Lo! How a Rose E’er Blooming in Highland Park

By Robert Wilonsky Tue., Jul. 17 2007 at 9:47 AM

Categories: Fashion

A few weeks back, I drove the kiddo to The Bubble and Turtle Creek for a Sunday-morning walk along Lakeside Drive -- well, it was either that or Bachman Lake, and we'd already spent the previous weekend collecting used condoms. And whilst back among the concrete teddy bears on the other side of the creek from Lakeside Park, we came across former Texas Rangers' co-owner Edward "Rusty" Rose's $8.1-million sprawling bunker.

Hadn't been back there in a long, long time, and when we emptied out on Willow Wood we noticed a bunch of other wrong-side-o'-the-tracks interlopers like ourselves gaping at the recent Rose addition -- the former Turtle Creek Pump House, which now looks sort of like a cross between a hipped-up downtown industrial space and a Mexican restaurant, only much, much cooler. Not HP at all, in other words. So it's funny that today, on a blog called Perfect City that I skim very occasionally, there's mention of the 2-year-old Pump House: "a place for the arts, a space for intellectual discussion, a temporary apartment, a playground.'

Some of the text is lifted from MESA Design Group's site -- they did the Pump House, in addition to NorthPark Garden and NorthPark Center, Southlake Town Square, the new Park Lane multi-use development and so on. But the point is, on a Web site devoted to "discussion about the future of our cities," we're again reminded that buildings from the past are capable of transitioning into the future -- if you have the dough, sure, but also foresight. As it says on the European-based Perfect City: "While normally in Dallas, the new is seen for the better, here historic traces were saved and revitalised." Course, we're not in Dallas. --Robert Wilonsky

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