Trammell Crow Park

Trammell Crow Park — the floodway park where marble cows graze under the skyline

Trammell Crow Park is not a landscaped city park in the ordinary sense. It is roughly thirty-two acres of open bottomland lying inside the Dallas Floodway, the engineered channel between two earthen levees that has carried the Trinity River past downtown since the early 1930s. The city classes it as a community park within the Trinity River Greenbelt, and what that means on the ground is grass, water, sky and a startling amount of room, with the downtown towers standing up behind the levee like a stage set. It carries the name of Fred Trammell Crow (1914–2009), the Dallas developer who became, by the reckoning of both Forbes and The Wall Street Journal, the largest landlord in America. The park’s strangest feature is his family’s doing too: a herd of life-size marble cows, carved in Italy, standing in the grass beside the water.

Highlights

• The marble cows — five life-size cattle carved by Texas sculptor Harold Fooshee Clayton (1954–2015), each cut from roughly four tons of stone, commissioned by the Trammell Crow Company while Clayton was still training in Italy. The Dallas Observer once named them the city’s best inexplicable art.
• Crow Lake — the still, tree-fringed body of water at the park’s heart, with a boat ramp and trailer parking, and the reason anglers and paddlers treat this as a launch point rather than a picnic ground.
• The Trinity Skyline Trail — 4.6 paved miles opened in August 2014, running along the floodway with what is arguably the best ground-level view of the Dallas skyline anywhere in the city. The park is one of its main trailheads, with parking attached.
• The Calatrava bridges — the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge, Santiago Calatrava’s white harp-string arch that opened in March 2012, and his second Trinity crossing, the Margaret McDermott Bridge, both visible from the open ground.
• The cricket field — listed among the park’s official amenities and one of a small handful on Dallas parkland, reflecting how large the sport has become across North Texas.
• The levee-top loop — a long unshaded circuit on the earthworks themselves, popular with distance runners and cyclists precisely because there is nothing to interrupt it.

What’s inside

The inventory is deliberately spare. This is floodplain: everything here has to survive being underwater, so there are no ornamental gardens, no fountains, no delicate structures. What the park provides is access — to the river, to the trail network and to a horizon Dallas rarely offers.

• Crow Lake, with a boat ramp and dedicated trailer parking for boats and paddlecraft.
• Soccer pitches and a cricket field on the open flat.
• Paved and unpaved trails linking into the Trinity Skyline Trail and the levee-top loop.
• The marble cow sculptures, each with a small nameplate at its base.
• Benches and a parking lot; restrooms are minimal, so plan accordingly.
• Direct river frontage — one of the few places in Dallas where you can stand at the water’s edge of the Trinity without a fence in the way.

What to do and who it’s for

• Distance runners and cyclists — miles of flat, uninterrupted, traffic-free paved trail, which is close to unobtainable elsewhere in central Dallas.
• Paddlers and boaters — the ramp and trailer parking make this a practical put-in for a Trinity float, and there is no comparable municipal launch nearby.
• Photographers — the skyline, the Calatrava arch and the marble cows in one frame; the golden hour here is genuinely worth the drive.
• Cricket and soccer clubs — league play on the flats, with room for several matches at once.
• Anglers — Crow Lake is quiet, shaded around its rim and fishable from the bank.
• Anyone who wants the city to feel far away — the levee blocks traffic noise remarkably well, and the park empties out on weekday mornings.

Getting there and practicalities

The park sits in the floodway on the western side of the river, between West Dallas and the Design District, with downtown a short distance east beyond the levee. Most visitors drive; there is a large parking lot with trailer spaces, and no light rail station is close, the nearest being Victory Station on the Green and Orange lines roughly a couple of miles away across the river. The better car-free approach is on foot or by bicycle over the Ronald Kirk Pedestrian Bridge, the 1933 viaduct that reopened as a pedestrian and cycling park on Father’s Day 2014, from which the Trinity Skyline Trail leads directly into the park. Entry is free; Dallas city code closes public parks from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. Allow an hour for a walk to the cows and back, two or three for a proper trail ride. Two warnings matter more here than at any other Dallas park. First, this is inside the floodway by design — after sustained rain the ground and the trails can be under water, gates get closed, and mud lingers for days afterward; check before you set out. Second, there is essentially no shade. The levee and the open flats are fully exposed, and from June through September a midday visit is a genuinely bad idea. Carry more water than you think you need, and go at dawn or in the last hour of light.

When to visit

Spring turns the floodway green and briefly wildflower-flecked, and it is the season the trail is busiest — though April and May storms are also what put the park under water. Summer is for sunrise only: by nine in the morning the levee is a griddle, and the shadeless expanse that makes the views so good makes the heat unsurvivable by noon. Autumn is the park’s finest stretch, with cottonwoods along the water turning, comfortable air from late October through November, and long low light that flatters the skyline and the white stone cattle. Winter strips everything back to bare structure — grey water, tawny grass, the bridge arch stark against the sky — and on a clear cold weekday you can have several miles of trail almost entirely to yourself.

Worth knowing

The park exists because of a catastrophe. In May 1908 the Trinity rose to 52.6 feet, killed five people, displaced four thousand and did some $2.5 million of damage, cutting Oak Cliff off from Dallas when every bridge went down. Landscape architect George Kessler was brought in and produced his plan for Dallas in 1911, calling for levees and a straightened river; the city balked, the First World War intervened, and Kessler was recalled in 1918 to revise the scheme. Two levees were finally built by the early 1930s and the Trinity was pushed into a channel between them. The old riverbed became the Trinity Industrial District, later renamed the Design District — and it was out of exactly that muddy bottomland that Trammell Crow and John Stemmons built their real estate fortunes. Crow’s own story is pure Dallas: Woodrow Wilson High School, class of 1932; the youngest certified public accountant in Texas at twenty-four in 1938; a Navy commander in the Second World War; then a first warehouse in 1948 for Ray-O-Vac, with the surplus space leased to Decca Records, which invented his speculative-builder model. By the 1970s his firm managed some 300 million square feet in more than a hundred cities. It went public in 1997 and was sold to CB Richard Ellis for $2.2 billion in 2006. With his wife Margaret he gave 598 works to found the Crow collection of Asian art in Dallas in 1998. The cows have their own provenance: Clayton, a University of North Texas graduate of 1977, spent 1982 to 1987 in Pietrasanta, Italy, learning stone carving in the studio of Sem Ghelardini, and accepted the Crow commission for four sets of five cows while still there. Three sets stand in Texas — here, at Founders Park in Las Colinas, and at the Arboretum at Great Hills in Austin — and the fourth in Milwaukee.

Visitor tips

• Check the weather for the previous week, not just the day. The floodway drains slowly, and a storm three days ago can still mean closed gates and calf-deep mud.
• Treat this as a trailhead. The park itself is quickly walked; the reward is heading out along the Skyline Trail toward the bridges and coming back.
• Bring everything you need — water, sunscreen, a hat. Facilities are thin, shade is nonexistent, and there is nothing to buy inside the levees.

Questions and answers

Why are there marble cows in the park? They are a set of five life-size cattle by sculptor Harold Fooshee Clayton, commissioned by the Trammell Crow Company. Each was carved from roughly four tons of stone, and matching sets stand in Irving, Austin and Milwaukee.

Is the park ever closed? It has no gate hours beyond the citywide rule closing parks from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m., but it lies inside the Dallas Floodway and genuinely floods. After heavy rain, access roads and trails may be shut or impassable.

Can I launch a canoe or kayak here? Yes. There is a boat ramp with trailer parking, which makes this one of the more practical Trinity put-ins near downtown. Judge the river’s level and flow yourself before going in.

How long is the trail from the park? The Trinity Skyline Trail runs 4.6 paved miles and opened in August 2014; the levee-top loop adds a longer unshaded circuit on top of the earthworks. The park is a signed trailhead with parking.

Who was Trammell Crow? Fred Trammell Crow (1914–2009), a Dallas-born developer who pioneered speculative warehouse building after 1948 and grew his company to roughly 300 million square feet under management across more than a hundred cities.

Can I get there without a car? Not easily by rail — Victory Station on the Green and Orange lines is the nearest, a couple of miles off. The realistic car-free route is walking or cycling in over the Ronald Kirk Pedestrian Bridge and along the Skyline Trail.

Is it good for small children? Only in a limited way. There is no playground and little shade, but the cows delight children, and the open grass is safe and traffic-free. Keep visits short and out of the midday heat.

What are the two big bridges you can see? The Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge, Santiago Calatrava’s arched span that opened in March 2012, and the Margaret McDermott Bridge, his second Trinity crossing. Both are among the most photographed structures in Dallas.