Mission San Jose, San Antonio, Texas

Mission San Jose, San Antonio, Texas, restored in the 1930s as a WPA project and monetized in the present.

DART Light Rail

As a continuation of my exploration of the built environment, I have been photographing the DART (Dallas Area Rapid Transit) light rail construction and thinking about the possible changes in the landscape around it. The image here runs parallel to the existing highways, bypassing businesses and dividing the landscape it runs through. Businesses will close, others will open and how society interacts with the landscape will be altered.

There is a history of transportation changes altering communities. A a string of towns runs between Shreveport, LA. and Dallas, Texas that were railroad town in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  The  automobile and US Highway 80 changed that, and eventually many of these towns were bypassed all together by the interstate highway a few miles from the town centers. In Dallas, the demise of the trolly system closed businesses and even churches, who depended on public transit and had no parking facilities.  link to images