Old Parkland

When Texas real estate tycoon Harlan Crow isn't sending his good friend Clarence Thomas on expensive vacations, he spends part of his time on a project called Old Parkland. (The original section is complete, but I have read that an expansion is in the works.)

Parkland was the first public hospital in Dallas, and over the years it grew into a complex of neoclassical buildings; above is the main hospital building of 1913. Then it became obsolete, and after serving for some years as a mental health facility it was mostly closed. But it was in a valuable downtown location, and Crow took a fancy to the old property. (JFK died in a completely different, modern facility.)

Crow and his team renovated old buildings and built new ones in a semi-classical style, ending up with a spectacular complex that has become office space for hedge funds and other top-dollar renters as well as a meeting space for conservative organizations. The rotunda building is one of the new structures, along with the sculpture of Dawn and (I think) everything else you see in the picture above.

I find this project fascinating for reasons that are deeply personal in complicated ways, so, sorry, this post is going to be half about Old Parkland and half about me. As all my readers know, I am no fan of modernism, and the closer it gets to brutalism the more it makes my stomach churn. But I have never been comfortable with contemporary neoclassicism, either. Parkland interests me because while there are things about it I like very much, I can't love it because so much about it feels contrived. I am happy Crow built this instead of another assemblage of glass rectangles, but I feel like we could still do much better. And, you know, why can't we come up with our own vocabulary of decoration rather than relying on systems developed in 350 BC or 1250 AD? There is also a political angle about which I have similar feelings, as I will explain.

The best thing about Old Parkland is that Crowe laid out a ton of money to top-notch craftsmen to pursue beautiful work in wood, stone, and metal. That's a real wooden floor, constructed by master woodworkers who give it top billing on their company web site; no doubt they were thrilled to have a client say, "damn the expense, give me your best work."

This kind of revelling in what the best artisans can do is one of the things I miss most in modernism. I love things beautifully made by real experts who have sunk years into their crafts, giving us details that startle and amaze.

There is also some lovely architectural work; fans of neoclassicism are particularly fond of the bell tower, which has been called the most beautiful neoclassical structure of the past half century. I would tell you who designed it, but the architect is listed as The Beck Group, a firm with dozens of architects; who says a committee never created anything nice?

I am of two minds about the proliferation of cow skulls. On the one hand, I was just complaining about the slavish re-use of Classical motifs, but on the other, this feels to me like Texas cornpone.

Noble western animals (there is also a grizzly bear in this set), along with a famous line from Montequieu on the need for independent powers within the government.

An interior like this conveys something of the promise and peril of neotraditional architecture. On the one hand this is an interesting space with many lovely details, but on the other it feels, to me, a bit fake, like a stage set hurriedly thrown up inside a warehouse. As you can see, the architects did regularly stray from basic Classicism and bring in details that look more like early twentieth-century Craftsman work.

Overall view of the new buildings at the inner end of the complex,

which sure beats the heck out of L'Enfant Plaza.

Crow also laid out a lot of money to neoclassical sculptors, with mixed results. Which is not really a complaint; when you commission new work from real artists you always run the risk of getting something strange, and kudos to Crow for patronizing people capable of surprising us.

One of the distinctive things about Old Parkland, and probably the thing most central to Crow's personal vision, is the theme of patriotic virtue. So we get sculptures of Washington and Hamilton interspersed with textual exhortations to be good.

Which sort of culminates in this work, Non Sibi by Chas Fagan, celebrating the heroes of 9-11. That's the "let's roll" moment on Flight 93.

I don't want to be too snarky about this, that was a real moment of heroism that might have saved hundreds of lives. Public sculpture is also, at least sometimes, supposed to resonate with the public, and I bet this resonates with far more Americans than anything abstract ever will.

So it isn't that I much mind anything that is depicted at Old Parkland; my gripes have more to do with what is left out. For starters, Abraham Lincoln; to me, a roll of American heroes that has room for Hamilton and random Revolutionary soldiers (and buffalo and grizzly bears) but not Lincoln smacks of neoconfederate reaction. It smacks of writing certain very important things out of the story to make it narrower, to make it the story of one kind of person and one kind of idea. The real story is something very different.

I am an American patriot in a profound way; I love this country, and I feel lucky to have been born here at the height of our power and glory. But I find the patriotism of people like Harlan Crow weirdly limited, and I mean weirdly; I just don't get how you can love America while leaving out so much of what makes our story amazing. Ours is not just the story of robust manly heroes of liberty. It is the story of mad adventures, utopian dreamers, scheming traitors, desperate immigrants, clever inventors, cruel slave drivers, bold rebels, stubborn prairie farmwives, masters of gerrymandering, apocalyptic prophets, drag queens, self-sacrificing saints, libertarians, communists, death-crazed gunmen, hippies, yippies, video game designers, the Society for Cutting Up Men, the Black Panthers, the Federalist Society. It is a story of riotous cultural invention: blues, jazz, rock and roll, honty tonk, grunge, emo, abstract expressionism, pop art, comic books, superheroes, science fiction, the hollywood blockbuster, the Lindy, the Twist, the Twitter thread, the flame war.

What makes me uncomfortable about Harlan Crow's vision is the same thing I dislike in histories written by the woke: the narrowness. I hate the the exclusion, the insistence on defining one path as the only correct one and shunning everything else. In my sculpture park, every statue of a Hamilton or Washington will be accompanied by one of Susan B. Anthony or Eugene Debs or Andy Warhol. I hate the refusal to see the ambiguity of everything, to recognize the excellent qualities even of awful or desperate people, to understand that a world in which everyone agreed on how to live would be a dismal, boring place. American history is the history of disagreement and conflict, and if you hate that then as far as I am concerned you don't really love this country.

To get back to architecture: what I like about Old Parkland is the way it broadens the horizons of contemporary design, rejecting the spare modernism that we have too much of already. What I dislike is that it rejects the modern straightjacket only to don a different one, the limitations of patriotic neoclassicism. Not entirely, which is how the project ended up producing much that is worthy of praise: the wonderful wooden floors, the amazing ironwork, the beautiful, luxurious spaces. 

What Old Parkland achieves is the expression in brick and stone of a certain outlook on the world, both politically and aesthetically. That outlook is mercantile, traditional, Texan, patriotic in a certain limited sense. That was probably Crow's aim, and he achieved it. But Crow's outlook is very different from my own, which is why I can admire this from afar but not welcome it into my heart.