Dealey Plaza Dust Up
Continuing with my ongoing consolidation of pre-blogged material from this year that was originally posted elsewhere, I now bring to you maybe the most significant thing that happened to me this year. You can scroll way down into the infinite past for the original post, which I’ll reblog in a chronologically correct manner.
Here goes.
Monday after the Super Bowl we visited Dealey Plaza in Dallas and were shocked to find the place was a run down mess. Had a really good camera with me but after watching the Steelers lose the Super Bowl I truly was traumatized and could not see pictures in the way I normally would and the images I took that afternoon are so bad that I still can’t stand to look at them.
Nevertheless I wanted to tell the world about the disrepair of this historical site so I put a handful of shots together with kind of a spooky written-in-the-middle-of-the-night commentary on our experience there and posted it to a Leica enthusiast website run by Steve Huff.
About 30 or so comments were made, some of them supportive, some of them rightly critical of the bad photography, and some of them downright defensive of the city of Dallas and I engaged a few people there for about the next week and that, as far as I knew, was the end of it.
Until last week.
I Googled myself to get sort of a benchmark idea of where I am online in terms of sites and hits. We all do that. If you don’t, you should stop reading this and go Google yourself. And then don’t bother coming back. Okay? I’m serious.
Okay the first hint of trouble was when I saw a result from the Dallas Observer.
And I’ll walk you through it as I experienced all this last week instead of the actual chronology.
So I click on the link and I don’t even see the part about Vanity Fair. I mean, it was THERE, I SAW it, but it didn’t register at all. I was that blown away by the fact that there was THIS THING HERE AT ALL and then all these harsh comments etc. I was, I don’t know, in shock for a moment.
Dealey Plaza is a place where harsh shadows and mysterious figures are still juxtaposed with a fierce blue sky and glaring sun.
Continuing. It was about a minute later is when the Vanity Fair aspect finally registered. Vanity. Fair. What. The. Fuck? Just like that. Five separate words. That’s about how it went in my head.
SO… given how harsh the comments were on the Dallas Observer I was a little rattled at the idea that there might be more of the same at the God Almight Vanity Fair. But, that wasn’t to be the case as the contributing editor James Wolcott was right there with me in spirit regarding the condition of Dealey Plaza.
At Steve Huff Photo, where I get all my legal injections of Leica excitement (while making do with a modest D-Lux 4), there’s a very telling piece by the photographer Donald Barnat about a dispiriting day at Dallas’s Dealey Plaza - James Wolcott @ VANITY FAIR!
VANITY FAIR: Well, Mr. President, You Can’t Say That Dallas Doesn’t Love You.
Anyway. The last amazing thing I won’t spoil but the Dallas Observer writer Wilonsky posted yet ANOTHER article to his blog on all this just about three months later. That’s actually not to be missed as there’s actual NEWS in it regarding where this all is or has gone. Sort of the payoff.
Dealey Plaza Needs Another Makeover. Let’s Look at the Proposed Plan
Remember how offended everyone got when Los Angeles-based photographer Donald Barnat penned his dispatch from Dealey Plaza back in March? Sure you do. Wrote Barnat, who’d been here during the Super Bowl, “The place is in such a miserable state of disrepair that it amounts to a disgrace for the city of Dallas, the state of Texas, and the United States of America.” At which point everyone told him to stick it where the California sun don’t shine.
HERE is what you call a HAPPY ENDING!
That’s the plan — at a cost of around anywhere from $1 to $2 million, depending on how extensive the redo, and, yes, those fountains could use another touch-up. (That’s not counting the additional $1.5 mil needed for further renovations.) Where’s the money coming from? Where it always comes from: magic. Or we’ll just find out tomorrow.
