Weather or Not

Severe Outflow by R. Edwards

Lessons from a Dallas Deck Park

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Quality urban renewal takes a lot of commitment from multiple people and organizations. It cannot be all governmental, or it will fail to live up to potential due to suffocation in layers of red tape. You know the drill: shortfall-budgeted, bureaucratized, top-down, one-size-fits-all, rules-driven rigidity, unimaginative design, CYA decision making, and poor-quality, lowest-bidder contract work. That’s a recipe for disuse, decay and crime. Yet it can’t be all private, or it will lack transparency, public accountability and maybe even public access.

Dallas offers a success story most would have deemed highly unlikely beforehand: an urban park built over a freeway, doubted by many in city government itself, opposed by the adjoining major art museum that’s now awash in revenue from it, named after a living child. The park was conceived by highly regarded architects, urban planners, engineers and designers mainly hired through a nonprofit foundation, and molded conceptually by visits to renowned spaces in several other cities.

It was and is funded by a wide mix of wealthy private donors, venture capital, big-corporate gifts, city, state, and federal sources, all shrewdly solicited by talented business people and dealmakers devoted to applying those skills to civic service. All of the above had to set their egos aside and make compromises, which ain’t easy when great gobs of money are at stake. It sounds complicated, daring, and risky to pull off, absolutely needing bold visionaries with dogged determination to make it happen. It was all of those things — and that’s what it takes.

I’ve been to Klyde Warren Park several times now, and it’s both a relaxing and exciting hangout: a large, surprisingly roomy and open deck park bridging Uptown and Downtown in ways even the “pie in the sky” dreamers and early promoters didn’t imagine. One sees restaurants with open-air seating, street-food trucks, pavilions, trees, gardens, sunny and shaded areas, executives in Armani suits, moms strolling babies, children at play, teen lovers, yuppie residents of all the new condos nearby, buskers, tour buses, film crews, blue-collar workers from nearby taking breaks, the occasional celebrity sighting, some event or another (concerts, weddings, festivals, small fairs) almost daily, a lot of people without feeling crowded, unrestricted access from either side, and enough police presence to notice and keep it fairly safe, without being obtrusive.

That combination is not common in this country. It also hosted a huge total-eclipse party in April 2024; a lot of the awestruck, cheerful roar I heard through the urban canyons emanated from that direction within seconds after the moon blackened the sun’s space in the sky.

Massive residential, office and arts developments have sprouted around the park to the tune of over $1 billion in value, with cranes rising continually in the line of sight, and the surrounding tax base growing. Several cities look to it for inspiration for their own forthcoming projects. Best of all, access is free to the public, with a million visitors a year.

For all the problems Dallas has had the last 20 years or so on several other civic fronts, bogged down in red tape, interdepartmental and governance disputes, study after study sans tangible action, that deck park is a spectacular success. The city has just opened another over I-35E in Oak Cliff, near the zoo, with more on the way. Dallas Morning News architecture critic Mark Lamster won a 2026 Pulitzer Prize in criticism for his outstanding story on how it all came about.

Excerpt:
“That philosophy of programmatic excess defines the park and makes it, aesthetically, something of an upended toy box, with its diverse goodies strewn about. There is little relationship, for example, between the park’s allée of mini-arches with Japanese-style lanterns and the cool minimalism of Phifer’s performance and restaurant pavilions. The park surely subscribes to the mantra of architect Morris Lapidus, champion of Miami Beach modernism: ‘Too much is never enough.'”

30 Years Ago Today: Paris TX Tornado

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On 2 April 1982, a series of tornadic supercells wrought great violence across portions of northeast Texas and southeastern Oklahoma. Ten folks perished in Paris, TX, with 170 injured and damage rated F4. A separate supercell spawned an arguably f5-rated tornado that crossed mostly rural areas near Speer and Broken Bow, OK, and deposited a motel sign from Broken Bow 30 miles away in Arkansas. After dark, the outbreak shifted into southwestern Arkansas, with several more deaths from tornadoes produced by the same supercells that ravaged the Broken Bow and Paris areas.


      Image courtesy NCDC and NWS Ft. Worth

I still recall that day vividly, as a young teen in east Dallas. Already stoked by morning hail, and knowing of severe weather potential via weatehr radio, I was hoping to see some storms again in the afternoon, before the dryline surged through. I got out of school early for a doctor’s appointment, and rode my bike there. The office had a radio on and a TV off. After hearing warnings broadcast on WBAP radio, I asked the receptionist to turn on the TV for news of tornadoes to our north.

On Channel 5, Harold Taft was relaying Al Moller‘s NWS tornado warnings for the area around Bonham. Through trees and buildings, I could see parts of a massive pile of convection to the NNE.

Fortunately, I needed just a shot and a prescription; and the appointment didn’t take long. It was time to get a better view of some atmospheric action. I got on my bike and “chased” a vantage point for the soon-to-be Paris storm, on a hilltop about a mile away that had a good N and NE view.

Dallas was behind the dryline and in some blowing dust by the time I saw the supercell in its optimal splendor. That storm, lit with an orange tinge through the dust and in the late-afternoon light, blew my mind. The backshear, knuckles, enormous towers boiling into the back side of that storm at an upward pace visible to the stare, even from that distance. At that time it was producing six-inch diameter hailstones. To this day, despite hundreds of supercells seen since, I don’t recall clearly more powerful-looking, robust rear-flank convective structure that what was rolling up into the SW side of the Paris storm. It was a transcendental, awe-inspiring experience. The dust eventually got too dense to see much, the storm moved farther away, and the daylight faded.

Thanks to Jeff Passner for stirring up memories of that event on another forum.

Texas Wildflower Extravaganza

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Prior to last autumn, the Hill Country of central and south Texas had been mired in an intense, multi-year drought that ruined crops, depleted grazing fields for livestock, lowered aquifers and reservoirs to levels not recorded before, threatened municipal water supplies, and caused great angst among water-management agencies. The drought also left wildflowers rather sparse each spring season, limited to localized pockets of marginally favorable conditions and some roadsides where runoff effectively boosted “rainfall” on the scale of a few yards’ right-of-way width.

Then last year, along came the positive phase of the ENSO (El Nino Southern Oscillation) in the equatorial Pacific, well-known to influence large-scale atmospheric patterns over North America during the cool season. Storm tracks behaved in the typical manner for these episodes, with a series of southern-stream perturbations aloft that yielded abundant precipitation over central and south Texas — some of it even in the form of snow.

The cold, wet fall and winter were absolutely ideal for settling, cracking and germinating untold scores of long-accumulated bluebonnet seeds. Fully aware of this potential for a major wildflower feast a few months ago, Elke and I began planning a mid-April trip to our favorite parts of the Hill Country, on a long weekend that I was scheduled to have off. Of course, we would partake of the usual excellent German food in Fredericksburg, the barbecue in Llano, a chance to stock up on Dublin Dr Pepper and collect limestone slabs for our landscaping back home, and marvel again at the geologic variety of the Llano country. [See our road trip report from 2005.]

It couldn’t have worked out any better. In absolutely stunning fashion, nature snapped wide awake from its drought-induced floral coma. The wildflower explosion was second to none in either of our experiences. The roadsides, hills and meadows, for mile after mile, bore carpets of bluebonnets, paintbrush, prickly poppies, evening primroses, phlox, and numerous other varieties of all colors.

We’ve all seen the legendary shots of entire fields packed full of bluebonnets; this year, they really were! From Mason to Willow City, Doss to Buchanan Lake, we roamed for three days in ecstatic appreciation of the visual and photographic delights abounding all around.

Locals whom we heard, and with whom we spoke, claimed that the wildflower show this year was unlike anything seen since at least the mid 1980s, perhaps even decades longer. I believe them. Old-timers, who never thought they again would witness such a spectacle, marveled at the scenery. Where not mowed at the wrong times, and seeds had been permitted to accumulate, the flowers got so dense it was as if heaven itself had poured forth a bounty of color upon the land. Several entire ranches were covered in flowers.

We had two sunny days and one mostly overcast, each with their own distinct advantages in photography. Clouds helped with smoothing away harsh shadow/highlight contrasts and lowering the dynamic range. Wind made it a challenge on the cloudy day to shoot in lower light, especially at high f-stop settings needed for rich depth of field. Still, even at twilight on the cloudy day, one could lie down in the bluebonnets and shoot with nice results.

The sunny days offered opportunities for tighter apertures and landscape panoramas, but also, freezing flower motion in windy conditions at shorter depths-of-field.

We’ll be in awe of what we witnessed on this journey for a long, long time. The only bad thing about such an amazing experience is that we know it might not be matched again in the remainder of our lifetimes, given the nearly perfect cascade of meteorological dominoes that must fall over a span of years to months to produce such an extravagant floral show. No matter…we shall return, for the flowers, fine food and friendly folks.

For more shots from the trip, please visit our online gallery of 50 select photos from the 2010 Texas wildflower eruption.