Continuing our look into the archives of Heritage Park designer Lawrence Halprin courtesy of District 9 City Council member Joel Burns, we’re taking a look today at some…odd selections leading up through the design of the park. Tomorrow, we’ll be looking at some actual sketches of the design of the park.

First, this rather unusual map…

It’s a bit hard to see what’s going on in this drawing, but close examination reveals some details. The map shows a Downtown Fort Worth that never was, and a good number of structures that were never built. Not all are named, though some appear to be parking structures. It’s almost like a variation of the infamous Gruen Plan. At the top of the map, a curved roadway appears crossing the Trinity to the north of Downtown, and it’s marked with the note “Southwest Freeway general alignment.” It’s hard to picture a freeway slicing through what is now slated to be prime urban development property in the heart of the Trinity River Vision – it would almost certainly have been looked back upon as an unfortunate addition to the central Fort Worth urban environment.

A note just above the Paddock Viaduct notes “Main St. closed to through traffic,” indicating that North Main and the Paddock Viaduct would have perhaps been turned into a pedestrian path.

At upper left, a very interesting piece of history – what appears to be a small lake-type body carved out of the convergence of the West and Clear forks of the river. While much smaller than the lake planned in the Trinity River Vision, it’s clear the idea has been around for a while. Some sort of structure is shown with what appear to be boat docks extending into the lake. A dotted line runs through this structure and to the south, all the way to at least Lancaster Avenue. It’s our belief that this dotted line represents the Leonard’s/Tandy Center subway line, running through some sort of new waterfront development. The dotted line to the south meshes with old plans by the city to extend the Leonard’s subway all the way to Lancaster. Which leads us to…

This appears to be a rendering of the waterfront structure from the map above. The bridge shown is the Henderson Street bridge, and it matches the existing structure’s single arch design. Boat docks extend into the water, and there appear to be people fishing off the structure as well. The river is wider, showing the small “lake” from the previous map. At the lower part of the image, the tracks of the Leonard’s subway can be seen running out of the building into Downtown.

Finally, this is one of several pages of notes written & drawn by Halprin during the design of the park. As this was presented to us without explanation, we can only guess at what Halprin was saying here, exactly, but the note is interesting to look at even without context. Movement has always been a key component of Halprin’s design process, and it would appear he was thinking about it during the Heritage Park design – whatever these notations mean.

Tomorrow – design sketches of the park itself.