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Numerous Pioneer Cemetery headstones have disappeared over the year. Some are in the basement of Dallas City Hall, others stored at Hensley Field. But many are missing, making it difficult to tell who’s buried where, in part due to conflicting plot maps.<\/p>\n
Robert Wilonsky\/Staff writer<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were out [laser-mapping] because the Texas Historical Commission wanted us to confirm where the bodies are and where the coffins may have shifted under the dirt,\u201d Rosa Fleming, director of Convention and Event Services, said Monday morning as we stood in the parking lot off Griffin. Enough folks freaked out over the sight of workers wandering the boneyard that Fleming and reps from public relations firm Allyn Media, hired by the city to sell the makeover, invited me for a chat.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is part of the overall convention center master plan,\u201d Fleming said. \u201cThis was always meant to stay here. It\u2019s the second most visited site in Dallas. Why would we move it?\u201d<\/p>\n
By the way, Dealey Plaza is the most visited site in Dallas, because of course it is.<\/p>\n
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Fleming said $10 million has been\u00a0allotted for design, construction and restoration, while another $5 million has been earmarked for the just-in-case. Said Fleming, \u201cAs with any historic restoration project of this scale, we anticipate cost adjustments as work progresses, and have built in contingency funding and outside partnerships to keep the project on track.\u201d<\/p>\n
She envisions a far more walkable (and ADA-compliant) site that would actually combine the steers and the cemetery into a cohesive, coherent site with signage that provides more Dallas history than some headstones with familiar names on them (Harwood, Browder, Peak, Young, Marilla). There\u2019s also a tunnel buried some 20 feet beneath this dried-out, deeply eroded hill, dating back to the days when this land was a railyard.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou had a railroad that went through here, you had a cattle drive, you\u2019ve got the founders,\u201d Fleming said. \u201cThere will be the storytelling of how Dallas became Dallas.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Louis Frisbie, founder and CEO\u00a0of Metropolitan Infrastructure, has been at Pioneer Cemetery in recent months trying to determine how many people are buried in the founders’ graveyard\u00a0\u2014 and exactly where they\u00a0were interred.<\/p>\n
Robert Wilonsky\/Staff writer<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not exactly clear how many people are buried in the cemetery, a local and state landmark<\/a> that fell into disrepair<\/a> a couple of times<\/a> in recent years despite being under the care of the Dallas Park and Recreation Department. Convention center expansions, among other issues, required archeological surveys and reinterment as recently as 1999.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Louis Frisbie, founder and CEO of Metropolitan Infrastructure and the project leader, said Monday that \u201cthere are two different burial plot layouts that contradict each other.\u201d<\/p>\n And even a quick walk through the boneyard reveals dozens of missing and indecipherable headstones \u2014 some, just snapped off; others, merely worn down by time. Some headstones are locked behind a gate in a City Hall parking garage, while others were taken to Hensley Field, the old Naval Air Station where the city winds up stashing everything sooner than later.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s why we\u2019ve had boots on the ground, to see what\u2019s really here, then reconcile it against the documents we have,\u201d Frisbie said. \u201cThen, hopefully, with that information, if the broken pieces are still legible, we can figure out where they went. So, it\u2019s a process.\u201d<\/p>\n Kind of like finishing Pioneer Park itself.<\/p>\n Somewhere beneath the hill featuring the cattle driver is a train tunnel that used to cross this land, which was a\u00a0railyard before the convention center’s expansion.<\/p>\n Robert Wilonsky\/Staff writer<\/p>\n Allyn Media\u2019s been meeting with folks, including Summers, who worked with Crow on the project, which was supposed to feature 70 Longhorn steers running down that hill. But as Summers told the Dallas Observer in 1999<\/a>, only 49 were ever installed, alongside three trail riders, when money and momentum ran out. But not before Crow and supporters raised $5 million to sink the steers into city-owned land once set aside for Griffin Square, which was supposed to feature a 75-story office tower and a convention center hotel. Crow, developer and owner of what was then called the Loews Anatole Hotel, didn\u2019t love that.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Today, 14 of the sculptures are grazing at Hensley Field, Fleming said, including 10 removed in 2018 because they\u2019d grown too \u201cwobbly\u201d; others were later damaged when a driver steered a car into the steers. City staffers said at the time that restoration of the 10 would cost $250,000, though Fleming said Monday they are \u201cstill working on the cost estimate.\u201d Nonetheless, she said she would like to see all 70 roam the intersection at some point.<\/p>\n Decorating that corner with Summers\u2019 cattle drive was done over the objection of the city\u2019s Public Art Committee, which included artists who sued to stop it, insisting, among other things, they weren\u2019t historically accurate. The Shawnee Trail cut through Dallas<\/a>, but in 1993, Dallas City Council member Paul Fielding, yet to become\u00a0the first council member to be indicted while in office<\/a>, told this newspaper that \u201cDallas has never been a cattle town\u201d and accused Crow of \u201ctrying to turn the city into something it\u2019s not.\u201d<\/p>\n Texas Monthly wrote that\u00a0the Dallas Parks Foundation<\/a> \u201cwould have done better to sponsor a sculpture with \u2026 70 shopping bags from Neiman Marcus,\u201d because \u201cat least they have something to do with Dallas.\u201d But Crow told The New York Times in 1994<\/a> those \u201cbovine bronzes \u2026 would someday be what the Eiffel Tower is to Paris and the Colosseum is to Rome.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Pioneer Cemetery’s final burial occurred in 1921. Which looks to be the last time its grass received any water.<\/p>\n Robert Wilonsky\/Staff writer<\/p>\n For better or worse, he wasn\u2019t wrong.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Who knows when this will happen. The convention center\u2019s delayed until at least 2030, and the city still has to issue a request for qualifications to find a landscape architect. But if and when it\u2019s done, there should be signs and paths enough to tie the site together.<\/p>\n Monday morning, Allyn Media\u2019s Shawn Williams said that according to a survey, 61% of the visitors who pull over to photograph those steers don\u2019t know there\u2019s a cemetery on site. About half an hour later, 71-year-old Jose Trevino came over to ask if he could walk on the grass to take photos of the sculptures from atop the hill.<\/p>\n Trevino just retired from the Dallas Police Department, three years after being honored as the Northwest Patrol Bureau\u2019s Non-Sworn Employee of the Year. He said he finally had the time to take photos of the Longhorns. I asked if he knew what was beyond the sculptures, up the hill. Sure, he said \u2013 City Hall. We explained that there was a cemetery up there filled with founders of the city for which he once worked.<\/p>\n \u201cWow,\u201d he said, his eyes wide. \u201cYou live in Dallas, you don\u2019t really take the time to explore it.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Yup, a lot of good stories here, some of them even true.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The southeast corner of Young and Griffin streets in downtown Dallas is 4.2 acres of history, mythmaking and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":417134,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[102,104,103],"class_list":["post-417133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-dallas","tag-dallas","tag-dallas-headlines","tag-dallas-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417133","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=417133"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417133\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/417134"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=417133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=417133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=417133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>\n
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