Three days ago, I reported what I thought was breaking news. I’d heard a rumor that the much-vaunted 200-acre Harold Simmons Park would not, after all, be built between the levees, alongside the Trinity River. So I called Tony Moore, the head of the Trinity Park Conservancy, the nonprofit building the park, and got him to confirm that.
Turns out, Ken Kalthoff over at NBC 5 had reported this back in June. I didn’t learn that fact until I’d posted my report and put a link to it on Twitter. Someone there was like, “Hey, doofus, Kalthoff beat you by three months.” You know when people say they are humbled but they actually mean they are honored? Well, I was actually humbled.
So I updated my post, and I watched Kalthoff’s story. It was light on specifics, such as where, exactly, the park would go. Kalthoff stood on the Trinity Overlook Park, on the levee, and gestured toward West Dallas. And I remembered something Tony Moore had told me: “The brick and the mortar and the park proper, we’ll put those outside the levees, attached to the levees but not down in the floodway.”
I went to the Dallas Central Appraisal District’s site and clicked on the nearest property to the Overlook Park. It is owned by TPC Beckley LLC, which shares an address with the Trinity Park Conservancy. I kept marching west, clicking. DCAD shows that a whole bunch of properties in that neighborhood are controlled by either the law firm Munsch Hardt or by a lawyer named Phillip Geheb, who works at Munsch Hardt. They all changed hands recently.
I clicked until the picture emerged that you see above. It’s a rough outline of about 70 properties, 55 of which are controlled by either the Trinity Park Conservancy or the Munsch Hardt lawyer. The outline encompasses 17 acres, give or take, and the 55 TPC-Munsch properties are valued by the appraisal district at about $15.5 million. Remember that this area was once a neighborhood of single-family houses, so many of these lots are small. Some are tiny slivers of land with nothing on them. That road on the right is West Commerce Street. The “eyebrow” of land at the top lies on the other side of North Beckley Avenue and is the portion that I assume Moore was referring to when he said the park would be attached to the levee.
Some of you will know that Angela Hunt works at Munsch Hardt. She’s the former city councilwoman who gets the lion’s share of credit for killing the dumb Trinity tollroad. I texted her the blue polygon and asked what her law firm was up to. She’s not new to this game, so she didn’t reply. I emailed her coworker, Geheb, and he said he couldn’t reveal who his client is. Also, he said Hunt had told him that I’d texted her and that she had nothing to do with my blue polygon.
Last on my list was Moore. I told him what I’d done and laid out my estimates of the acreage and so forth. I asked him if that blue polygon was where the park is going. He declined to comment beyond emailing the following statement: “I am truly excited about the expansion of Harold Simmons Park and can’t wait to share the full details soon.”
Fair play to him.
Here’s what seems apparent: Harold Simmons Park, once planned for 200 acres along the Trinity River, in a floodway, is now being reduced by about 90 percent and built in an area of West Dallas currently occupied by a bail bondsman and a fabricator of structural steel. Whatever the plans for the park are, two large garden-style apartment complexes will have good views if those plans come to fruition.
What remains a mystery: who asked for this? Harold Simmons Park was imagined as a verdant wonderland with the Trinity River running through it. Is the $50 million from the Simmons family still in the bank? How do they feel about losing the river—or just looking at it from the levee? If they’re sad about it, does that mean this park will require public funds?
After I posted my non-scoop story earlier this week, Mark Lamster, the DMN’s architecture critic, said on Twitter that he’d be looking into it. Apparently he, too, had missed Kalthoff’s story. Maybe the three of us can form a Simmons Park super team and together get some answers to these questions. Stay tuned.
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