Let’s make one thing clear: the urine-soaked diapers that have been thrown into Susan and Mark Lauterbach’s yard late at night, with some regularity, for the past several months, likely have nothing whatsoever to do with the stand of crape myrtles that was unlawfully felled, perhaps with malice, so as to provide an unobstructed view of the finest vista in all of Dallas. The only reason the diapers bear mention is that Susan initially thought they were related to the (dearly departed) crape myrtles. That’s how ugly the situation has grown in this otherwise idyllic slice of Old Lake Highlands.
The neighborhood is divided. A handful of homeowners with a view have been pitted against the hundreds who don’t. Dastardly crimes have been committed. A city councilman has been drawn into the fray. But with a little luck and some old-fashioned advocacy-style journalism, the kerfuffle can be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction.
But first to the diapers. The Lauterbachs, it must be acknowledged, send their kids to Hexter Elementary, the same school to which this reporter sends his own boy. One recent Friday evening, at a function held in Hexter’s courtyard, Susan gets to talking about the diapers. Susan has blond hair and a ready smile. Mark is an architect at RTKL, and he plays lead guitar in a band that does rocking covers of U2 and R.E.M. tunes, at least by the standards of Hexter parents. With her husband performing in the background, Susan explains:
The diapers are adult-size. Always accompanied by surgical gloves. The diaper and the gloves are deposited perhaps once a week near the Lauterbachs’ yard on Van Dyke Road. The Lauterbachs named the perp the Diaper Bandit.
“We’ve joked about sleeping in the van with the kids on a Saturday night, just staying up all night to catch him, drinking wine and watching videos,” Susan says. “We’re hard-up for fun.”
Susan first thought the Diaper Bandit might be in cahoots with the Triangle Club, a group of homeowners just a few doors down the street. The Van Dyke Triangle Club was incorporated to adopt the 11,000-square-foot triangular median that lies where Van Dyke meets Peavy Road. The intersection and the houses near it sit atop a bluff that offers the finest vista in all of Dallas. In a landlocked, flat city, the folks who live at the end of Van Dyke, aka the Triangle Club, have something singular: a bona fide view, with White Rock Lake in the foreground and the glass skyscrapers of downtown rising in the distance. But between the Triangle Club and the view lies the triangle. The triangle that was once home to about 100 crape myrtles that stood 15 feet tall.
Susan found it suspicious that the diapers seemed to wind up only in the yards of the people who’ve been most vocal about those missing trees. Because the Lauterbachs have certainly been vocal. After all, when the trees were cut down, Mark had been working to get approval to build a handsome sign on the triangle that would announce to all that here, on this bluff, is where Old Lake Highlands begins. He’s proud of his neighborhood. He’s lived there since 1989. And the design of his sign was predicated on those trees. In fact, the trees came down just two days after the City Council passed a measure that would make the sign possible.
From all accounts, December 10, 2003, was a dark day for the neighborhood. On that morning, a group of men pulled up to the triangle in an unmarked truck and began cutting down crape myrtles. People gathered. Angry, tree-loving people. According to one source, there was finger wagging. According to another, there was yelling. The leader of the work crew was informed that cutting down trees on public property was illegal. He said he’d been hired by Sheryl Landman, founder of the Triangle Club, but he wouldn’t give his name and left as soon as his crew had cleared the triangle. The police were summoned. And a heated meeting took place in Landman’s living room.
Sitting in that same living room today, Landman says she can explain what happened. She teaches cosmetology at Skyline High School and is wearing a Skyline t-shirt with a Superman “S” on it. Landman’s neighbor is there, too. Norma Minnis has large, round eyeglasses, well-tended silver hair, and a manila folder containing photographs she is eager to share.
Landman starts at the beginning, when she moved into her house in 2002. She and her husband loved the place, but when friends came to visit, they remarked that the triangle median in front of Landman’s house was an eyesore. Weeds grew unchecked. And the thicket of crape myrtles was a mess, having been neglected since about 1994, when budget cuts ended city maintenance.
“And people want to say those were trees,” Landman says. “They were dwarf crape myrtles, not regular trees. They were shrubs. Or bushes.” On this point, Minnis agrees.
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| REAL LOOKER: You can see downtown beyond the lake—now that the trees have been cleared from the Van Dyke triangle. |
Then rats started building their nests in the crape myrtles. So Landman took the next step and officially adopted the triangle, in the name of the Van Dyke Triangle Club, under a program called MOWmentum run by the city’s Department of Street Services. She got a plan approved to clean up the triangle and hired someone to thin out the thicket of shrubs. She says she used spray paint to mark the ones that were to be removed. So far, so good.
Landman says the trouble started when her man began his work and people gathered at the triangle. With a group of neighbors arguing among themselves and shouting at the man—some neighbors saying to leave the trees alone, others yelling to take all the trees out, both factions apparently unable to distinguish between a tree and a shrub—the worker, too, got confused and, in his confusion, razed the whole lot of them. Landman herself was at work while all this was transpiring. When she got home, she says she was just as surprised as anyone to find all the shrubs gone and the cops wanting to have a word with her.
Hang on, this reporter says, aghast. All this trouble started over a mistake? What’s the name of the guy who cut down the trees then? He deserves a phone call.
“I’m not going to tell you,” Landman says. “I’m not going to bring a third party into it.”
“And you’re not going to find him in the white pages,” Minnis says.
An awkward silence fills Landman’s living room. Somewhere an easily rattled tree-service operator gives thanks that he has such a loyal customer. Yes.
But here’s the thing: Charlotte Koford was there the day the crape myrtles were cut down. Koford has lived on Van Dyke for almost 20 years, though her house does not overlook the lake. In the Street Department’s “Van Dyke triangle” file—by the way, an impressively thick file—there are two letters from Koford documenting the history of the beleaguered triangle. In one, Koford writes passionately about the migrating monarchs that used to perch in the crape myrtles. In those letters, Koford says that she asked the man on that dark December day whether he’d been told to thin or to cut down all the crape myrtles. He clearly said he’d been hired by the woman in “that house,” indicating Sheryl Landman’s house, to cut them all down.
Oh, and another thing: a horticulturist at the University of Arkansas recently examined pictures of the crape myrtles. She said they were trees. Not shrubs. For what that’s worth.
But our story doesn’t end there. In 2004, spring came to the Van Dyke triangle, and the crape myrtle stumps, refusing to succumb to a confused man’s blade, bravely put up new green shoots. And, sadly, the shoots were mowed down. When they insisted on sprouting up yet again, someone poisoned them. It could have been Roundup. Maybe it was just gasoline.
And that’s when someone took revenge on the Triangle Club. Here is where Norma Minnis brings out her photographs. On the front of her 4,300-square-foot gray brick house, a vandal, or vandals, spray-painted in red: “We F—ed crape MYRtlEs.” Except the vandal wasn’t kind enough to employ the dashes. And, just like the tree feller, the vandal, too, apparently became confused. Because he tagged someone who didn’t even belong to the Triangle Club. On the innocent man’s Toyota sedan was spray-painted “CM F—eR.” On his Chevy pickup was painted “CRAP MYRTlE F—er.” The man had such difficulty making sense of the graffiti that Sheryl Landman had to read it to him.
By then, Councilman Gary Griffith had become involved. He’d been working with Mark Lauterbach to get the original portal sign built, and he’d met with the two sides more than once to try to bring them together. Griffith asked to see pictures of the graffiti. “It’s a lot of emotion and a lot of destruction over, yes, landscaping a triangle,” he says, choosing his words carefully. “My goal is to hopefully make it where the two groups can work together on this.”
Griffith wants to move forward. So does Mark Lauterbach. That’s why he isn’t terribly thrilled about rehashing the events surrounding the crape myrtle incident. That’s also why Mark hastens to discredit his wife’s initial theory about the Diaper Bandit having an allegiance to the Triangle Club—which, by the way, has expanded to become the Van Dyke Point Neighborhood Association. The VDPNA claims 14 homes from which the triangle can be seen. It is this schismatic organization—having splintered from the Old Lake Highlands Neighborhood Association—that controls the future of the triangle.
With the help of a landscape architect at RTKL, Mark has come up with a new plan for the portal sign. It’s a more sculptural solution, featuring a berm, several boulders, and a circular stone wall. From Van Dyke, the profile of the wall would squat under 18 inches, so as not to interrupt the view. But the $20,000 plan, presented to the city in October 2004, can’t succeed without the approval of the new VDPNA. Because no less than two new city ordinances have been modified as a result of the battle.
The first benefits the OLHNA: the city used to charge businesses upwards of $1,000 per year to lease space in a right-of-way, but Griffith helped change the ordinance so that neighborhood associations can erect a portal sign for a one-time charge.
The other ordinance benefits the VDPNA: no such signs can be approved by the city unless the plans get a go-ahead from residents who live within 300 feet of the signage.
So today the Van Dyke triangle is in limbo, a dry, barren patch of land waiting for salvation. Susan Lauterbach says she and her husband don’t understand why a handful of people should speak for the rest of the neighborhood. She says her husband has come too far to abandon the sign project and let the other side win. “Mark doesn’t do that very often,” she says. “He’s not a fighter.”
Sheryl Landman and Norma Minnis, however, want to know about this new sign, how exactly it will affect their view, and what specifically happens if someone crashes his car into it and is rendered a quadriplegic. Who’s going to pay the liability insurance? Another member of the new VDPNA, a lawyer, is looking into it.
“We’re sort of moving Mark’s plan back and forth in shuttle diplomacy,” Councilman Griffith says. “But from what I’ve been able to discern, I think that plan provides dramatic signage and colorful and appropriate landscaping without disturbing the vista.”
It seems so simple. Reasonable, intelligent, neighborly neighbors ought to be able to work this out. Shouldn’t they?
As for the Diaper Bandit, no doubt a lynch mob will be required to bring that menace to justice.
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