Freeway park

An idea to create greenspaces on the most unlikely locations needs planning now.

Imagine transforming noisy symbols of our city’s most vexing problem into civic showcases, somewhere we can take out-of-town visitors just to show off what Houston can do.

Actually, we don’t have to imagine it. It’s already a reality — in Dallas. Although we’re loath to admit our rival neighbors to the north have done anything we should imitate, we Houstonians need to start making plans to turn what’s now freeway space into new park land.

Here’s why we need to jump onto this idea. State highway officials plan to spend about $1.32 billion on a series of road projects that will literally change the way we get around Houston. The most dramatic development will move Interstate 45 to the other side of downtown, aligning it with the I-69 Eastex Freeway next to Minute Maid Park.

Texas Department of Transportation drawings of those upcoming projects include some truly visionary ideas to bury freeways below ground level and cover them with greenspace. Highway planners call this “cut and cap,” basically cutting a trench in the ground and capping it with a deck. The Eastex and North Freeways would go below grade next to the George R. Brown Convention Center, and TxDOT suggests a deck atop the newly reconfigured highways could be transformed into downtown park space.

A few miles north of downtown, they propose developing a park over the North Freeway near North Main.

Then there’s the tantalizing question about the future of the Pierce Elevated. After the North Freeway is realigned, traffic will no longer drive on the elevated section of the freeway that’s basically the dividing line between downtown and midtown. There’s discussion about turning it into an elevated park, raising the prospect that we’ll see new greenspace both south and east of downtown in places where we now see traffic jams.

But here’s the catch. These greenspace options are just ideas on the drawing board, pretty pictures without any funding. As TxDOT’s artist renderings prominently note, putting parks atop freeways will require separate finance and development.

Maybe this seems like some farfetched brainstorming, but we don’t have to look far to see how it can really happen. Atop a section of the Woodall Rodgers Freeway in Dallas sits Klyde Warren Park, five acres of inner-city greenspace featuring everything from a fountain plaza to a performance pavilion to an urban dog park. The $110 million development was bankrolled with a combination of city bond funds, state highway money and — most significantly — $55 million in private donations. It’s also privately managed by a foundation that raises money to pay for its operations and new amenities.

Houstonians have a rich history of generously underwriting park projects. Discovery Green was nothing more than a couple of parking lots until a small group of philanthropists got together to acquire the real estate that’s now one of the city’s premiere attractions. The $58 million development of Buffalo Bayou Park was funded entirely with private money, more than half of it coming from the Kinder Foundation.

Mayor Sylvester Turner earlier this week, when asked about what might happen to the Pierce Elevated, said it was “all kind of up in the air.” But as TxDOT begins its multibillion-dollar local highway projects, this is exactly the time Houston needs to begin planning and fundraising for what could become a couple of iconic local attractions. If Dallas can do it, surely we Houstonians can create our own freeway parks.