| Jacquielynn Floyd: Terminal dreaming pays off 01/30/2001 By / The Dallas Morning News FORT WORTH – One of my favorite pictures of downtown Fort Worth captures a brief visit by President Harry Truman during his 1948 re-election campaign.
It's not Harry that makes the picture – he's almost indistinguishable from all the other ant-sized dignitaries and the milling crowd – but the setting. President Truman spoke from the steps of Fort Worth's finest public structure, the Texas & Pacific railroad passenger terminal. The picture, shot from a distance, shows the grand building's magnificent scale, dwarfing the miniature cars and the tiny people pooled around its mighty base.
Barely five years later, in what has to get the what-were-they-thinking award of the decade, highway engineers constructed a hideous elevated freeway right past the terminal's front door. It marooned the great building and effectively chopped off downtown Fort Worth at the ankles.
Imagine an Alamo freeway
Imagine a concrete raceway on stilts running down Houston Street in Dallas, or cutting off the state Capitol in Austin. Picture a four-lane freeway slicing across the plaza in front of the Alamo.
Frankly, people have hated the Interstate 30 overhead, as it is called, for as long as anybody can remember, so you have to wonder how it got built in the first place.
"It was hailed as an engineering marvel," said Jon Nelson, who led 20 years of warfare to get the thing torn down. "At the time, it was considered a wonderful traffic concept."
It was a time when the era of passenger trains was wheezing its dying breath, giving way to the heady, tail-finned glamour of big private cars. Old art deco buildings were a dime a dozen, but freeways were thrilling and new, so the most sublime work of public architecture in North Texas was desecrated by a structure of abject and utilitarian ugliness.
It's a common enough story, of course, but it has an uncommon conclusion. A dogged coalition of Fort Worth housewives and rich guys and neighborhood block captains and garden club ladies waged a long, expensive, complicated campaign against the state highway department, and won.
A new segment of I-30, running behind the T&P building and bypassing the old overhead, opened last fall. The elevated freeway, unused and blocked off, is scheduled for demolition this year.
Mr. Nelson, a lawyer who took the highway department to federal court and lost and then won on appeal during the long fight, said the case was proof that residents really could guide the destiny of their own communities, that progress doesn't have to equal destruction.
Patience, effort, planning
It took a lot of patience, he said, and a willingness to work with reluctant highway department engineers. And it took an alternate plan (one of the Fort Worth Bass brothers underwrote the cost of architects and consultants) to channel heavy cross-town traffic through the crowded district.
"It doesn't do any good for a public organization to say, 'Don't do that' unless you can come up with an alternative," Mr. Nelson said. "You have to be willing to organize and be persistent and raise enough money to have meaningful expertise."
I went by the old railroad terminal the other day. It is riotously, gorgeously ornate. Even the elevator doors and heating vents and light fixtures are spectacular works of art.
It's also empty. It belongs to private investors who have a dreamy plan to turn it into a historic hotel, like the grand railway hotels of the past.
It sounds far-fetched. But then the idea of those civic-minded folks persuading state bureaucrats to move an entire freeway just because it was ugly sounds far-fetched, too.
They didn't prove that it's easy. But they proved that it's possible.
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