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English Studies Forum
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The Most Beautiful Highway in Texas: U.S. 75 and the Future of the American Road Joshua Edelman Of all the public works ever built in America, none are as costly, as studied, or as omnipresent as our highways. Freeways share a pedestal with baseball and the democratic process as basic symbols of the American spirit. I’m not talking about the simple, serviceable roads of asphalt or dirt that connect one town to another; the Phoenicians had those, for Crissakes. I’m talking about roads as monoliths: pillared strands of concrete flung high above the city, interstates stretching endlessly straight across the plains, triple-decker overpasses and cloverleaves with names like the Mixmaster coiled tightly enough to create a geography of their own. And oh, how we love them. The largest public works project in human history is underway right now in Boston. No, it’s not the Sphinx of Sommerville, but a new means of driving under, around, and through the Charles River and the only un-highway-friendly major city left in America. Like the spirit that created them, American highways have changed over time, and that history is chiseled into the American landscape as indelibly as the walls of China. Call it a ribbon or a gash, but I-90 will roll across South Dakota long after the gas-powered car has purred its last. Roads change as the ways we use and see them change. Just as modern classicists study the Parthenon and Homer to understand Greek society, Americanists two centuries from now will read Arthur Miller and USA Today and marvel at a stretch of concrete through the heart of Dallas called U.S. Highway 75. * * * * * Central Expressway, or U.S. 75, is an engineer’s dream: a superefficient highway, not too wide, nearly invisible to the city around it, and capable of moving huge numbers of cars through the heart of the city with very few backups and still fewer accidents. It follows the path of the first railroad to reach landlocked Dallas, but the case to build a major road there was made by the oligarchs who ran the young city as early as the late 1910s. The city voted for $450,000 in bonds for the project in 1927, but it took twenty years to finally break ground on what to be was one of the country’s first urban freeways. The Dallas Times Herald of 21 January 1946 explained this new concept for its readers:
How futuristic and strange this all must have sounded to a community that had, not fourteen years earlier, feted the opening of a paved road—paved!—stretching from Houston all the way to the Canadian border with a grand “Pageant of Progress” and the crowning of “Miss Highway 75,” Noel Reynolds of Ennis, “attended by a court composed of princesses and duchesses from more than a score of other Texas cities.” But here it was; the first true freeway in Texas and the one reason Dallasites could give the world to pay them some attention.. At a final tab of over $20 million, the first section of Central finally opened in August of 1949. To celebrate, the city held a pair of square dances on the new highway—one for whites south of the Hall Street bridge, and one for Negroes north of it. “As of this hour, Dallas can claim the finest expressway in the world,” bragged the Morning News, and this was a boast with substance: the new highway caught the attention of reporters from Richmond, engineers from Paris, and the editors of Life magazine, who photographed it for their 19 September 1949 issue. The accolades dried up as fast as the ink. Traffic loads were approaching capacity by 1952, and soon rose far beyond what the highway was designed to handle. The Times Herald ran a front page article on complaints of the “congested and dangerous traffic on Central Expressway” on 6 January 1955, two months before the highway’s final section was finished. By July, the Times Herald was calling the northern half of Central “jam-packed” and “the timid motorist’s nightmare during rush hours.” How had such a feat of engineering become so obsolete so quickly? Simple: poor design. The concept of an urban freeway was so novel in the 1940s that no one knew how to do it properly. The road swooped over cross-streets and under bridges like a narrow, tipsy rollercoaster. All this curving made for atrocious sightlines and an accident-prone drive. The ramps linking the service roads to the highway proper came every half or quarter mile and were impossibly short, making accelerating into the flow of traffic a move worthy of NASCAR. The constant hazard of entering and exiting cars slowed up traffic for miles and caused still more accidents. In the 1970s, metering lights controlled by computer were installed at each entrance ramp. Not merely useless, the lights proved an active nuisance, backing up traffic on the service roads as well. Dallas motorists soon learned to ignore them, and by the time they were removed in the mid-1980s, North Central had become a major civic embarrassment. Though its service roads attracted some of the priciest commercial developments in town, the crush of traffic rendered it essentially useless as a thoroughfare for thirteen hours a day. It’s nearly impossible to overstate Dallasites’ hostility towards Central. Newspapers called the road antiquated, ugly, and dangerous. “I HATE Central Expressway” bumper stickers became de rigueur. One Dallas waitress had this to say on the road’s thirtieth birthday:
That feeling has long outlived the road to which it referred, becoming part of what it means to be a Dallasite. To this day, you can tell how long someone has lived in Dallas by the lengths to which his impulses will take him avoid Central. Central’s capacity desperately needed to be raised, but there was virtually no space in which to widen it. So the state proposed building a second expressway directly on top of the first. Normally complacent Dallasites formed an organization called People Against Double Decking (PADD) and packed city council meetings in protest. One of the most business-friendly papers in the country, the Dallas Morning News, opined in a way not all that unusual in the 1970s:
It’s a testament to two decades of foreign policy that this view seems so radical to us today. Now, we are more than willing to project our automotive love affairs into an endless (and perhaps impossible) future. The main argument against double-decking, though, was blight. It was thought that a towering, steel-girded freeway running seven miles through the heart of Dallas would be monstrously ugly. Very openly, people talked about the need for sunlight. Roads ought to be beautiful, PADD argued, or at the very least they need to be tolerable. As bad as Central was—and it was God-awful—it was worth suffering through it for a few years more to be sure that the eventual solution was aesthetic and sustainable. They persisted in this argument to the point that the political costs of double-decking were just too high. And so city and state officials committed themselves to solving the Central problem at—or below—grade. The magic word was “cantilevered”; if the access roads were extended out over the highway proper, more total lanes could fit in the same space. So the main highway was put into a thick trench, which, alongside a serious commitment to build a light rail system beneath and along the Central corridor, was enough to get the plan finally approved by the state in July of 1985. “Central is more than a physical being,” said Walt Humann, the chair of the Central reconstruction task force, in 1990. “It is an embodiment of Dallas; it is part of the fabric of our city.” It would take fifteen years and over a billion dollars for the city to shed its old, dilapidated body and construct a new one three times as large, much more efficient, and far, far more beautiful. When the new Central finally opened on 5 December 1999, it wasn’t just the engineers who smiled down from the bridges over their new grand monument, dancing, cheering, and sighing with relief. * * * * * Tellingly, the Morning News assigned their architecture critic, David Dillon, to write a major Metro-front-page essay on the new Central; it should be required reading for all budding freeway apologists. He wrote less about the potential for commerce and efficiency than he did about the sheer glee drivers would feel on the new road (“as much fun as any Disney thrill ride”). The new highway might attract still more traffic, he admitted, producing the same “sorry sclerotic mess” that had crippled its predecessor. But rather than quoting figures to show that this would not happen, Dillon responded culturally:
He’s wrong on that last point: Dallas could get along without freeways, just as we could all get along without Wal-Marts and computers and microwave ovens. But we wouldn’t dream of it. He is right to say that freeways define space and line in our urban centers, and that is something Dillon, like most of us, could not imagine giving up. The elevation of the freeway is more than a literary metaphor or an architectural necessity; it is a decision we have made about the way to structure our public space and thus our society. Because the Mayans built temples that so dominated all their other structures, we assume that the function those temples held dominated their communal lives. Well, Bostonians live in the literal shadow of their aging Central Artery, and the message that steely old freeway sends to the neighborhoods below is clear: the human being is most exalted when exercising his inalienable right to drive—80 with the top down—and those who choose not to must find leftover sunlight and space as they can. That this has been the dominant image of freeways for so long in so many urban centers— Chicago, New York, L.A., and particularly Houston—says something about the American relationship with the automobile. It’s not just that cities like Dallas and Houston are built assuming everyone has a car of her own; it’s that driving has become the only real way we experience the space around us. Texas, especially its suburbs, is a famously homogenous place. There is no here here; land speculators and oilmen, not geography, set Dallas down where it is. Most Texan buildings—offices, public places, homes—have precious little to do with the land around them. The goal is to create a gracious, beautiful, and healthy home, and this task has little apparent connection with the world beyond the lawn. No one walks anywhere, not even in the balmy winters. Driving is the main means left of interacting with the outside world, and as the roads rise higher and higher off the ground, the space these drivers experience is less about the land and more about the road itself. Freeway design, then, is a concern for more than civil engineers. Yes, we want roads which are efficient, safe, and easy to drive. But we want ones which are beautiful, too; ones which can lead us to a relationship with the space we inhabit which is harmonious and healthy. And so, when Dallas finally decided to renovate Central Expressway, the city set aside a few million dollars to take care of what were called “amenities”—all the things that would determine how the freeway was seen by those who drove and came near it. It is hard to think of a contemporary public works project with more far-reaching cultural consequences. * * * * * This being Dallas, one of the world’s largest architectural firms was hired for the job. Hellmuth, Obada + Kassabaum (HOK) has offices in twenty-five cities in eight countries, and has been responsible for projects ranging from massive Saudi and Japanese airports to a stadium for the Sydney Olympics to an Egyptian resort on the Red Sea. HOK has a Dallas office which is, incongruously, on the twenty-eighth floor of one of the few thriving downtown skyscrapers. The Central amenities project is the firm’s largest in Dallas, though they were also responsible for the design of Dallas’s new light-rail stations. Kirk Millican, a trim, energetic man, was one of the architects from HOK responsible for Central. His firm was approached with the project, he said, after the Texas highway department (known as TxDOT) had finished in-house work on the Woodall Rogers Freeway, a heavy, bland concrete gash running through downtown Dallas. The TxDOT team leader was “disappointed” in his work, Millican said, and did not “envision that North Central take on that same design.” Known for its massive, efficient rural highways, but TxDOT is less at home in an urban setting. With the Central project, HOK hoped to change that. HOK principal-in-change Donald Simpson said:
Merely prettying up a rural highway with landscaping and a painted guardrail or two—which TxDOT did for the stretch of Central beyond HOK’s bailiwick—won’t cut it. Instead, Millican talks about “developing a design vocabulary” that could be used in every context the expressway passes through. The goal, he said, is consistency: Central needed a visual identity that was internally coherent, safe, and pleasant both for drivers on road and those who work and live alongside it. And, as any good designer will tell you, simplicity can be extremely difficult. The earliest published ideas of what a new Central could look were are all over the place: neon splashes on the retaining walls, vines dangling over everything, wildly different bridges for the different neighborhoods (some Georgian brick here, some polished steel there). “Disney-land-esque,” scoffed Millican. He points out that at 65 mph, a seven-mile stretch of highway goes by very quickly. Use a very few elements, make them simple and clear enough to be seen and processed at highway speed, and use them consistently and regularly over the length of the road. The road as a whole is more important than its individual sections. And then there are the neighbors to consider. Central passes through one of the richest neighborhoods in Texas, Highland Park, and folks there like their highways convenient and invisible. But the bulk of the highway is lined with offices, malls, and businesses of all descriptions, and they depend on the road to bring in customers. Depressing the roadway hides it quite well, and it also raises up the frontage road businesses in the driver’s eye. But it doesn’t do much for the problem of bulk. HOK considered all this in the context of a number of practical design parameters (constructability, cost-effectiveness, safety, maintenance needs). The goal was to create a “North Central image,” one which could “weather changes in style and public opinion.” But this task, apparently, so exhausted the design team that they were too spent to proofread their final report and had to turn back to the community to answer one decisive question They presented three alternatives, and each, they explained, reflected a “different relationship between North Central and the surrounding city:”
This report is a fascinating document, laying out the thinking behind the team’s work and offering short descriptions and detailed sketches for each of the three alternatives. Option A is the most horizontal of the three. It looks like an aerodynamic canyon—long, graceful lines with an underlying system of vertical supports. It was inspired, said the report, by “the streamlined highways of California.” Option B is a little more elaborate and homey: each bridge takes on a look more distinctive to its neighborhood, and the retaining walls are decorated with a comfy woven pattern that looks like, well, apple pie. Option C is the most “built,” with block-in-grid retaining walls that look like abstract city skylines. The bridges and walls here have sorts of traditional architectural flourishes (arches, columns) we expect from dignified buildings, which, even in the report’s sketches, look a bit too big for the road.. Did the designers themselves have a preference? Chief architect Steve Goss had this to say in October of 1987: “The real question is what the people of Dallas want the primary image of North Central to be. I personally favor the city image, one that all the people in the city can relate to. Central Expressway has grown up with Dallas, and has always been reflective of the fabric of the city.” That’s not so much an endorsement of Plan B as a restatement of the basic question that few cities are asked to confront so clearly: What exactly is the ‘fabric of your city’? What is this thing, your Main Street, your aorta? Be careful in your choice; you won’t be able to change you mind for half a century. Dallas picked A. The result won HOK and TxDOT a Texas Society of Architects Honor Award for 1997. And now the freeway’s lines are sleek, and it all seems so clean and easy and obvious, and you have to remind yourself that this concrete valley you take to work each day is not immutable. It was chosen and others were not, and there was nothing inevitable about that choice. * * * * * The highway today has a color scheme. The walls and bridges are a light, earthy taupe with pavement colored to match. As the concrete surrounds you completely on three sides, this is a crucial color choice: had the standard dark-grey asphalt been used, the road would have been undrivably dark. Tall, graceful, deep-brown light poles keep the road lit at night. There are some anemic ferns and shrubs planted in the thin median and within some of the scalloped retaining walls, but the real greenery peeks out from the non-highway world above the lip of the trench, just beyond your reach. A bluer, cool shade of green is used for the guardrails and eye-catching labeling on the heavy bridges that cross the highway every half-mile. This accent color is used sparingly, but it’s quite effective, playing off the deep green of the foliage and standardized exit signs, which have become part of the design and not just an arbitrary convention. The depressed roadway manages to feel less like a tunnel and more like an open-air train car. The retaining walls, the dominant element of the design, are built on a series of “strata,” said Millican, “almost as if you were digging down through the ground.” But the archaeology here is inverted, with the ribbed upper layers drawing more interest than the simpler, lower ones. The whole ensemble is tied together at the very top with a blue-green guardrail, which links the two sides gracefully over the bridges like a kind of ribbon. The word is “streamlined,” not just in the sense of ‘sleek’ but in the sense of a river carving out a canyon or one of those Rossini melodies which pulls on and on and on like an endless string of taffy. HOK even insisted that the freeway’s trench be dug at a uniform depth so that there would be no waving up and down to interfere with this grand horizontal flow. The freeway’s line has a tempo, too, and this is set by vertical lines—support beans, generally—which punctuate the walls every twenty feet with perfect regularity. To Millican, this automotive metronome was central to the freeway’s sense of organization, and it was crucial that everything else on the road—every sign, every pole, every light—sit squarely on a beat, not between them. This was a new idea for TxDOT, he explained, who were used to placing signs and poles as policy dictated with no regard for each other. This tempo was so important that these vertical beams continue when the walls themselves go away—at exit ramps, for example—and feel slightly like the regular bars of a cage. Even when the road comes above ground, the pattern is maintained with some kind of regular marking at the side of the road. The effect is to make driving any one part of the road feel remarkably similar to driving any other part, like a thirty-minute techno track. There is some rhythmic differentiation, however, by means of the bridges built for cross streets. As you can’t see much of anything else from the bottom of the trench, they are your primary means of measuring your trip. They form alternating bands of light and dark, reversed at night, as you move from the open air to the under-bridge space and back again. Passing under this oscillating ceiling makes for a kind of tiny purgatory: here you are below, hemmed inside a soft brown corral with too many other cars, while above, over the bridge tops, you can just make out trees and these abstract brick-and concrete monuments heralding the entrance to each neighborhood. When your exit comes, you rise up above the grid onto a wide, open plaza with big swaths of red brick pedestrian walkways linking one side of the highway to the other. The sudden comfort of that openness and the red of those bricks—the first warm color you’ve seen since the onramp—is a tiny salvation. So there are three arcs at work in driving 75: the metronome of the vertical beams, the rhythm of the coming and going of bridges, and the long arc of gridded confinement to open release. For Dallas commuters, this happens at 8:30 and 5:30 like clockwork. They have HOK to thank for this daily exposure to one of the great plotlines of Western civilization. * * * * * These arcs are subconscious, of course. Very few drivers think about highway design; the point of a road is where you can get on it and how quickly. As a peoplemover, Central is extraordinary: if I leave at nine a.m., my seven-mile drive to work takes ten minutes. I am a five-minute drive from two full-sized malls, three Denny’s, a half-dozen bookstores, and most of the best office buildings in Dallas. I could live quite well without ever leaving the highway. It contains nothing to block the sun. The clean-and-clear design makes for a safer drive and faster clearing of those accidents which do happen. Texas drivers are still maniacs, but there’s nothing anyone can do about that. There is a rush hour, even here, and there are times when traffic moves as slow as 30 or, on a bad day, even a frustrating 15 mph. At first, I tried to switch lanes at every opportunity in the hopes of saving a few precious minutes. It never worked. After a while, I learned the secret of all true commuters: the car can be a place of tranquility in the calming waves of traffic. Here office politics stop; here the baking heat and the driving rain can be neutralized by a few ergonomic dials on the dashboard. Stop-and-start driving requires too much concentration; if you have to have a rush hour, you want a slow, steady crawl like Central’s. One can lean the driver’s seat back and listen to the low, soothing voices of the NPR announcers, or sing along with Hank and survey the cars below from the heights of a pickup’s cab. This has become our private time. The more we drive a few, highly regulated thoroughfares at particular times of the day, the more those thoroughfares resemble mass transit systems. The crucial distinction is that here, each rider has a car of his own to be painted, played, and piloted however he sees fit. Subways are socialist; the freeway is free-market. Better road design and smaller, more fuel-efficient cars might make that distinction smaller, but as long as each driver has a bubble of his own it will never go away. The new Central will eventually grow overcrowded and ugly. It may be a more drawn-out and graceful process, but this highway will not be beautiful forever. Already, soot buildup is darkening parts of the walls, and in a few places you can see the paint beginning to crack. What will happen then to the deeply ingrained Texan notion of personal space when trains fly past a jammed-up, broken freeway? Will the Texans give up their cars even then? Central’s designers assumed they would not. They designed the bridge crossovers in case some pedestrians come along someday, but a highway built this tightly through a city and this far below grade simply does not have the flexibility to accommodate changes in transportational tastes. The building of 75 was Dallas’s lusty, public, billion-dollar wedding with the automobile, and for better or worse, the two are now stuck with each other. When I moved to Dallas, my first impression was that here was a city that had made its peace with the car. What I didn’t immediately realize was how studied and how permanent that peace was meant to be. * * * * * It may not be the healthiest of relationships, but I sympathize. Like most Americans, I love to drive. I have known Boston traffic jams, unpaved country roads, switchbacks carved into mountainsides, and those endless stretches of flat asphalt across the plains, and I loved them all. But Central is like none of those. I take it to work every day, and I have never driven on anything like this before. Which is why I can’t help but laugh at HOK’s suggestion in Alternative A that U.S. 75 is just another “part of a regional transportation network.” Was the Berlin Wall a part of German civic architecture? The new Central Expressway was, without question, the biggest public works project in the history of the city of Dallas. There are lots of big roads in the Dallas area. Central feels like none of them. It never has, and any Dallasite will tell you it never will. Most roads take us from one place to another. But from Central, the world looks like an idealized no-place, comfortable and swift without any distraction of context. Space has been democratized; no exit is greater than any other. Yes, the city is there, if you choose to go up and see it. But how much faster to stay below amid the pulsating rhythm of the freeway, in a cradle of warm concrete, where every inefficient quirk has been homogenized, streamlined out. David Dillon, the architecture critic, was right: it is very easy to load onto freeways the ambivalences we have about our cities. I see my concerns about Dallas—isolationism, conformity, monotony—in Central. But this is not an accident or a coincidence. Central is too big and too beautiful not to be a monument of one kind or another. A choice was made about what kind of monument it would to be. This is a highway all about efficiency, consistency, and organization. It is one of the most graceful roads I have ever seen. Texans are, I think, uncomfortable with the overt idea of civic monument. It is too old-world and weighty. Better to free oneself of all constraints of past, place, and society, and nurture the fire of individual human initiative. Here, if anywhere, is the place where one man with a good idea and persistence a-plenty can still make it big. In the West, this self-realization has come to mean a taming of the land. Central, then, represents the ultimate victory in the struggle against the wilderness; the final triumph of the rancher over the cowboy. That’s a monument if ever there was one. The goal of the modern transportation system is to overcome space itself, and Central may be the closest we have come architecturally to the realization of that goal. It is a single, purely artificial axis around which all aspects of a human life can be organized. As more of our cities look like Dallas, more of our lives will loosen their connection to our haphazard old urban schemes to revolve around axes like Central. It will be a more efficient way to live; a more modern one, too, and more American.
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