In a recent column for The Dallas Morning News, architecture critic Mark Lamster proposes a new pedestrian-oriented vision for the district surrounding Dealey Plaza, where President John F. Kennedy was murdered, and where the Dallas authorities are currently planning a new municipal memorial for the victims of racial violence. The memorial will be set in Martyrs Park, a grassy, triangular knoll surrounded on all sides by highway infrastructure and roads.

"Make no mistake: The geography of Dallas is a geography of race," Lamster writes, highlighting that historically speaking, "systematic discrimination forced African Americans into the least desirable spaces of the city—areas prone to flooding, near industry, caught on the wrong side of train tracks and highways, and always ripe for appropriation if and when the need arose" and that the same logic is currently at play with regards to the location of the proposed Martyrs Park memorial.

Lamster's vision would change this arrangement by closing off Main Street, which bounds the park and Dealey Plaza, to traffic while also pedestrianizing a "triple underpass" bridge that runs over Main Street between Dealey Plaza from Martyrs Park. The plan would create a new pedestrian district connecting the two memorial parks with a series of museums and other civic monuments nearby. 

As Lamster writes, "a park here would have far greater benefits, uniting the new lynching memorial, the Sixth Floor Museum, the Holocaust Museum (just a block away), the adjacent civic museum in the Old Red Courthouse, and the JFK memorial beyond it. A memorial park would bring this ad hoc group of institutions and monuments together, forming a focal point for tourists and the city."

Beyond providing a fitting series of humanized urban spaces surrounding these important public icons, however, the new park district would also highlight the city's efforts to fully come to terms with the role racial terror and other forms of social tragedy have played in its development. 

According to Lamster, "Above all, it would have the potential to flip the way Dallas understands itself, and is understood by the rest of the country. For understandable reason, this city is identified with political violence and intolerance; yet the idea that other cities — especially those in the North — might look down at Dallas is in its own way obscene; they are by no means innocent themselves. A new memorial park would show Dallas embracing that past, reckoning with it in a way that most cities have not."

As the critic states, the transformation would not be so different from New York City's Snøhetta-led pedestrianization efforts around Times Square. "If New York City can shut Times Square, the so-called Crossroads of the World, to vehicular traffic," Lamster writes, "Dallas can close the Triple Underpass."