Maybe the third time will be the charm? That’s where we are if you’re counting the major plans to bring vitality to the Arts District, which is now moving into middle age, having yet to realize the promise of its adolescence.
The latest entry in this long civic experiment is the Arts District Connect Plan, which was approved in late January by the City Council. If the city actually manages to carry it out, it just might be the solution the district needs to fulfill the grand vision of its conception.
A bit of history: The Arts District was the product of a 1977 report by the Boston planners Stephen Carr and Kevin Lynch that called for the relocation of the city’s aging cultural facilities, then mostly in Fair Park, into a single district that would help renew a struggling downtown. (Nevermind that this meant the evisceration of Fair Park, in historically Black South Dallas.)
The report was translated into a formal plan in 1981. Created by Boston-based Sasaki Associates, it remains the essential visioning document of the district, for both better and worse. The Sasaki Plan, as it is known, established Flora Street as the tree-lined spine of a dynamic mixed-use neighborhood of arts, retail, commercial and residential spaces.
It looked good on paper, but Dallas turned it into Dallas: an auto-centric commercial real-estate play with no housing or access to public transit. In 1985, Morning News architecture critic David Dillon lamented that it was “more of an office park with an arts theme than a cultural district” and that it would “never be funky and offbeat.”
In 2003, a new plan laid out the performance spaces on the eastern end of the district. It brought more signature architecture, but failed to resolve the enduring vitality problem, and perhaps exacerbated it by creating two distinct zones sliced in half by the forbidding Pearl Street intersection.
If there is hope for the new Connect Plan, it lies in the fact that nearly every space in the district that might be exploited for financial gain has been exhausted. This is not accidental; the plan, presented in October of 2018 (and substantially complete long before), sat on a shelf, essentially written but unapproved, for more than two years. In that time, the district filled in with a series of commercial and residential towers.
The latest of these is the recently completed Atelier, a 41-story high-end residential apartment tower fronting Flora Street on what had been a surface parking lot. When conceived, the building was to include subsidized loft-style studios for local artists, and indeed the loft apartments were included in the finished design, by the architecture firm Stantec. But as usual in the Arts District, business comes before art, and those lofts are now going at market rates.
The cart thus having been properly placed before the horse, the Connect Plan is left to find a way to transform this libertarian product into a cohesive unit.
The new plan was commissioned by the nonprofit Dallas Arts District Foundation, the coalition of arts organizations, business and public representatives that advocates for the district. Like the Sasaki original, it comes by way of Boston, this time from the architecture and planning firm NBBJ, and it aims to achieve what the previous plans did not by focusing on the district’s connective tissue.
“It’s not sexy stuff,” says Lily Cabatu Weiss, executive director of the Arts District. “The basics are important, and a lot of the basics are missing or have crumbled over time.”
The Connect Plan maps out five essential strategies for improving the district: transforming Pearl Street into an “Avenue to the Arts”; reinforcing the integrity of Flora Street and Ann Williams Way (its extension on the east side of Routh, named for the founder of the Dallas Black Dance Theatre); the remaking of Ross Avenue into a pedestrian-oriented, commercial boulevard; better wayfinding and digital signage, as well as enhanced public art; improving connections to adjacent neighborhoods.
The Pearl Street transformation is the headliner here. The so-called “Avenue to the Arts” would run from Carpenter Park to the south through the Arts District and Klyde Warren Park to McKinney Avenue in Uptown. Various measures — road narrowing, new pavers, medians with public art, mid-block crossings, infill development, enhanced greenery and lighting — are proposed to create a pedestrian-friendly environment beckoning visitors into the heart of the district.
It would finally connect the Arts District DART stop to the district for which it is named but presently has no real relationship.
A key component of this strategy is to mitigate the disastrous intersection where Pearl meets Flora. Pedestrians have all of 15 seconds (a paltry 25 if they notice the crossing button) to traverse the seven lanes of Pearl. “It is the No. 1 safety issue in the neighborhood,” says Weiss. “If you’re a mother with a stroller, you’re not going to get across. If you’re a teacher chaperoning a class, you’re not going to get across.”
It is flat-out insanity, an affront to the arts institutions in the district and an embarrassment to the city.
The problem is that any proposal for the crossing requires endless bureaucratic wrangling, even with the Connect Plan approved by the City Council. “Just to talk about safety, we needed a traffic study,” says Weiss. That says a lot about Dallas priorities: Cars always come first — even in a pedestrian-designated arts district. That is reflected in the budgeting for the intersection: $1 million in bond funding was assigned to address this crossing, far less than necessary for such a major undertaking.
The other “big” move of the plan entails the remaking of Ross Avenue, currently the underperforming rear-end of the district, into a mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly (that phrase again!) commercial corridor linking the West End, the Arts District and East Dallas. This required making Ross Avenue and its adjacent properties a part of the Arts District zoning envelope (technically, “planned development” or PD, in Dallas zoning parlance), which they were not — a major victory.
In this vision, Ross becomes a genuine boulevard, with lanes slimmed to accommodate cycling, wider sidewalks and otherwise conform to the same standards as the rest of the district. It is important to note here that the recommendations (as with those for Pearl) are in keeping with the broader 2017 Downtown Dallas 360 Plan.
“This whole plan is all about the street,” says Jill Magnuson, chair of the Arts District’s Infrastructure Committee. “Our citizens love their cars, but we’re actually getting them out to walk.”
While Pearl and Ross are conceptually reimagined, the changes to Flora are intended to accomplish what was originally intended but never fully achieved. The idea of an active street with cafes and shops is undermined by the physical makeup of the sidewalk: three rows of cypress trees that take up too much space; a hodgepodge paving system that is a challenge for pedestrians (especially those in heels or with strollers); poor lighting; inadequate and dilapidated street furniture. Those details matter.
New standards would remake this streetscape, maintaining the original vision while giving it a practical structure. The new plan would also bring a wayfinding and information system to the district, with public art at key points to reinforce the district’s identity, free Wi-Fi, and digital information kiosks. The present dearth of a serious information program, not to mention pedestrians, often leaves the impression that the district is dead, when in fact there are myriad events happening every day. These moves would do much to change that perception.
The Connect Plan’s final priority is to better connect with its neighbors, in particular Uptown. Creating a gateway intersection at Pearl and Woodall Rodgers is one option under exploration. A problem, however, is that the Vegas-style fountain proposed for an adjacent plot at the foot of Klyde Warren Park would undermine any attempt to create a dramatic entry to the district defined by public artwork.
Another issue is the Routh Street Gateway, the corridor under the Woodall Rodgers Freeway linking Uptown and the Arts District. This is of special importance because it is the path taken by students at minority-majority Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, who park under the freeway and then walk to school.
There are funds to pay for half of this project, but the North Central Texas Council of Governments, led by Michael Morris, has declined to match the city’s contribution until a neighboring property is developed.
And so it will be with the Connect Plan, generally. It has all the right elements to make the Arts District the vital space it was designed to be, but there is a long distance between approving it and then paying for it and making it happen. It will, no doubt, be an expensive project — and at a time of fiscal austerity.
The decisions Dallas makes will demonstrate the extent to which it values the arts. Thus far, “Business, as usual,” has been the mantra.
You get what you pay for.
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