The Trinity River does not run where it used to. Until the late 1920s it wandered through the bottomland west of downtown Dallas in a set of loops that flooded the town again and again. Fifteen inches of rain fell on 25 May 1908; the river crested the next day at fifty two and a half feet, a record that still stands, spread a mile and a half wide, took out every bridge and left Oak Cliff reachable only by boat. Five people died and four thousand were made homeless. The answer, argued over for twenty years and funded under the Ulrickson bond programme of 1927, was to give up the old channel: dig a new straight one half a mile west, and raise earth levees thirty feet high along both sides to make a floodway two to three thousand feet wide. Construction began in July 1928 and ran about seven hundred working days, a thousand men and fifteen draglines around the clock shifting twenty two million cubic yards of earth. It was the second largest project of its kind in the country at the time, after the levee works at Dayton, Ohio. What it produced was not only flood protection but land: ten thousand reclaimed acres in the middle of a city. The old meanders were filled and the ground became the Trinity Industrial District, chartered in 1928, which is the route Stemmons Freeway took when it opened in 1959 and where the Design District sits now. The river was left in a grassy trench between two embankments, out of sight of the city it runs through, and a two hundred and fifty acre park is being built in it.
Getting there
32.7838, -96.8182
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
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