The Bartholomew Plan: Shaping Dallas's Urban Landscape

In 1943 the firm of Harland Bartholomew and Associates, city planners and landscape engineers from Saint Louis, Missouri, were hired by the city of Dallas to design a comprehensive master plan for the city. The firm’s principal, Harland Bartholomew, was a noted civil engineer and urban planner who in 1927 had contracted with the city of Fort Worth to produce a major street improvement plan (see BARTHOLOMEW PLAN (FORT WORTH)). Dallas’s earlier master plan, the Kessler Plan, published in 1912, was only carried forth in piecemeal before its architect, George Kessler, died in 1923. In 1927 the Ulrickson Committee, organized to follow up on the recommendations of the Kessler Plan, recommended that a new comprehensive master plan be developed. Bartholomew and Associates were considered for this purpose, but no new plan was commissioned at this time. The city planning movement in Dallas was stymied by internal divisions and the onset of the Great Depression.

In 1939 the Citizens Charter Association, supported by prominent business leaders in the Dallas Citizens Council, swept the city council election and selected steadfast city planning supporter J. Woodall Rodgers as mayor. Rodgers and civic leaders rallied support for a new master plan. In 1943 the city council hired Bartholomew’s firm to prepare a series of planning reports. In September of that year Bartholomew and Associates published a volume titled Your Dallas of Tomorrow: A Master Plan for a Greater Dallas, consisting of two reports. These first two reports, “Character of the City” and “Scope of the City Plan,” were followed by thirteen more reports (although not published) issued to the city periodically until May 1945. The reports took a comprehensive view of the city’s problems and included recommendations not only for the development of the city’s central business district, but also for its various neighborhoods and the county beyond the city’s contemporary limits. They covered a wide range of topics, such as zoning, land use, airports, public buildings, housing problems, the park system, sanitation, and street improvements, among other issues.

Bartholomew and his team were particularly concerned with the economic and social decline of the urban core of the city due to suburban growth. In their reports they proposed an upgraded street plan with extensions and widenings to improve traffic flow from all parts of Dallas to downtown. The report on housing criticized the many instances of inadequate housing and substandard living conditions in certain neighborhoods, including those just outside the central business district. The report specifically highlighted the city’s inadequate housing for African Americans and censured the discriminatory housing practices that forced many Black Dallasites into old homes which lacked proper facilities. To solve the problem of these slums and the outflow of residents to suburbs, the report advised the redevelopment of blighted areas with affordable, modern housing and expanded public housing. Bartholomew advocated cooperation between the municipal government and private enterprise to address neighborhood rehabilitation.

In early 1945 Dallas city leaders launched a campaign to annex the nearby communities of University Park, Highland Park, and Preston Hollow. This effort was prompted by the plan’s call for political unity across the greater Dallas area to execute the recommendations of each report. In April 1945 residents of Preston Hollow voted to join Dallas while those of the Park Cities voted against the merger. As a result of the election, the city also annexed forty square miles of unincorporated county territory. In December Mayor Rodgers and other supporters of the master plan secured passage of a $40 million bond program, the largest in the city’s history at that point, which carried many of Bartholomew’s recommendations. Money from this bond went to projects such as expansions of Love Field and the Garza-Little Elm Reservoir (later renamed Lewisville Lake) and construction of Central Expressway (U.S. Highway 75), the Dallas Memorial Auditorium (now the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center), and a new Dallas Public Library building (completed in 1955). In November 1946 the Greater Dallas Planning Council was established as an advisory body to guide the implementation of the plan. In 1950 Marvin Springer, chief planner for Bartholomew and Associates, became Dallas’s city planning director. However, the city fell far short of the goals of the plan, which was never formally adopted by the city council, and its recommendations quickly waned in importance to city leaders.

Some problems with the master plan included its failure to anticipate the rapid growth of Dallas after World War II. The population and traffic counts that Bartholomew and Associates had predicted that the city would reach by 1970 had already been exceeded by 1951. The firm’s street plan was therefore outdated before it could be fully implemented. The plan’s recommendations for zoning reform were defeated by developers, and other elements of the plan were hindered by lack of support from the state legislature. The city of Dallas also struggled to afford planned infrastructure development in newly-annexed areas, much less the more ambitious public works recommendations by Bartholomew’s firm. Nevertheless, the plan continued to influence city planning efforts. In particular, the master plan’s housing recommendations informed the city’s postwar public housing and urban renewal efforts. In 1954 Mayor R. L. Thornton formed the Citizens Housing Rehabilitation Committee to restore blighted neighborhoods. The following year Mayor Thornton appointed a Dallas Master Plan Committee, headed by D. A. Hulcy, to develop a new, updated master plan for Dallas.