

– Introduce a memorial overlook and promontory linking Dealey Plaza and Martyrs Park. Kennedy assassination site and Martyrs Park, a neglected bit of green space that will soon be home to a $100,000 memorial to victims of racial violence, designed by the artists Shane Allbritton and Norman Lee. That route passes two of the city’s most significant spaces of memory: the John F. In the coming years, the path through Dealey Plaza and the Triple Underpass will become the primary conduit between downtown and the $250 million Trinity park.

It is up to the people of Dallas and the city’s leaders to move these ideas forward.Ĭhange is both necessary and inevitable. The Dallas Morning News presents this plan to help visualize what is possible for this space. During that time, Lamster and the design team consulted with a variety of local stakeholders and authorities, including Dustin Bullard and Scott Goldstein (Downtown Dallas Inc.), Jerry Hawkins (Dallas Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation), George Keaton (Remembering Black Dallas), Nicola Longford (Sixth Floor Museum), Tony Moore and Marcus Shropshire (Trinity Park Conservancy), Krista Nightengale (Better Block Foundation) and Willis Winters (co-author of Dealey Plaza and former director of Dallas Park & Recreation Department). Work on the proposed design for Dealey Plaza was completed over nine months between 20. Reed invited Ponce de Leon and Cantrell to join the design team. That commission eventually went to Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates of Cambridge, Mass. Reed was well-acquainted with the Dealey Plaza area, Stoss having won the 2013 Connected Cities Design Challenge, a competition that seeded design ideas for a park between the Trinity levees. That column sparked a conversation between Lamster and Stoss' Reed about how such a project might be developed. The project was initiated by architecture critic Mark Lamster and germinated from a January 2020 column that proposed closing Dealey Plaza and the Triple Underpass to vehicular traffic and the development of a memorial park linking the plaza with Martyrs Park and other sites of memory in the downtown area. Lauren Cantrell of Dallas-based Delineator Landscape + Planning + Urban Design provided local support. That team was led by Chris Reed of Boston-based Stoss Landscape Urbanism and Monica Ponce de Leon of Princeton, N.J.-based MPdL Studio.
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The reimagining of Dealey Plaza is a speculative proposal developed for The Dallas Morning News by a team of leading designers working pro bono. All are welcome.Įditor’s Note: Read about the design team and how this proposal came together. How might it be implemented? How might it be improved? What would it cost? Next month, The News will host a community event with the proposal’s designers to address these questions, and others. The News presents this speculative proposal - a big idea, complete with renderings and architectural drawings - to show how these spaces could be transformed to suggest what is possible if the city can summon its collective will.Īnd we'll be reporting on the public response. That group was led by Chris Reed of Stoss Landscape Urbanism in Boston and Monica Ponce de Leon of MPdL Studio in Princeton, N.J. The Dallas Morning News commissioned a team of distinguished designers to present a bold new vision for how this space might be reimagined. It is a deplorable state of affairs, but also a great opportunity a chance to transform this site into a space of civic memory and understanding that embraces the past and points to the future. But they are now something quite different: perilous to navigate, marked by tawdry vandalism and utterly inadequate to both their historical gravity and to the functional demands of the city. This represents a sad decline from the grand ambitions that characterized their invention.Īt the time of their introduction, in 1936, they formed a celebratory and gracious gateway into a city on the rise. Today, they are centers of tourism and public gathering, and a principal point of access to downtown.Īnd yet in their current state, they do not meet their many vital civic obligations. They are where the city began, and the site of several of its most tragic moments in history, from the lynchings of the Civil War era to the assassination of President John F. The time has come for Dallas to redesign Dealey Plaza and the Triple Underpass, which together represent one of the city’s most profound urban failings.
