Ultramodern underground Dallas: Vincent Ponte's pedestrian-way as systematic solution to the declining downtown.(Report)

Mid last century, North American civil servants and urban planners and developers proffered inventive solutions to the problem of the declining downtown core. Robert Moses looked to super-block development and Title of the US Housing Act of 1949 to funnel federal dollars into urban renewal projects in New York City, Because it had been successful in the suburbs, Victor Gruen sought retail development in the form of downtown shopping centres. The Montreal-based planner Vincent Ponte focused his attention on the "multi-level city centre." Similar to the solutions proffered by Gruen and Moses, Ponte's multi-level centres were large-scale and multi use. However, unlike his colleagues' tabula rasa interventions, Ponte's multi-level centre was incremental. This essay focuses on Ponte's little-known 1969 multi-level pedestrian-way plan for downtown Dallas. I argue that Ponte's project for the centre of Dallas is unique in Ponte's oeuvre because, departing from his own espousal of super-block development, it was not built in one fell swoop within a super-block. The multi-level megastructural pedestrain-way in Dallas was fluid and incremental in its original planning and subsequent evolution. It is best understood according to Ponte's instrumentalization of systems theory.

Au milieu du siecle dernier, les fonctionnaries ainsi que les urbanistes etpromoteui ord ontpresentediverses solutions novatrices en vue de resoudre le declin du centre-ville. Robert Moses s'est tourne vers l'amenagement de mega-Hots de meme que vers le Titre I de la US Housing Act de 1949, afin de canaliser desfonds dugouvernementfederal dans desprojets de renovation urbain a New York. Par suite du succes de laformule dans les banlieues, Victor Gruen a vise I'essor du secteur de la vente au detail au moyen de la construction de centres commerciaux au centre-ville. Pour sapart, le planificateur montrealasis Vincent Ponte a axe ses efforts sur les centres de ville aux multiples niveaux. Similaires aux solutions offertes par Gruen et Moses, Les centres multiniveaux de Ponte etaient d'envergure et a usages multiples. Toutefois, contrai-rement a l'approche de la table rase de ses confreres, le centre multiniveau de Ponte etait de nature incrementale. Le present article porte sur un projet peu connu de Ponte, elabore en 1969, pour une voie pietonne multiniveau destinee au centre-ville de Dallas, Je soutiens que ce project est unique dans l' oeuvre de Ponte en ce qu'il de'laisse sa propre notion de mega-ilot et que la structure n'a pas 'ete' construite en une seule fois. Lavoie pietonne a multiple niveaux a Dallas a beneficie, des l'origine, d' une conception pour une construction et une evolution par etapes. Le projet s analyses le mieux selon l'instrumentalisation qu'a fait Ponte de la theorie des systemes.

Imaging Dallas: The Legacy of Vincent Ponte's Plan for a Grade-Separated Pedestrian Network in Dallas, Texas

The grade-separated pedestrian network in downtown Dallas is a warren of underground tunnels, bridges, and interstitial walkthroughs covering thirty-six city blocks. (1) A public-private venture and accretive effort with its first component opened in 1965 and last 1986, the downtown pedestrian-way in Dallas is, though consistently efficient in providing walkers quick passage to lunch or between buildings in a temperate climate, unpredictable in aesthetic experience. In wandering through, pedestrians experience a melange of surfaces, volumes, and lighting. The walk is a contrapuntal affair. The shops and interior architecture along the descent into the system at Pacific Avenue and Ervay Streets are new and well maintained. Starbucks, Pizza Hut, and local Chinese and Indian restaurants line a well-lit dining area with colourful modern furniture. Exit the large, modern, communal dining area and walk down the tunnel toward Thanksgiving Tower, and one passes under harsh fluorescent lighting, before walls of curving grey panels a la the science fiction movie Logan's Run, in front of a lone Indian restaurant with a faux red brick facade, through a poorly lit and maintained passage, in front of a lone Mexican restaurant with a faux yellow brick facade, and up an escalator to the entrance of a derelict tower. Continued passage underneath the city requires movement above ground through the ghost-like lobby of this abandoned building. Walking through the lobby of the thirty-story tower designed by Harwood K. Smith & Partners, with Dales Foster located at 1600 Pacific Avenue, (2) is a surreal and haunting experience. The skyscraper was built in 1965, and its original tenants were the National Bank of Commerce. Electro-Science Investors, and American Life Insurance Company. Today, it is empty and unused. Vestiges of the building's function as a banking and retail centre are evident in the desolate storefront spaces in the lobby by which pedestrians pass en route to the next underground segment. Dallas pedestrians emerge up from the tunnel, pass through its dark, deserted, leaf-strewn lobby, and re-enter the underground walkway system by descent on an escalator that works intermittently. The escalator takes pedestrians down, underneath a striking, large, ocular-shaped window that looks onto Pacific Avenue, back into the tunnels for fast movement underneath the Central Business District of downtown Dallas (see figure 1).

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

The underground walkway system in downtown Dallas is one of a handful of similar systems built not because of inclement weather, as with the Canadian systems in Montreal, Calgary, or Toronto, but in order to buoy development in the city's downtown business core. As with the walkway systems in cities with milder climates, such as Charlotte, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, and Portland, the walkway system in Dallas was built to motivate economic renewal. (3) Though the intention of Dallas planners was economic growth, the system has served only to remove pedestrian life from streets already challenged by ever-decreasing economic livelihood. Like the historic central business districts of many cities across North America, pedestrian life in downtown Dallas has shrunk and been proscribed by the departure of residents for life in the suburbs. As experienced underneath the city while walking through its tunnels, life in downtown Dallas is a midday event. Lunch hour in the underground walkway system bristles with activity--people dining, shopping, and having their shoes shined. The din of activity expires at around 2 p.m., after which passage through the underground walkway is a silent activity. By 5 p.m. the underground walkway system is a ghost town. Planners and pundits who originally envisioned the project in the late 1960s would never have predicted the anemic life of Dallas's pedestrian-way today.

Testament to the original vision of renewal, in June 1968 Esquire magazine devoted an issue to urban planning in downtown Dallas. Referring to one of the most sought after planners of the day, the cover read, "Vincent Ponte should have his way with Dallas" (figure 2). (4) Given the saucy tone of the words on the cover, that the urban planner Ponte should "have his way" with the city and that he was a very eligible and dapper forty-seven-year-old bachelor who looked young for his age, it would seem that Esquire promised an expose of one man's torrid affair with a woman named Dallas. (5) The Boston-born Ponte held an impressive, well-nigh noble pedigree. He attended Harvard College and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he received a master's in city planning, and had worked in the offices of Webb and Knapp and I. M. Pei from 1959 to 1963. (6) If only Ponte would bestow his expertise on that woman called Dallas. Alas, the magazine's intentions were far more down-to-earth and pragmatic. Dallas was part of an experiment conceived by the renowned designer George Lois and publisher Arnold Gingrich of Esquire. (7) It was an "urban project" in publishing and journalism: one of six different covers the magazine ran that month, each of which devoted a two-page spread to a given city. With the exception of Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, the cities--Omaha, New Orleans, and Dallas, to round out the six--were provincial American urban hubs. In two pages, the magazine promised to analyze the problems of each city. In an article titled "Dallas Is in Exile," the publishers wrote that Dallas's main problem was overcoming the stigma of "being a town where a President of the United States was shot to death." (8) While Dallas shared its urban ignominy with Washington and Buffalo, it was the only city to have "emerged with the killing as part of its permanent image." (9) To ameliorate the city's tarnished reputation, Gingrich propounded urban transformation through entertainment and education, calling for a major-league baseball team cooperatively owned by Dallas and Fort Worth, a city of the arts, and ...