Is This the Trinity Park Plan of Dallas' Dreams?

"After more than two decades of infighting, foot-dragging, false starts, and recrimination, Dallas finally has a serious plan for a park between the Trinity levees," according to an editorial from Dallas Morning News architecture critic Mark Lamster.

After setting aside some of the "ill-conceived" fantasies of past iterations of the park plan, Lamster identifies the good stuff from the most recent proposal, which includes "a two-part scheme that brings a stepped riverine ecology to the Trinity flood plain, and places a series of overlook parks on the tops and sides of the levee walls."

New York-based landscape architecture firm Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates produced the new proposal. The firm's urban park résumé includes Hudson River Park and Brooklyn Bridge Park, in New York, and the landscape at the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas.

The proposal is still conceptual—the result of an action by Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings "in response to public feedback to the so-called Dream Team’s proposals for the Trinity toll road." Lamster has been one of the toll road's most vocal critics, though certainly not its only critic.