\u201cI tried to hide my excitement, so no one would think anything more of it since they were about to be thrown out,\u201d\u00a0Castaneda, a 39-year-old Woodrow Wilson High School graduate, told me Monday. \u201cI tried to be super-nonchalant. I said, \u2018I\u2019ll take these off your hands.\u2019 Meanwhile, inside I\u2019m like, \u2018Holy cow, these are the statues.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
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Solomon\u2019s statues featuring the artist\u2019s cephalopod interpretations of Sarah Horton Cockrell, left, and John Neely Bryan have been saved after the city removed and hid them beginning in 2019.<\/p>\n
Robert Wilonsky\/Staff writer<\/p>\n
They city never would say where they went or why they were hidden from the public\u2019s view, only that they weren\u2019t commissioned works of public art and therefore did \u201cnot belong in the public space.\u201d<\/p>\n
They still remain out of sight but have been spared execution, thanks to Castaneda, now thrilled and proud to be part of a story that inches toward myth with every turn of the screw. Using his father\u2019s SUV, he ferried the couple to his grandparents\u2019 circa-1920s house on Glasgow Drive, where they remained until a long-planned renovation forced Castaneda to find them yet another home last weekend.<\/p>\n
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So Monday evening, I went to visit Bryan and Cockrell at their latest digs: the northwest Dallas garage of my old friend and former Dallas Observer colleague Pete Freedman, who\u2019d covered Solomon and his statues while at Central Track and WFAA-TV (Channel 8)<\/a> with the fervor of a true believer<\/a>. Castaneda knew Freedman would give them a good home.<\/p>\n \u201cThis story just pops up every couple of years, and it\u2019s so crazy, everything about it,\u201d said Freedman, now managing corporate communications at Public Storage, how appropriate. \u201cBut it\u2019s also so fun. Nothing surprises me anymore. I am completely and utterly charmed by the whole thing. You have a guy doing this for no real reason other than to have fun with some bizarre Dallas history and proliferate the Dallas origin story. This is crack for people like you and me.\u201d<\/p>\n Self-Portrait of John Neely Bryan (hypothetical), 1877 first surfaced\u00a0near the convention center\u2019s Lamar Street DART station at October\u2019s end in 2019. It was accompanied by a plaque, made to look like an official public work, whose text began with the story of Bryan\u2019s end, when he was \u201cconfined in his last days to an insane asylum in Austin\u201d\u00a0\u2014 the State Lunatic Asylum, to be precise, where he died in 1877 after a seven-month stay.<\/p>\n Dallas firefighter Saul Castaneda kept the statues in his East Dallas home until a planned renovation required him to find a new home for the pair over the weekend.<\/p>\n Saul Castaneda\/Courtesy<\/p>\n I\u2019d wager that most people who read that first Central Track story knew little to nothing of the Tennessee-born Bryan, except, perhaps, that there\u2019s a log cabin planted downtown meant to replicate his long-drowned home along the Trinity River. The Pioneer Cemetery headstone honoring the \u201cFirst Citizen of Dallas\u201d<\/a> is also phony, as it\u2019s likely Bryan is buried in an unmarked grave in Austin<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Solomon\u2019s statue and its accompanying plaque remind me of something historian A.C. Greene wrote in Texas Monthly in 1973 when lamenting that Dallas had done little to honor the man who willed this city into existence<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is a shame that the city he made can\u2019t know more of him,\u201d Greene wrote. \u201cHe was one of the frontier strange ones; gifted in vision, but touched with a kind of driven, vengeful fate that finally enveloped him (he suspected the terrible experience of cholera had damaged his mind and body).\u201d<\/p>\n The statue is as much a fever dream as Bryan and the city he forged. And the plaque accompanying it ended with a question many of us dug-in lifers ask regularly: \u201cIs the city he began a city in fact or only in shared delusion?\u201d Octopus-headed John Neely Bryan just put it more elegantly.<\/p>\n Portrait of Sarah Horton Cockrell, 2024 \u2013 taller and heavier and sturdier and more detailed than Bryan, her head adorned with a halo, her upward-turned right palm holding a John Kennedy half dollar, her feet surrounded by real animal bones \u2013 showed up in mid-December 2021 on the spot formerly occupied by the 1897 Confederate War Memorial<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Its accompanying plaque bore Cistercian numerals<\/a> forming a phone number, which, when dialed, played a distorted message; then, later, classical music. The plaque also spoke obliquely of Cockrell\u2019s construction of the first bridge to span the river\u00a0\u2014 \u201cher Trinity Toll Bridge still calling in Sarah\u2019s debts on another plane, a taller, more enduring memorial than any our city\u2019s other daughters have built.\u201d<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Pete Freedman cradles the head of John Neely Bryan (or close enough), who now shares a home with Sarah Horton Cockrell in the Central Track founder\u2019s garage. Freedman is thrilled to have them. His wife is occasionally startled by the cephalopods now residing in her garage.<\/p>\n Robert Wilonsky\/Staff writer<\/p>\n Again, the city quickly snatched the statue and buried it in the bowels of the convention center.\u00a0<\/p>\n Downtown Dallas Inc.\u2019s president and CEO, Jennifer Scripps, at the time director of the city\u2019s Office of Arts and Culture, said Monday that the works were \u201cshockingly good.\u201d But leaving Bryan and Cockrell in place would have \u201copened the doors to anyone putting anything on city property,\u201d she said, \u201cand what you think is art, someone else doesn\u2019t, and then you have issues.\u201d<\/p>\n The statues stopped appearing, the stories stopped running, but Solomon was far from finished.<\/p>\n In April 2022, Freedman and a few others smitten with the mystery received a text that read, \u201cAbsence was noticed\/Ambassador of ashes\/The keys are in the safe,\u201d accompanied by a photo of five plaster birds lying in a circle in a parking lot in downtown\u2019s shadow\u00a0\u2014 on the spot of the burned-down Ambassador Hotel in the Cedars. More clues led to more birds around Cockrell\u2019s grave at Uptown\u2019s Greenwood Cemetery<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 then, eventually, a box in a small lake near the Santa Fe Trestle Trail containing a bronze bird and more clues and carvings.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n A 47-minute YouTube video titled The Dallas Cephalopod Mystery<\/a> chronicled the story also unfolding on the group-chat app Discord. Reddit, too, became obsessed<\/a>. Then in 2024, Freedman said, he and the other Solomon followers\u00a0received another photo of a plaque in the Trinity floodway containing five lines representing Dallas\u2019 possible namesakes. Determined diggers discovered Solomon had also buried a sarcophagus, a foot below ground, containing what Freedman described as an unnamed \u201ccephalopod humanoid.\u201d<\/p>\n Bird statues placed around Sarah Horton Cockrell\u2019s headstone at Greenwood Cemetery weeks after the statue was discovered in downtown\u2019s Pioneer Cemetery.<\/p>\n Staff photo\/Dallas Morning News<\/p>\n Freedman thinks he knows who Solomon is. But in truth, that\u2019s the least interesting part of a story that\u2019s seemingly unfinished if the artist sticks to his schedule of dropping new works every two years.<\/p>\n \u201cThe who doesn\u2019t matter,\u201d said Freeman, to whom the artist sent a small sculpture accompanied by a plaque awarding him The Solomon Award for Journalistic Exceptionalism. (It reads, in part, \u201cDallas is only tangible so long as it is described that way.\u201d) \u201cIt\u2019s the what, because the why is implied: Let\u2019s have some fun with the history of Dallas. And he did it. He has a couple of dozen people scrambling around the city going into trails and cemeteries and floodways actively seeking information about the city of Dallas. They\u2019re experiencing the city. That\u2019s pretty remarkable.\u201d<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Before I left Freedman\u2019s house Monday, we tried that old phone number to see if Solomon picked up. Instead, we got a text: \u201cCan I call you later?\u201d He never did.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Shortly before the machines arrived to begin devouring the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center at the end of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":373851,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[102,104,103,88574,109410,88952],"class_list":["post-373850","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-dallas","tag-dallas","tag-dallas-headlines","tag-dallas-news","tag-tp-downtown-dallas","tag-tp-art-and-the-city","tag-tp-dallas-city-hall"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373850","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=373850"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373850\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/373851"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=373850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=373850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=373850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>\n
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