Yes, Klyde Warren Park is great. But wouldn’t you like it better if it was greater? That is the question we posed to the attendee of the design charrette we hosted in Kit Sawers’ living room a few months ago. And, sure enough, Phillip Jones over at the DCVB said, “H_ck y_s.”
So here we are: Klyde Warren Park 2.0.
First, we had to figure out what everyone loved about the park to begin with. Was it the fact that it brought some green space to the middle of the city? No. The food trucks? No. The playground? Nuh-uh. The little area with a bookcase and some chairs and tables where Dallas Morning News city columnist Robert Wilonsky can hold court occasionally? No. The games? No. The restaurant? No. OK, are you sure it wasn’t the food trucks? No, it wasn’t.
What everyone loved—we guessed after looking at the results of a Google search for exactly six minutes—was the fact that it was built over a highway. As a park, it was only OK. But as a park built over a highway? [licks lips unnecessarily lasciviously; everyone looks away extremely uncomfortably] Mmmm. Very nice.
But how could you re-create that magic? I mean, we’d already built a park over the highway. We couldn’t do that again.
Or could we? It took a little arm twisting and some baby kissing, but we were finally able to rustle up enough cash to make our wildest dreams possible.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait, you’re saying to yourself. That can’t be. Are they really going to build a highway over the park, just so they can build another park over that highway?
No. Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous.
We are building two highways.
That’s right. Two. I can’t really take any credit for the idea. I mean, Phillip is the one who really inspired us. We kept asking him what he wanted, if he could have anything. He just kept saying, “B_G things happen here,” over and over and over, until Kit suggested we take him to the hospital or at least make him stand out on the patio for a while. We tried that first and he wouldn’t stop saying it, so eventually we decided to take him to Presby. The doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with him, and so we brought him back, and I guess at some point what he was saying started to make some sense.
Like, OK, building a highway above a park that’s above a highway is a wild idea, but is it a B_G one? And if we build only one, won’t we just be back at the drawing board before long, trying to figure out how to wring every single last drop of goodwill out of this project?
With that in mind, we are capitalizing on the success of Klyde Warren Park right this very minute, shutting it down for a year so we can build an eight-lane highway above the park, supported by 158 pretty unobtrusive concrete columns. Then, we are shutting down the park and that new highway—naming rights still available, hint hint hint!—for another year so we can build the new park. Then shutting down all of that for no more than another 12 months, so we can build a scaled-down “express” highway—just six lanes on this guy—and then, finally, we are going to keep all of it, the original park, the second highway, the second park, and the third highway, closed for probably only another 10 to 11 months so we can build that third deck park we are so excited about.
Naming rights for that are also still up for grabs.
