Linda Jenkins and Preston Bluff

DEAR SANTA

Posted on Sat, Dec. 15, 2007

Dear Santa: If you build it, they will come

By Linda Jenkins
Special to the Star-Telegram

Dear Santa,

All I want for Christmas is a theater and ecology center in Gateway Park on Fort Worth's east side.  That will be hard to carry on your sleigh, but I'm sure you and the elves can find a way.

I haven't written you since I was a child in Riverside, playing along the Trinity River Oxbow before it was cut off by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The holiday gifts that danced in my head then were simpler, and selfish.

This request isn't just for me -- it's for the people of the east side who have patiently waited too many years for the city's powerful, elected and otherwise, to fully fund Gateway Park.  It always falls to the bottom of their wish list.

You can see the park north of Interstate 30, just minutes from Sundance Square, when you drive from Fort Worth toward Arlington.  Its green canopy has shaded the Trinity since before mortals arrived here. Sometimes you can spot teams on its playing fields and boaters in the river.

We've been told that if the design of Gateway were ever completed, it would be the largest urban park between the two coasts. Imagine that.

Imagine we have. And we have waited.

Last year, it seemed that the enhanced park might be funded through a "trickle-down" from the Trinity Uptown project intended for the city's north side. But that stalled in a political tangle: Republicans versus Democrats, Fort Worth versus Dallas.  You know all about that, since you know who's naughty and who's nice.

Perhaps the people holding up that Trinity Vision don't realize what a boon it could be to residents east and southeast of downtown. You surely recall that once upon a time, Fort Worth segregated most of its African-American residents into clusters to the east and south of the courthouse. Might that history play a role in the failure to fund Gateway?

Instead of making us wait for our crumbs after the folks with clout settle their differences and fulfill their dreams, please bring us this special gift.

I want a year-round theater that will seat approximately 350, an amphitheater (not too big) and an educational center where school kids can study the Trinity ecosystem. Those last two are already in the plans.

My special wish is for an enclosed theater that will give the east side a weather-independent cultural anchor for clusters of restaurants and businesses near the park. Imagine the employment opportunities and neighborhood pride that this would generate.

Already we are remodeling and renewing the housing on that side of town, where affordable homes range from bungalows to mansions. The Gateway Cultural Center would put an economic wind beneath our wings.

And imagine the boon for Fort Worth theater companies, which are hard-put to cover production costs in their small houses yet find it harder still to fill the 450-seat Scott Theatre or the Bass Performance Hall. Our companies could produce shows in rotation at the Gateway center, increasing revenues while bringing in new audiences. The 350-seat house and the amphitheater would support musical and film events, touring shows, internships, production training, field trips and festivals.

Housed in one complex, the theaters can share a loading dock, equipment and technology, storage, green rooms, makeup areas, lobby and concessions, rehearsal space, restrooms, parking, security, ticketing, administration and meeting rooms.

Public arts money should commission sculptures and murals in and around the park that will further lift the community's spirits and entice residents from throughout the region into our dappled groves.

Live theater and music bring diverse people together to listen, laugh, cry and think as a community. With arts, recreation and educational programs ongoing year-round in Gateway Park, we can animate the city in a manner unmatched in the Metroplex.

If you deliver this for us, the powers-that-be might fast-track other Gateway features, such as better lighting, increased security, a traffic signal at Beach Street and Lawnwood Avenue, a new First Street bridge near Oakland Boulevard, bike trails connecting with Quanah Parker Park, restoration of the Oxbow, and distinctive towers rising from the greenbelt to give our "gateway" to the city a strong identity.

The fulfillment of the Gateway Park design -- along with my dream of a substantial enclosed theater -- could offer a significant economic, cultural and educational gift to the city's east side.

I know you can do it, Santa. The east side doesn't ask for much.

Maybe it's time we did.

WORDAHOLIC

Posted on Sat, Sep. 15, 2007 

CONFESSIONS OF A WORDAHOLIC

By Linda Jenkins
Special to the Star-Telegram

What's on your reading table? A recent Associated Press-Ipsos poll suggesting the typical American reads but four books a year set me to reflect on my infatuation with literature, applaud the Star-Telegram's support of literacy, and encourage the paper to do more.

I'm a wordaholic. I sleep, dream, think, talk, write books, stories, essays, poems. My bedside table is piled high with mysteries, short stories, the Southwest Review, the latest New Yorker and studies in the archaeology of language. Facts, speculations, feelings, insights -- through writing I connect with the world Riverside home.

At 5 I performed in Shakespeare's The Tempest in the Reeder School, led by Fort Worth artists Dickson and Flora Reeder. I fell in thrall with the lyrical magic of "full fathom five thy father lies, of his bones are coral made." Later I discovered the delights of clever banter from Aristophanes to Greater Tuna.

My family visited the old Fort Worth Public Library on Saturday mornings as one might approach Mecca.  I knew the basement children's section as well as the Trinity River woods near our house. Later I graduated to the upper floors and worked through fiction, nonfiction, plays, stories, poems, screenplays -- even Lewis Carroll's logic puzzles.

Through writing I traverse space and time, building friendships with authors, historical figures and characters. How else could a child from Fort Worth learn about Jane Addams, a 19th century philanthropist in Chicago, and her commitment to struggling immigrants? The Earth for Sam introduced me to evolution -- even though my fifth grade teacher raked me over the coals for reading about "how man came from monkeys."

As a single mother 20 years later, I might have fit that "four books a year" profile, for I had little time for publications not related to my profession. Despair not over those who told pollsters they read few books now; revisit them in retirement.

But we should be wary of deeming a population literate by measuring only how many books it has read. After all, books haven't been widely available for long, as human history goes, and the ways in which we gather information have changed just as access to books has changed. People read stories and articles in print media and online. Another survey might estimate how many readers follow links on the Web, weaving together a world of ideas.

Before the advent of books folks wrote poems, ballads, essays, scientific treatises, sermons, letters and plays; today screenwriting, journalism, e-mail and blogs join those forms. Although we might groan over the quality of some creations, writers keep literacy alive.

I welcome the variety of information the Star-Telegram currently prints about reading and writing. Please continue the brief book reviews, Sunday book coverage, Stephen Wilbers' writing style column in the Work & Money section on Mondays, and features on programs such as Freedom Writers.

However, the paper could do more to generate and nourish literacy. Readers could use star-telegram.com to share title recommendations and ways to discuss books. The Star-Telegram might sponsor online book club chats for readers of all ages -- from pre-K and K through AARP.

Across the Metroplex people meet in book clubs, from private homes to libraries to community centers. Let's have regular coverage of what people are reading locally, along with tips for how to organize and guide discussions. A calendar listing of local book clubs would be a welcome addition.

We need thoughtful writing about literature, not mere summary overviews.  San Antonio's Steven g. Kellman won the 2006 National Book Critics Circle award.  Bring us columns by kellman and others of his caliber that are, in his words and in the best sense of the term, provocative.

The paper gives little attention to local authors, journals, writing contests and publishers. Organizations such as Sisters in Crime and North Texas Writers, as well as journals such as Southwest Review, deserve attention. Support from the hometown newspaper can help writers and presses across this region build audiences.

And why not sponsor writing contests for all ages and genres, more than limerick competitions?

The ancient Athenians spurred the foundations of Western literacy through playwriting contests. Let's have a local literary Van Cliburn contest -- an Inciting to Write Fest -- with winners published in a special festival edition as well as read in schools, libraries, bookstores, coffeehouses and elsewhere.

Pens, keyboards and reading glasses ready? Let the games begin.

ON IMMIGRATION

A need to know

By Linda Walsh Jenkins
Special to the Star-Telegram, Saturday, Jun 16, 2007

Quick quiz: Do you know the number of immigrants allowed into the United States from each country under which visas and why? Do you understand why millions bypass the legal process? I don't.

Like most Americans, I'm appalled that millions enter the country illegally and taxpayers carry burdens that employers (and immigrants' home countries) shirk, while our porous borders are increasingly dangerous. However, I cannot evaluate policies -- or condemn those who break them -- when I don't know what they are or why they were devised.

For example, the Senate changed -- apparently arbitrarily -- the number of "guest workers" they propose to allow in each year from 600,000 to 200,000; where do those numbers come from?

(And the idea that poor noncitizens will pay thousands of dollars, go home and wait years to return is flimflam.)

Also, contradictions in the proposed legislation baffle me: We're told that we need huge numbers of unskilled and desperate "cheap laborers" to do work that "Americans don't want to do" -- yet we will favor immigrants who can compete with skilled U.S. citizens for the jobs that Americans really do want. That sounds like a plan to further stagnate middle-class salaries, but hey, what do I know?

Let's step outside the "legal-vs.-illegal" shouting match and try to understand how the United States got into this immigration mess.

We might decide that some laws being breached were wrong from the outset -- like we decided about the anti-Irish Naturalization Act of 1798 or the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, for instance. We also might agree that other laws are sound and worth defending. That could give us a fresh perspective on lawbreakers.

Two approaching dates should help us ponder matters of immigration and labor: June 19 and July 4.

On the latter, we celebrate a revolt against being used as a cash cow for the British Empire.  Yet even as the colonists declared independence, many revolutionary leaders brought slaves and indentured immigrants here to do work that Americans didn't want to do. The U.S. economy, it seems, depended on labor forces that could be exploited. (Or should I use present tense?)

On Galveston Island, June 19, 1865 -- months after the end of the Civil War -- Union Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger read aloud General Order No. 3:

"The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a proclamation from the executive of the United States.  All slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor."

The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.

The "Juneteenth" general order "advised" the "freed" African immigrants to stay where they were and work for their former masters without equal social or political rights. Sound familiar?

This nation continues to struggle with the repercussions of not swiftly integrating those "guest workers" into the citizenry. Why would we want millions of people working here now without the obligations as well as rights of citizenship?

I want to see crops harvested, park services operating and the economy flourishing. I want to see families with a strong work ethic and the desire to be good citizens given opportunities that my European immigrant forebears had when rules of entry were much simpler. Our laws should be honored and our borders protected, but I fear a system that exploits noncitizens and keeps middle-class Americans' wages down so that the rich-- here and in other countries -- can get richer.

Benjamin Franklin told our Constitutional Convention in 1787 that its proposed form of government "can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government." I submit to you that corruption feeds on public ignorance.

I need more information from elected representatives and the press (not just Wikipedia) -- perhaps in newsletters, inserts and online files -- to weigh the alternatives to our current immigration policies. And I'd like to have a serious national examination of the historic, economic and social issues entwined in those policies. Our democracy needs it.

Happy Juneteenth and Independence Day.

RIVER OF DREAMS

Posted on Sat, Mar. 17, 2007 

Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Just whose river of dreams are we talking about?

By Linda Jenkins

East side residents are wary for good reason of the Army Corps of Engineers' proposal to construct a floodplain in mostly uninhabited land along the Trinity between Riverside Drive and Beach Street. A resident of White Lake Hills, I welcome this controversy because it prompts us to forge our own multiethnic community vision for the Trinity's eastern corridor.

In designing the Trinity Vision North, the corps had planned to flood an affluent section of the west side where the West and Clear Forks meet to form the Trinity. It would cost $10 million to displace inhabitants.

The corps now wants to shift the controlled flooding to city-owned land east of downtown. The $10 million saved can generate matching state and federal funds to more than triple the buyout, restore the river's ecosystem and jump-start the $50 million master plan for Gateway Park.  Fast-tracking the park's development is the carrot held out to the east side -- and it's a most appealing carrot.

An expanded Gateway Park between Riverside and Oakland Boulevard north of Interstate 30 can constellate much-needed economic development around its perimeter and spur improvements to roads and bridges. The benefits to Fort worth, Haltom City and Richland Hills will be wonderful.

Imagine a back yard for river dwellers featuring fishing, rowing, sports, music, theatre, dance, horseback riding, biking, nature trails, picnics and playgrounds -- in our beautiful Cross Timbered hardwood forest.

However, east-siders wonder who will be affected by the flooding and how, and we want vigorous participation in the project's analysis.

Questions residents are asking:

Do the flooding projections take into account climate change? Will our land and groundwater be the dumping site for toxic effluence from upriver (especially if land in Trinity North is not decontaminated)? What might be the consequences for communities farther east along the Trinity? Will property be seized by eminent domain? What will happen to our property values, rents and taxes? What if dams fail?

Behind those practical concerns are suspicions more deeply situated in the city's political history:

Who stands to benefit most financially from this project? Are players behind the scenes manipulating information without telling the whole story? Do race and class play roles in the choice of east side over west side for flooding? Will Gateway not be built if we don't accept the floodplain? How much beyond that $10 million is it worth to west-siders to move the controlled flooding farther east?

Please forgive some for not jumping on the bandwagon, but folks on this side of town have good reason for caution. For too long the Trinity's eastern corridor between Fort Worth and Dallas and the people who inhabit it have been marginalized; race and class play no small role in that.

Paralleling I-30 the river is a barely visible artery, a blue-collar stalwart where hard-pressed families live side by side with gritty industries, quarries, grain elevators and warehouses.

In the 19th century, the eastern edge of downtown's "Hell's Half Acre" housed wagons, horses and cattle driven in from across the plains; railroad tracks curved north along that eastern ridge. Maps recently displayed at the Amon Carter Museum illustrate the industrial nature of "my" side of town with colorful depictions of mills utilizing the river's power and cattle grazing its shores.

As the city expanded, most moneyed folks claimed sites away from railroads, industry and cattle lots for their homes, leaving the eclectic east to populate with small business owners, workers, farmers and freed slaves. My parents moved into Riverside 60 years ago; I played through childhood a pasture away from the proposed floodplain. Since then demographics grew diverse and folks built enclaves of lovely homes in the hills and river bottom east of Sundance.

The multiracial east side is rural and urban, small town and suburb, savvy and decent. It is time we had a nice wedge, thank you, of the city's economic pie, but on our terms.

To their credit, Trinity planners, engineers, politicians and civic leaders have listened carefully to residents at public hearings for this project and say that the floodplain will not go forward without community support.

Can -- and should -- Gateway Park go forward without the floodplain? As we question, let us channel honest contention into a new east side that protects its residents while providing a unique gateway into the golden west.