A runner crosses the Rosemont Bridge as the sun rises over downtown in Buffalo Bayou Park in Houston.

A runner crosses the Rosemont Bridge as the sun rises over downtown in Buffalo Bayou Park in Houston.

What Dallas can learn from Houston’s Buffalo Bayou for the Trinity River project

    How do you transform the flood plain of a neglected urban waterway into a grand public park and metropolitan gateway?

    Dallas has been struggling with this challenge for more than 20 years, making incremental progress on the Trinity River corridor while debating whether to burden it with a toll road. Houston, meanwhile, has spent that same time successfully remaking a 10-mile stretch of the Buffalo Bayou, the sinuous river that runs through the heart of that city and down to Galveston Bay, into precisely the kind of urban amenity Dallasites have long imagined for themselves.

    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.

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    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.

    The explanation begins with accountability.

    In Houston, authority has been centralized in a single organization, the Buffalo Bayou Partnership, rather than the morass of private, city, regional, state and federal entities with their hands in the Trinity. It has also stuck to its 2002 master plan, “Buffalo Bayou and Beyond,” a 20-page visionary document produced under the direction of the distinguished urban planner Jane Thompson of Cambridge, Mass. Beginning with the premise that “nature is an integrated part of a new urban vitality,” it promised to create a more competitive city with higher property values, to spur public transit development, increase tourist revenue and, above all, provide residents with a better quality of life.

    That plan called for the division of the bayou into three sectors: an urban waterfront for downtown, a zone of parks and trails for underserved neighborhoods to the west and a reclamation and celebration of abandoned industrial infrastructure to the east. For a total public outlay of $800 million over 20 years, it projected $56 billion in private investment in the bayou district.

    “It’s really important to have this overall vision and then just keep after it,” says Anne Olson, president of the partnership. It has been able to do that due to the philanthropy and foresight of Nancy Kinder, whose family foundation donated $30 million in 2010. That gift inspired others and came with the condition that there be a continuing source of funding for annual maintenance, which runs to $2 million. (It is paid by the city through tax increment financing.) It was also agreed that the partnership retain full operational control over the project.

    A walk along Buffalo Bayou

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    Reclaiming history

    The rehabilitation entails the recovery not just of a river and its flood plain, but of the city’s origin story. It was along the bayou’s silty banks that the brothers J.K. and A.C. Allen, real-estate speculators from New York, founded the city in 1836, with the river serving as its commercial gateway. “Buffalo Bayou is the reason Houston exists,” says Guy Hagstette, Buffalo Bayou project manager. “It’s a fundamental part of Houston’s history, but it’s also been an embarrassment.”

    The city actually acquired much of the bayou flood plain, some 300 acres, in the early years of the 20th century, following a series of studies that called for its transformation into parkland. Among those who contributed to this vision was George Kessler, the Kansas City, Mo., urban planner who in those same years brought City Beautiful principles to Dallas.

    Flooding in the 1920s and ’30s precluded the transformation of the bayou into the grand park those planners imagined, and for decades it festered as an industrial dumping ground prone to inundation. Meanwhile, road builders encroached on the space that had been designated for recreation, squeezing it between the Allen Parkway, Memorial Drive and the spaghetti interchanges of downtown Houston.

    “The reputation of the bayou in the ’70s was horrific,” says Hagstette, who is considered something of a civic treasure within Houston planning circles. “It was basically an open sewer.”

    The Buffalo Bayou Partnership was founded in 1986, following campaigns for rehabilitation that had brought renewed attention and piecemeal improvements. Among its first achievements was Sesquicentennial Park, a 4-acre stretch along the bayou unveiled in 1988 to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Republic of Texas.

    Momentum continued with the 1996 revitalization of Allen’s Landing, a waterfront park where the Allen brothers had first laid their claim. Among those responsible for that project was a local landscape architect and parks advocate, Kevin Shanley. When it came time to begin the master planning of Buffalo Bayou Park, in 2010, the partnership again engaged Shanley and his firm, SWA Group.

    A first order of business was to repair the bayou itself, which had been straightened and channelized in the 1950s. In the intervening years, silt had considerably reduced its capacity to carry water and retain floodwater. With the cooperation of the local flood control district, much of that silt was removed, and some of the bayou’s natural oxbows restored, putting it back on a sinuous path. At the same time, the banks were cleared of invasive species and replanted with native trees — bald cypress, sycamore and green ash — providing both structural reinforcement and habitats for fish and other wildlife.

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    Discrete ecologies

    Shanley’s design separated the bayou flood plain into distinct ecologies; finished lawns for public gatherings; low-mow areas with native grasses; no-mow savannahs with tree canopy; and wild areas left rough and tumble, traversed only by occasional pathways.

    He also designed a series of winding bridges that crossed the bayou and the adjacent roadways, to provide better access to the park. The pony-truss spans, which curve in multiple dimensions, proved a bit too challenging for conventional bridge builders, but here Houston’s petroleum services industry proved useful: The contract went to a manufacturer of offshore oil rigs. The rolled-steel pieces were assembled on site to ensure proper alignment and then returned to a factory for galvanization in molten zinc.

    “There was all kinds of fabrication artistry that gives you a real respect for the guys that make these things,” says Shanley.

    Supplementing SWA’s landscapes and bridges are four gardens — “special moments,” according to Hagstette — designed by the Massachusetts-based landscape architects Reed-Hilderbrand, who also consulted on the overall landscape plan of the park.

    The partnership also commissioned architect Larry Speck, a principal with the firm Page and a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, to design a series of pavilions and recreational buildings. “We wanted the whole park to have a theme that ran through it, and the pavilions are that one thing we could do that would tie it together,” says Speck. “They weren’t meant to be objects so much as fabric, so you would know you were in Buffalo Bayou because you would see them.”

    To achieve this, Speck devised a common visual language of heavy concrete walls and broad canopies that feather out, creating an area of penumbra between interior and exterior. The design was driven by the concept “thermal mass,” Speck’s idea that “when you’re near a cool surface you feel cooler. ... We wanted these big, thick concrete volumes that were in the shade, and would therefore feel cool, and be cool anytime you touch them.”

    Taken together, the structures suggest a modernist interpretation of the architecture of the Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps, which built works in harmony with the landscape in the nation’s parks.

    The sense of unity in the park is reinforced by blue-tinged lighting in the evening, designed by the artist Stephen Korns with the design firm L’Observatoire, that waxes and wanes in brightness with the phases of the moon.

    Speck is also responsible for the rehabilitation of the Cistern, a cavernous subterranean holding pool for collected well water built in 1927. Within its tomblike space are more than 200 enormous steel columns. “It’s got a rawness and a real elemental quality to it,” says Speck. “It’s downright Egyptian in scale.” It had been scheduled for demolition, but instead Speck is converting it into a space for special events and exhibitions, with an open-air performance space, boasting postcard views of downtown, on its roof.

    The Cistern, a cavernous subterranean holding pool in Buffalo Bayou Park

    The Cistern, a cavernous subterranean holding pool for collected well water, was built in 1927.

    Another historic property along the Bayou at Allen’s Landing, the 1910 Sunset Coffee Building, is being restored and renovated by the San Antonio architects Lake-Flato. Coffee roasting, now the purview of the urban hipster class, in fact has a century-old tradition in downtown Houston, one that will be celebrated in a conversion that will put a paddle-boat station on the water, with a roof terrace, dining facilities and the partnership’s offices. It will open this spring.

    Dealing with traffic

    In planning circles, the bayou project has received considerable attention for its achievement in knitting park space through the challenging automotive infrastructure of Houston. But to see this as an endorsement of the idea that a high-speed roadway, never mind a limited access toll road, might somehow be compatible with an urban park is to completely misunderstand this project. Those responsible for the bayou are universal in their belief that such an undertaking would be counterproductive.

    “We did that in the ’50s,” Hagstette says of the road building adjacent to the bayou. “We’re trying to undo some of that stuff now. One of the big challenges of this park is access, because highways cut it off from the city.” Indeed, getting to the bayou can be difficult, and the partnership is working with the city to remediate that problem by taking back lanes and adding traffic signals to the adjacent freeways that hem it in.

    Dallas would do well to learn from the experience of its neighbor, as it has in the past. Klyde Warren Park took some of its cues from Houston’s Discovery Green, a highly programmed downtown park that was also orchestrated by Hagstette.

    Whether it is a case of misplaced sibling rivalry or just plain negligence, there is no sign that this is happening now. Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings’ dream team task force for the Trinity toll road includes experts from Cambridge, San Francisco and Vancouver, but not Houston or San Antonio, which has also leveraged its river into a major urban amenity in recent years. Administrators at the Buffalo Bayou Partnership can’t even recall the last time they were contacted by anyone at either the Trinity Trust or the Trinity Commons Foundation, the two entities that are theoretically guiding the development process.

    Instead, Dallas has allowed ad hoc-ism to reign. Who, exactly, is in charge of the Trinity Corridor project? There is no ready answer. What are the results? While the Trinity River Audubon Center is a civic jewel, this process has also produced a pedestrian bridge that leads to a no-man’s land on its downtown side; a whitewater rapids that doesn’t work properly; a horse park that provides no value to the vast majority of Dallasites; and plans for lakes and fields and trails that languish as the city mulls an ill-conceived toll road that would cut those amenities off from the very citizens they are intended to serve.

    In Houston, they have a park.

    A woman reads a book in a dog park in Buffalo Bayou Park

    A view across the Bank of America Center downtown shows a curve in the bayou around the Houston Police Officers’ Memorial in Buffalo Bayou Park.

    Mark Lamster is a professor at the UT-Arlington School of Architecture

    Video: Brian Elledge

    Designer: Troy Oxford

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