A New "East-West Highway"
In the mid-1950s, Dallas was caught up in the national fervor of urban renewal. City leaders were eager to modernize, and in 1957, they celebrated the completion of what was then called the “East-West Highway” (later I-30).
It was a point of immense civic pride. “The city was quite proud of this fabulous new turnpike,” local historian Evelyn Montgomery says. “They had postcards you could buy showing the looping interchanges and toll booths.” It promised a futuristic, high-speed connection to Fort Worth, bypassing the slow “old Fort Worth highway.”
Carving the Chasm
But that progress came at a steep price. To create the “Canyon,” engineers dug deep into the earth, literally wiping out the existing street grid.
“They dug and they wiped out both older, expensive Victorian homes in the southern part of downtown and a lot of the Cedars, which was an industrial and working-class area,” Montgomery explains. The highway even swallowed half of Old City Park, the city’s very first park…