Generations and Other True Stories

by Bryan Woolley

  That was thirty-three years ago. A few months ago, bulldozers began tearing up a parking lot in front of the Dallas Convention Center and building a hill of dirt. The lot is about to be transformed into a four-acre park called Pioneer Plaza, in honor of the early settlers of Dallas, some of whom are buried in the adjacent cemetery.

  The finished park will feature a twelve-foot waterfall over a limestone cliff, a rushing stream, a reflecting pool at the corner of Young and Griffin streets, trees, seats for tired tourists, a plaque about the history of Dallas, and a miniature prairie planted in buffalo grass.

  But the centerpiece of Pioneer Plaza, its raison d’etre, if you will, is to be…cowboys. Three of them. One white, one black, one Hispanic. In bronze. Ten and a half feet tall in the saddle. And…cows. Well, steers. In bronze. Seventy of them. About six feet tall at the shoulder. Driven by the three cowboys, the steers will appear to be meandering down the new hill, through Pioneer Plaza on their way to market. Just a few blocks from Neiman Marcus.

  The whole project is supposed to cost about nine million dollars—about five million dollars for the land, provided by the city, and about four million dollars for the landscaping and the sculpture, to be provided by the Dallas Parks Foundation.

  The sculpture, the first pieces of which are now being cast at the Eagle Bronze foundry in Lander, Wyoming, is the brainchild of the foundation, a private, nonprofit organization that raises money from private sources to help out the city of Dallas in such projects as developing parks and planting trees on public lands.

  Or, more precisely, it’s the brainchild of real estate developer Trammell Crow, chairman of the foundation’s board of directors, who with a single application of political clout may be turning eastward-looking, sophisticated, cosmopolitan Dallas into Cowtown East.

  At least that’s the view of the Public Art Committee, an adjunct of the city Cultural Affairs Commission, whose job it is to look artistic gift horses in the mouth and advise the City Council whether to accept them. In this case, the committee’s recommendation was a resounding no, on grounds that the sculpture is bad art, bad history, and a possible hazard to the public safety. But the Cultural Affairs Commission overruled the committee and recommended that the City Council approve the project, which it did.

  Agreeing with the Public Art Committee is a group of Dallas artists who believe the shortcut path that the Dallas Parks Foundation took through the City Hall bureaucracy was an illegal one. They’ve filed a lawsuit against the city to halt the project.

  They also condemn the Parks Foundation’s image of Dallas and its past as historically incorrect. And, because of the way the sculptor is planning to create the animals—by making an assortment of steer horns, tails, and hooves and attaching them in various combinations to ten basic steer bodies, instead of sculpting each beast individually—they refer to the project as “Frankensteer.”

  On the other hand, the member organizations of the city’s tourist business establishment—the Central Dallas Association, the Dallas Convention and Visitors Bureau, the Greater Dallas Chamber of Commerce, and the Hotel/Motel Association of Greater Dallas—all have issued statements in praise of the project. Les Tanaka, executive vice president of the Hotel/Motel Association, went so far as to declare that because of Pioneer Plaza, we Dallasites already “have become the envy of everyone in the tourism industry, throughout the country.”

  And those most intimately involved in the project—Jack Beckman, president of the Mesquite Arena, home of the Mesquite Championship Rodeo, who is co-chairing the project for the Dallas Parks Foundation, and Robert Summers, the Glen Rose artist who is creating the steers and their herders—say it’s time for Dallas to dismount its cultural high horse and admit at last that, yes, it’s part of Texas.

  “Dallas has always tried to be the New York City of the West, the most sophisticated city in the West, and there’s nothing wrong with that,” Mr. Summers says. “But it’s a mind set. It’s a facade. When we were kids we called it ‘play like.’ The fact remains that Texas was started on cattle. And Dallas is part of Texas. What hurts me more than anything people are saying about the art is that people don’t want to admit their heritage. And this is the heritage of Dallas, whether they like it or not.”

  Besides, adds Mr. Beckman, Pioneer Plaza isn’t really about art anyway. “This isn’t just a piece of art, sitting out there for people to see its artistic value,” he says. “This is supposed to look like a real cattle drive, not something somebody made up. Those cows are supposed to look like damned old longhorn cows or steers or whatever. You can call it art or you can call it crap. Either way, that’s just your opinion. To me, it’s sort of a ghost of our past, telling where we came from. And it’ll be at the front door of the Convention Center, where many, many people from all over the world are coming to visit.”

  According to the Parks Foundation, that’s why Dallas—the part of it in front of the Convention Center, anyway—is suddenly shucking its snooty cosmopolitan pose and becoming part of cowboy Texas: because Texas is what the tourists who come to Dallas want to see.

  In 1990, says Paula Peters, executive director of the Parks Foundation, the Convention Center and the Convention and Visitors Bureau conducted a survey of just about everybody who attended a convention in Dallas. “It was something like two million people,” she says, “and they asked them some questions about Dallas: What did you come here to see? What did you expect to see? What didn’t you like? What did you expect to see that you didn’t see? What would you like to see more of?

  “The overwhelming response they got was: Where is the West? Not only Where is the West? but Where is Dallas history? Did the city spring fullblown as a twentieth-century city? Was it constructed in 1960? Where are the historic sites? Where’s the story of how Dallas came into being? And that was the seed of Pioneer Plaza.”

  A few years earlier, the City Council had hoped to lease the parking lot as the site for a new convention hotel. But when the oil bust came and the Dallas economy took a dive, the city’s negotiations with developer Vance Miller and the Marriott Corp. fell apart. So when the master plan for expansion of the Convention Center was completed in 1989, the four-acre plot was designated a green space.

  Some critics of Pioneer Plaza have claimed that Mr. Crow and the Dallas Parks Foundation offered to develop the site as a means of preventing a hotel being built there in the future—a hotel that would compete with the Loews Anatole, partly owned by Mr. Crow’s family, and with the Hyatt Regency, which is owned by the Woodbine Development Corp., whose president is John Scovell, whose wife, Diane Scovell, is co-chair, with Jack Beckman, of the Pioneer Plaza project.

  Mr. Crow (who was in Russia and unavailable for comment) has denied this. “There should be a beautiful entry to the Convention Center,” he told reporters last May, after a briefing at which the City Council thanked him officially for developing Pioneer Plaza. “That’s what started us putting a sculpture out there.”

  Ms. Peters denies it, too. “The city turned to the Parks Foundation and asked if we would help them develop that green space,” she says. “The hotel-motel tax is being used to retire the indebtedness of the Convention Center expansion, but there was no money available for any improvements to that site. They needed us to come up with some private funding.”

  In 1991, during the early discussion with city bureaucrats and politicians about just how the plaza was going to be developed, apparently little was said about sculpture, and nothing about cowboys or steers. “The original proposal did not include an art project associated with it,” says A.C. Gonzalez, the assistant city manager in charge of the Convention Center. “The first concept drawings had to do with landscaping work, a water project, and at the time of the actual presentation before the council for the contract, there was some thought about it being an art project, a sculpture or what-not, but nothing had really been decided.”

  However, Carl Lewis, a member of the Public Art Committee, says Ms. Peters broached the
idea of a cattle drive sculpture to the group around January 1992, before the contract was signed. “We all chimed in,” he says, “and our response was that there are already a number of projects that have to do with cattle in other cities. Besides, the history of Dallas is not one of cattle.

  “It came past us again later in the form of a proposal.” he says. “We asked to see a maquette (a small model), and we asked to see a resume of the artist and other things. There was a certain amount of information that we needed in order to make an appropriate assessment as to whether this was a viable project. The Parks Foundation kept promising they would have a maquette soon, but they kept putting us off. Then we read in the newspaper and in the Parks Foundation newsletter that the contract with the city had been signed (by the city manager’s office) and the landscaping was under way. I said, ‘Wait a minute. How can you have a contract if the project hasn’t gone through the appropriate review process?’ ”

  The contract that the city signed with the Dallas Parks Foundation on March 26, 1992, says Mr. Gonzalez, “was simply to develop that site. There were no details in it about what kind of development Pioneer Plaza was going to be, and no specific mention of any artwork.

  “For that reason, there really wasn’t anything to take before the Public Art Committee or the Cultural Affairs Commission,” he says. “The contract anticipated, however, that if there was going to be some art feature, that feature would be coordinated with the Public Art Committee and the Cultural Affairs Commission.”

  The Parks Foundation already had begun its search for an artist. After conferring with galleries and collectors of western art, it had put together a list of some twenty sculptors who had done monumental bronze pieces. “We were committed to hiring an area artist,” Ms. Peters says. “We went in person to look at the works of eight artists, and finally narrowed it down to two.” Robert Summers, whose monumental works include a statue of Byron Nelson at Las Colinas and one of John Wayne at the Orange County Airport in California, kept coming up on everybody’s list, she says.

  The foundation also hired historian A.C. Greene to write a report on the early history of Dallas, with emphasis on the trails that ran through the town in its early days. The gist of Mr. Greene’s report was that Dallas became an important town because it stood at the junction of several trails that carried settlers, freight, and cattle to and fro in all directions across the Texas frontier.

  John Neely Bryan, Dallas’ first settler, had reached his new home on the east bank of the Trinity via an old north-south Indian trail called Coffee’s Bend Road. An east-west trail called the Kickapoo Trace ran along what is now Commerce Street. Another north-south route called the Preston Trail ran along what is now Preston Road and brought thousands of settlers across the Red River into North Texas.

  But the foundation was less interested in the trails that brought settlers into Dallas than in the Shawnee Trail, a trace that South Texas drovers used to herd cattle to markets in Missouri before the Civil War. The Shawnee originated in Brownsville, came north through Austin and Waco, crossed the Trinity near the present Hyatt Regency, went through downtown Dallas, and continued northward along Preston Road to the Red. The first herds moved along the trail in the 1850s, and until the opening of the war, it was the only route to the northern cattle markets.

  But its fame was brief, and its role in the history of the West—and the history of Dallas—was minor. Cattle raisers in Missouri, whose more expensive livestock had to compete with the cheap Texas cattle on the market, claimed that the longhorns were infecting their cattle with Texas fever, a disease carried by ticks, which apparently didn’t affect the wild longhorns but was fatal to more domestic stock. After a number of armed confrontations between Texas drovers and Missouri farmers, the Missouri markets were all but closed to Texas cattle.

  Furthermore, the Texas cowboy hadn’t yet become a folk hero. It wasn’t until after the Confederate surrender, when war-impoverished Texans began moving cattle up the Chisholm Trail to Abilene, Dodge City, and the other Kansas railheads, that the cowboy grew in the American imagination into a romantic knight of the prairie.

  “Dallas had a cattle trail before Fort Worth did,” Mr. Greene says, “but by the time the Chisholm Trail opened in 1867, all the cattle and everything else had moved west. That’s why Fort Worth, and not Dallas, became Cowtown.”

  Instead, Dallas became the mercantile and financial center for cotton-farming East Texas and, later, the burgeoning Texas oil business.

  So when a cousin called Robert Summers in Glen Rose and told him that Dallas was about to commission a trail drive sculpture for downtown, his reaction was: “Are you sure it’s Dallas?” And when his cousin sent him an August 1992 newspaper article describing the project, he said: “This must be a misprint. Three horses and riders and seventy longhorns?”

  Not long after the article appeared, Jack Morris of the Altermann & Morris Art Gallery in Dallas, which represents Mr. Summers, called and asked him if he would be interested in the job. He said, “Sure.” And last fall, Mr. Morris and his partner, Tony Altermann, landed the commission for their client.

  “When I went to Trammell Crow’s office, an architect had designed a scale model of the plot,” Mr. Summers remembers. “They already had a bunch of little half-inch steers arranged on it like an army marching across a flat field. They asked me, ‘What do you think of this?’

  “And I said, ‘That’s probably the most uninteresting thing I’ve ever seen.’

  “And they said, ‘Well, what would you do?’

  “They had some buckets of sand there, so I dumped one of them on the desk and started making a hill out of it. We spent two hours playing with the sand and the steers, and they took pictures of it, and that was it.”

  Mr. Summers went home to Glen Rose to start work on his maquettes. He says he would prefer not to have to assemble the steers from interchangeable parts, but the cost of seventy individually sculpted steers would be prohibitive.

  When Mr. Beckman presented the maquettes to the Public Art Committee, the steerhockey hit the fan.

  “The first reason was safety,” says Sharon Leeber, a Dallas art consultant and a member of the Public Art Committee. “They said they would blunt the horns of the steers so people won’t be impaled on them, but the sculpture is certainly going to cause a safety problem. You can have massive internal injuries from falling on anything blunt. The other thing is people falling off of them. What are they going to fall onto? Prairie grass? Mud? First, they said the steers were going to be a storybook thing, with kids climbing all over them and getting their pictures taken. Then they said, ‘No, nobody is going to be allowed to climb on them.’ Well, who’s going to enforce that? And if, during some Texas-OU weekend, a drunk falls off of one of those steers and breaks his neck, who’s going to be liable?

  “The second reason was the maintenance cost,” she says. “The Dallas Parks Foundation was predicting between five thousand dollars and ten thousand dollars, basically for washing and waxing the steers twice a year. That didn’t include any repair or any other maintenance that might have to be done. So nobody knows what the maintenance really will be. And the money has to come out of the Convention Center budget.”

  She’s talking about why the Public Art Committee voted not to recommend the project to the Cultural Affairs Commission. “We also had some questions about the manner in which they chose the artist and the landscape architect, Slaney Santana. We found difficulty with quite a bit of what they were proposing. Prairie grass and some of the other things they were proposing were not in keeping with the overall view of the space. We felt they didn’t fit an urban space.

  “And fourth,” she says, “the project didn’t meet the aesthetic standards that had been set for Dallas. We saw a maquette. I can’t remember which one it was. It was not a good maquette. I think it was a steer we saw. I’ve blocked it out of my mind very successfully. The man basically is not a good sculptor. I’ve seen his John Wayne piece in Orange Coun
ty, and half the town considers it a laughingstock. Why do we need seventy steers? If it’s really good art, we don’t need seventy of anything. A good artist would be capable of making a statement with seventeen or twenty or whatever.”

  Finally, she says, “This is not Dallas’ history. Steers have nothing to do with Dallas. If Mr. Crow wants something like this to happen in Dallas, none of us is opposed to him buying a space downtown and putting that project on it. But from my standpoint as a citizen of Dallas, it’s not a good thing to put in front of the Convention Center. I don’t think this is what Dallas really wants as its image. Years ago, Dallas fought this image. Immense energy was dedicated to keeping Fort Worth Fort Worth and Dallas Dallas. There was a huge effort to make sure you knew where you were.”

  So the Public Art Committee was surprised and dismayed when its parent body, the Cultural Affairs Commission, voted on March 18 to recommend that the City Council approve the Pioneer Plaza project, cowboys, steers, and all. “If my memory is correct, that’s the first time we’ve been overturned during my five years on the committee,” says Carl Lewis.

  The Public Art Committee is a subcommittee of the Cultural Affairs Commission. Both are advisory. The City Council isn’t required to follow their recommendations. Says Phil Jones, director of the Office of Cultural Affairs, “A city ordinance provides that the two bodies will review and make recommendations regarding any proposed donations of artwork to the city. In essence, that’s what happened. The project was reviewed. The Public Art Committee had concerns about it. The Cultural Affairs Commission reviewed the recommendations of the committee, looked at a couple of maquettes, heard city staff address other concerns that had been raised, and then voted to recommend approval. This process fulfilled the foundation’s responsibility to confer with the two bodies. Pioneer Plaza is the responsibility of the Parks Foundation now.”

  In any case, Mr. Jones says, Pioneer Plaza already was a “done deal.” The contract had been signed before either advisory body could vote on the art proposal. A negative vote by the Cultural Affairs Commission wouldn’t have affected its validity.