dangled its legs in the low water.
It seemed for all the world they'd just wait for the rest of the river to return.
