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Following an impassioned speech by District 13 Dallas City Council member Mitchell (I'm counting the days until May when he's gone) Rasansky to protect the rights of wealthy business owners ("They deserve a voice too," he said, seemingly with a straight face -- it was difficult to tell watching him on television) and an only semi-coherent rant from Deputy Mayor Pro Tem Dwayne Carraway in which he still denied City Council involvement in an on-line poll, the City Council once again denied the will of the people and the recommendations of its own Planning Commission and voted 12-3 to rename Industrial Boulevard. From henceforth and forever more it will be known as Riverfront Boulevard as though (1) there was a river out there someplace and (2) this street was fronting it.
And, in one of the most blatantly patronizing acts ever committed by a public official, Mayor Tom Leppert then asked council member Steve Salazar, who moments earlier had introduced a perfectly sensible motion to but the brakes on this whole re-naming business for 60-90 days, to head an ad-hoc committee designed to throw the Mescans a bone that will keep them happy and in their place. I'm trying to remember a time when I was more ashamed of the majority of our elected municipal officials but one doesn't come immediately to mind.
Council member and chief Leppert puppet Dave Neumann has called the renaming a branding exercise. That's a kind way of saying it's a deceptive advertising exercise. But now all those businesses that are located on what was once Industrial can peddle to their properties to unsuspecting buyers: "The city is doing this once-in-a-lifetime park project on the Trinity River and here's your chance to purchase sure-to-appreciate land right smack dab on Riverfront Blvd." I doubt if anyone will ever mention that at absolutely no place on Riverfront Boulevard will anyone have a view of a river, unless you're in a building several stories tall. And even then ....
Listen, folks, whether you like it or not, the Trinity is not a river. It's a stream at best. To qualify as a river, you must have to swim across it and not be assured you'll make to the other side when you start out. And even if you want to argue Trinity's status as a river, soon there will be high-speed tollroad between Industrial and the Trinity. How can you name a street "Riverfront" when it's separated from the river it's supposed to front by a high-speed tollroad? If anything, the tollroad should be renamed Riverfront.
I admired the speeches given during this debate by Mr. Salazar and Mayor Pro Tem Dr. Elba Garcia. Other than Salazar, Dr. Garcia, Rasasnky and Carraway, the other members of the council were sheepishly silent to the point of coming across as ashamed of the way they voted. And well they should be.
Note to Mr. Salazar: A lot of people are going to coming to you in the next couple of weeks with suggestions on what to rename for Cesar Chavez. Let me be one of the first in line. I've got a street for you to rename after Mr. Chavez. It's not a major thoroughfare like Industrial or Ross Avenue; in fact, I would be hard pressed to find the western end of the street, where it dead ends into Young Street just west of Field in downtown Dallas. It's only about seven blocks long and it's not named, as far as I can tell, for anyone at all, let alone anyone of historical significance. The street I have in mind now bears the name Marilla. For all practical purposes, the western fourth of Marilla Ave. was sacrificed to build Dallas City Hall, yet the structure stills bears an address on that street. So I think it's only fitting that the permanent address of Dallas City Hall becomes 1500 Cesar Chavez Ave.
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Marilla was named after a wife of one of the pioneers in Dallas. However, the Dallas City Archivist has been trying for 7 years to find out who Pearl is named after. He can find nothing. Same thing for Moody. Put these two streets together and name them in honor of Cesar Chavez and you have a street going from the heart of the former Little Mexico, right next to St. Anns which was the first school to serve Hispanics in Dallas. From there Cesar Chaves would go south past the Cathedral of Guadalupe which is the largest gathering place for Hispanics in the Southwest every weekend as thousands attend multiple Masses starting Saturday evening and going through Sunday afternoon. Then Pearl goes on south across all of downtown Dallas, within 2 blocks of the Latino Cultural Center, and dead ends in the heart of the Farmers Market. What street could be more appropriate for the name Cesar Chavez? There are only about 300 addresses on Pearl and of those only about 50 are businesses, a fraction of the number that are on Ross. Most of the addresses are private residences.
No known source for the current street names, and if there is, nobody knows what it is now. From a historical perspective it cannot be that significant since less that one out of 10,000 people in Dallas know the source of the street names. A fraction of the number of businesses as were on Ross will be affected on Pearl. What is wrong with the Pearl/Moody street names being changed to honor Cesar Chavez and Hispanic History in Dallas? Such a change would also bring more visibility to this developing area of Dallas.
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