The Trinity River and the City Built on Flood Control

The Trinity River runs through Dallas in a channel that is almost entirely artificial. The concrete levees and the straightened course are the product of a decision made after a catastrophic flood in nineteen oh eight, when the Trinity overflowed its banks and inundated much of downtown Dallas. The flood killed a relatively small number of people but convinced city leaders that the natural river was incompatible with the city they intended to build. They spent the following decades engineering it into submission.

The Chisholm Trail cattle drives had used the Trinity's crossings. The river shaped the city's original geography: the earliest settlement clustered near the river for water access, and the topography of the valleys and bluffs the Trinity carved still organizes the city's neighborhoods, even though the river itself has been moved and straightened and contained to the point where it is effectively a drainage ditch wearing the name of a river.

The Trinity River Corridor Project, debated by Dallas voters and city planners for most of the past thirty years, has been an attempt to reclaim a relationship with a watercourse the city spent a century trying to suppress. Parts of it have been realized: parkland, trails, a section of restored floodplain. Parts remain disputed and unbuilt. The vision of a Dallas that engages its river rather than engineers it away has been expensive and contentious and is still incomplete.

The Chisholm Trail cattle crossed here. The motorcycle parade carrying Kennedy's body passed a bridge over the Trinity. The city that grew up beside this river decided, more than once, that the river was the problem.