Klyde Warren Park in Dallas (Nathan Bernier/KUT News)
As a high-stakes project to sink I-35 through downtown Austin kicks into gear this summer, city officials and the University of Texas are looking to Dallas for a possible glimpse of the future.
The vision: a vast, green expanse covering sections of I-35, similar to Klyde Warren Park in Dallas. The 5.4-acre sanctuary spans the sunken Woodall Rodgers Freeway, connecting the densely populated Uptown neighborhood with a thriving Arts District and downtown business center.
Since it opened in 2012, this “deck park” has been widely hailed as a success, boosting land values and stimulating the development of luxury high-rise buildings with homes and offices that are among the most coveted in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
But the project also raises important questions about how Austin and UT should navigate the governance of their potential new parks, balancing public accessibility with privatization and commercialization.
“When we started this, TxDOT was like, ‘What are you talking about? That’s insane,” reminisced John Zogg, a Dallas real estate professional who helped launch the deck park project in 2002. “It started with that flimsy of an idea and somehow it got legs and just kind of took off.”
You can read the rest, about the history of that flimsy idea and the fight to do something similar in Austin. I just wanted to point out that there’s a similar idea for Houston and the godforsaken I-45 project, though our version of it involves turning the to-be-abandoned Pierce Elevated into a park. It sadly would still leave a to-be-vastly-increased amount of overhead traffic, just relocated to the east of downtown. There was a proposal for an I-45 tunnel to be built from the Beltway through downtown, with the aboveground space converted into a more scenic local roadway; it was later dubbed the I-45 Parkway, as the upper portion was styled in a similar fashion as Allen Parkway. I last thought about that in 2015, in a post that mentioned that the I-45 project, which had been dormant for some time, was “estimated in current dollars at $1.1 billion, isn’t expected to start construction until 2025”. I find that both absolutely hilarious in terms of its cost estimate and more than a little scary in terms of its timeline accuracy.
Anyway. My point is that what Dallas has and what Austin is fighting for we could have had, if we have to have this accursed thing at all. We gave our best shot to defeating the project, which was noble and successful for a long time, and accomplished a lot of good along the way. Maybe I-10 can get what I-45 didn’t, if we have to have that damned thing, too.
It seems like capping 59/69 between Montrose and Kirby would be pretty easily doable. I’m surprised that never gets discussed.
In a city that can’t keep the lights functioning on the bridges over one of its major freeways, call me crazy for thinking that stable long-term funding of maintenance for freeway-spanning amenities is an overwhelming stumbling block here.
I’ve been at the Festival of Joy (a takeoff on the old India Day celebrations) last year at Warren. It works well, as photos may show. The main dance stage was at least 80 feet wide.
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