Dallas is an interesting city. You can be driving south on Inwood, for instance, and all of a sudden you’re on Hampton. Or you could be driving west from downtown on Continental and all of a sudden you’re on Singleton. How does this happen? You’ve passed over the Trinity river. The Trinity isn’t much of a river. It’s actually more of a creek, except when it floods. Then it becomes a river. But it rarely floods. So rare, in fact, that the city has built parks inside the levees. But the Trinity saunders through Dallas and divides the city into Dallas proper and west Dallas. West Dallas was called Cement City in the days of Clyde Barrow. It’s the poor section of Dallas; the section where Blacks and Hispanics congregate. The white people either live in townhouses downtown or have fled north.

But to get back to the Trinity river that separates Dallas, the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava was commissioned in 2002 to build a bridge across the Trinity where Continental becomes Singleton. It will soon become a symbol of the city and is already a prominent feature in the downtown skyline as viewed from the west. We west Dallas folks are already claiming it as our bridge. Calatrava has bridges in Buenos Aires, Venice, Jerusalem, Dublin, & Seville. He built an art museum in Milwaukee, a ballet in New York, the Olympic Sports Complex in Athens, the Turning Torso in Sweden, the Denver international airport, and a library in Zurich.