99% Invisible - 133- Port of Dallas

Episode Date: September 24, 2014

There’s a photograph we have tacked to our studio at 99% Invisible HQ. The photo, taken 1899, shows three men, all looking very fashionable, suspended mid-air on the lifted arm of a giant dredging machine. There are plenty of images … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. There's this photograph tacked on the wall here in the studio. It was taken in 1899. The photo shows three men all wearing bowler hats, two of them in bow ties. They're looking dead on into the camera with this casual look of conquest. Knees raised, hands-on hips, suspended suspended midair on the lifted arm of a giant dredgy machine, a machine used to force the natural environment to bend to the will of humans. Even if you don't know this image in particular, you've seen images like it, scenes of people standing around proudly looking good as they shape the earth.

What fascinates me about the pictures from this time is that they speak to this moment when there was a real sense of awe and reverence for the marvels of civil engineering. Now I don't mean to over-emanticize this stuff. A lot of things we did for the sake of progress were ethically dubious if not outright horrible. There were mountains tunneled, hills flattened, swamped, strained. But the environmental impact not was standing. These feats of engineering weren't just amazing for their time, they're amazing for our time. The photo I'm talking about, the three guys in Bollard hats on the judging machine, is a scene from the reversal of the Chicago River. And the reason that photo is famous,

or at least famous enough for me to have seen it, is because the reversal of the Chicago River. And the reason that photo is famous, or at least famous enough for me to have seen it, is because the reversal of the Chicago River was an enormous engineering project that was successful. But you've got to figure, there were countless other photographs depicting similarly awe-inspiring feats of engineering prowess that we have never seen, because those feats never got finished. They were, you could say, failures. Today we have the story of one such failure which, before people finally gave up on it, probably also once included a moment of men posing on machinery. So actually I do have a photo we can start from, dated to 1892. Reporter Julia Barton grew up in Dallas, Texas, where our story takes place.

These men, a few of them in Boulder hats, are standing on a wide flat boat with a winch on top of it. A chain and a hook dangle down from the winch and they're hauling up a tree stump. The boats in a narrow muddy river, and it's surrounded by huge piles of broken up trees and other debris floating in the water. The boats name, Snagboat Dallas of Dallas. Oh man, I love that name. Growing up in Dallas,

I never saw pictures of things like the Snagboat Dallas of Dallas. I never heard of the failed project that generations of Dallas people spent their lives pursuing. Even though it concerns an engineering project so massive that it was once compared to both the Panama Canal and the great pyramids of Giza. This is the story of the port of Dallas. If you know anything about Texas Geography, you probably at least know that Dallas is not

close to the ocean. At all, it's more than 300 miles to the Gulf of Mexico. That's like trying to build a port to the Pacific Ocean in Reno, Nevada, or a port to the Atlantic in eastern Tennessee. But unlike Reno or eastern Tennessee, Dallas is at least located on a river that flows to the ocean, the Trinity. In Dallas though, the Trinity is really low and very narrow. So narrow that there are stories of Dallas's first fairyboat on the Trinity turning itself sideways to act as a bridge from time to time. So the Trinity was not a great way to move

people or farm crops to the sea. But neither was the alternative. In the early days of Dallas in the 1840s and 1850s, if your goods weren't getting moved on a boat, they were in the back of a wagon getting pulled by a team of oxen. Railroads came to Dallas in 1872, but railroad companies could and did raise their rates whenever they felt like it. Dallas leaders wanted river navigation to keep access to the outside world affordable. But in addition to being low and narrow, the Trinity River is incredibly long and winding. So even though Dallas is about 300 miles to the ocean as the crow flies, with all the

Trinity's meandering, it's closer to 700 miles of river. The few boats that made it to Dallas from the Gulf took nearly a year doing it. One of them was the aforementioned Snag boat Dallas of Dallas, which cleared debris called snags out of the water to make the river navigable to steam ships. One of the first of those was the steam boat HA Harvey Jr. When the HA Harvey Jr. finally made it to Dallas in 1893, the city went nuts. There was a massive parade, the local paper printed its front page in red ink. It was a huge day and they declared Dallas had become a port city as a result of that. Even the city directories, like the 191 city directories,

it describes Dallas as a port city. That's Dallas historian Darwin Payne. And the dynamic he's describing here in the city directory is very important when it comes to Dallas. There's the actual version of events, and then there's this grossly optimistic version. And as I was researching this story, this kind of boostery salesman voice kept coming at me

in different forms, telling me that something that was absolutely untrue? Absolutely was true. We had Dallas-born actor William Jackson Harper voice various clippings from the written record of the 130-year-old history of the Trinity Project. Here he is as the Dallas Times Herald in 1893 in Sistine. The navigation of the Trinity is not a possibility it is an accomplished fact. Yeah, the H.A. Harvey made it, but that's just one boat. For more boats to follow, the river would have to become easier to navigate.

And remember, this is the era of getting s**t done. We gotta move the river? Fine, let's move the river. Dallas convinced Congress to survey the river and figure out where locks and dams could help make it navigable. The Army Corps of Engineers finished the first lock and dam in the early 1900s at a site 13 miles below Dallas. But eventually, Congress shelved the project.

The locks and dams had already been built, molded. The locks and dams along the river stood deserted, and moss covered, and just as it had done before the white man came to Texas and rested an empire from the wilderness, the Trinity River, muddy, unclean, and turtle infested, wound sluggishly between its banks and sullen victory. But then the port of Dallas caught a second wind. The Trinity may have been turtle infested, but it wasn't always sluggish. In 1908 the river flooded, and it made a mess of Dallas. It turned downtown Dallas into a peninsula surrounded by raging flood waters.

It devastated the city, and as a result result of that Dallas hired George Kester to create what was known as the Kessler Plan. Kessler was a famous urban planner, European trained, but he'd spent part of his youth in Dallas. He created a vision for the city that included boulevards and parks, but the part that really excited Dallas leaders was how Kessler reimagined a meandering Trinity. He envisioned it, becoming a straight channel about a half mile west of its existing course through Dallas. Levy's would contain the new channel and open up miles of floodplain for development

right next to downtown. Basically, they move the river out of downtown. Even if you do know the geography of Dallas, it's hard to picture exactly what this means. The project was even bigger than you would think, because it involved changes in the road roadways going over the sewer systems and utility connections and a huge earth moving project, of course. It's a vise to say, this was the kind of enormous project where there'd be pictures of giant machines topped by men in Boller hats. Well, by now we're talking 1928, so Fedora's would have been more in style.

And so, starting in 1928, the river-moving project was a go. The city of Dallas dug the Trinity a 26-mile straight-shot channel, with tall levees on either side of it a half mile apart, perfect for the commercial barges that had now replaced steamboats. And make no mistake, historical record shows that even though this massive project was on its face about flood control, Dallas leaders at the time saw this as the resurrection of the port of Dallas. So in 1930, you got another ceremony for the port of Dallas.

A bottle containing the sweet, sweet waters of the Gulf of Mexico, the final destination of the Trinity River, was smashed over a dredging machine, as people cheered on. A local pastor gave the benediction. May these engineers envision see the coming millions, who, when our virgin acres are upturned to the smiles of God, and our fabulous resources developed, shall people this empire. They really liked to lay an on-thake in those days. And from there, the plan to build the port of Dallas was really underway. There was a general will

for it, there was political clout behind it, and there was eventually money to fund it. The Army Corps of Engineers came up with a really big plan to change the whole course of the Trinity to allow boats up to Dallas. And even further upstream to Fort Worth. President John F. Kennedy, just a month before he was assassinated in Dallas, signed off on a huge $900 million spending package for the Trinity. And despite the PR nightmare that befelled Dallas after JFK's death, the river plan kept on moving forward.

After all, the new president Lyndon B. Johnson was a Texan, and he was in favor of the project. Here he is talking on the phone in 1968 with Fort Worth Congressman Jim Wright. be the major dronyism of the game. Well, I won't be done, I'll be sure to help. Help's the rest of us. Dallas was ready. In anticipation of the soon-to-be navigable Trinity River, new freeway bridges constructed over the river were built extra tall to allow seagulling vessels clearance underneath.

Most bridges are constructed 15 to 20 feet above existing terrain. While these two high-rise viaducts rise to well over 60 feet. One reason is, so they may handle the hook for and saw after barge traffic, the Trinity proponents claim will pour into the Dallas Fordworth area. It's been 130 years. That's about 115 years longer than it took to build the great pyramid of Giza. Dallas is finally becoming a port city. Think of what this means.

Sailor's loose on shore leave. Riverboat gambling cruises. Heavy industry. Loading docks. Fishermen. Longshoremen. Stevedores. Romantic picnics on the levees.

But then the port of Dallas hit a snack, so to speak. It went out not with a bang, but with the wine of a jet turbine engine. The great irony is that while all of this was taking place in the early 1970s, Dallas and Fort Worth were building an international airport. Rob Tranchion is a film producer who made a documentary about the Trinity for Dallas' public TV station KERA. He says the massive DFW airport invigorated the new economy growing here. Dallas was deindustrializing. The city had moved from its reliance on agriculture and trade to technology, light manufacturing,

banking and insurance. Companies like Texas Instruments were on the rise. They didn't need barges to reach the outside world. They had an airport. In my considered judgment, the canalization of the river would probably make Dallas go the way of the other port cities with a polluted channel which Houston has, increase crime, and increase deterioration of the inner city.

That's Alan Steeleman, who ran for Congress in Dallas in 1972. He ran against the Trinity Canal. It likely would mean the location of Steele Meals and petrochemical plants and other forms of heavy industry, none of which I won't locate in Dallas. And he won. Soon after that, voters rejected a referendum to spend their tax dollars on the canal. So right when the dream of those men aboard the snag boat Dallas of Dallas was finally on the cusp of reality, the dream was dead.

Dallas would not become a port city, which was really a shame, not because Dallas needed to be a port, but because they totally messed up the natural landscape of the city. Remember, that the port of Dallas project eventually included the Kessler Plan, which literally moved the river and channeled it into a man-made canal outside of town. The Trinity River used to meander through the center of Dallas. It's hard to second-guess the civil engineering needs of the time. I mean, the river did flood the city pretty regularly, but one can help but think that this could have been a nice riverfront for people to stroll

along, a beloved piece of nature in the middle of the city. The port of Dallas not only failed, but it stole the natural riverfront from the people of Dallas. Like a lot of people of my generation growing up in the 70s and 80s, I didn't really know there was a river in Dallas at all. You can kind of see the Trinity River in the title sequence of the TV show Dallas, which launched in 1978, but the camera mostly lingers on the skyscrapers. In real life, you might catch a glimpse of the river for a split second if you look down from one of those high freeway bridges.

More often, you'd smell the river. A lot of Dallas's untreated sewage got dumped there. In the 70s, there were, after a hard rain in Dallas, this thing they called the black rise would royal downstream and kill everything in its path. The toxic sledge wasn't the worst thing to turn up in the river. I'm talking about dead bodies. The Trinity River bottom was the place where you'd hide the evidence. It was sketchy and unlit.

It was so dark that if you flew into Dallas at night, you could pick out the floodway because it was completely invisible. This dark artery flowed through the heart of the city. You would never think of going there, never. But of course, Julia now had to go there. She got in a canoe. Let's call it the Snag canoe Dallas of Dallas. Do you see the Snag at 12 o'clock?

Are you going to go to the right or the left? The trendy river resumes its natural winding core south of downtown Dallas. It flows through a dense hardwood forest. This part of the river bottom was left alone for decades because the plan was to someday bulldoze all this into a big turning basin and loading area for barges. Now the Autobahn's Azani has built a center at the edge of the forest and it leads canoe and kayak rides for urban river explorers. This is not the suburbs, this is not the country, this is the city.

Oh I'm going to be so sunburned. So you've got 26 mile of river diverted into a walled off artificial channel, plus another long stretch shielded by dense forest. Making that easily accessible for public use is the huge urban planning challenge that Dallas now has to contend with. The good news is that the people now realize that this man made and man neglected landscape is the river they have,

and that's better than pretending that they have no river at all. It's a strange place. It's not exactly comfortable, but not the nightmare of my childhood imagination, either. It's a landscape stuck in anticipation of something that never happened. In the course of history, there are plenty of undertakings just as unlikely as the board of Dallas. We just don't think of the reversal of the Chicago River, or say the Panama Canal as

fallies, or forget about them entirely because against all odds they succeeded. And they were crowned with much hat wearing and machine posing. But when an engineering endeavor fails, sometimes all we get are scars on the landscape. And if we're lucky, we get to try again, make something good out of it, like a park. Hopefully with a plaque. I'd like it if they put up a plaque. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Julia Barton,

a Sam Greenspan, Katie Mingle, Avery, Truffleman, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 Local Public Radio KALW in San Francisco and produced out of the offices of Arxine, an architecture firm in the beautiful downtown Port of Oakland. You can keep up with all the coming and goings of 99 of 99pi on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, and Spotify. I said hi to every single person who said hi to me on Twitter. You thought I was kidding.

I was not kidding. And you're always welcome at our place at 99pi.org. Radio to you. From PRX. Radio Topeo from PRX.