Everyone is super excited about the mega-awesome new children’s garden at the Dallas Arboretum, right?
Well, not exactly. Perhaps that could have been the case had the Dallas Arboretum not — when it tried to turn Winfrey Point into a temporary parking lot for the Chihuly exhibit last summer — drawn the ire of White Rock Lake activists Ted and Hal Barker.
One of the Barker brothers runs a nonprofit for Korean War vets and one is a former city employee, but they spend the bulk of their time these days filing Freedom of Information requests, operating this website and, most recently, this Facebook page.
The purpose of the aforementioned, in a nutshell, is to expose the Dallas Arboretum’s diabolical plan to make the entirety of White Rock Lake its parking lot.
Now, I do not believe that is necessarily the plan and I, in fact, still am extremely fond of the arboretum, but the Barker brothers have uncovered some interesting information. The biggest find came surrounding the Chihuly parking fiasco, when they learned of a proposal to possibly pave the land at Winfrey and turn it into a permanent parking space.
That fueled the anti-arboretum fire among a large group of people — included protests and petitions — for some time.
Most of the indignation has died down, but the brothers along with a small group of followers are patiently poring through documents and studies, such as this recently released through FOI parking study, trying to find something particularly infuriating.
Photo from “boycott dallas arboretum” Facebook page. Photo by Jim Costello.
Meanwhile, the photo by Jim Costello they posted of an overhead shot of the children’s garden space was enough to get a few riled up. Instead of “awesome”, commenters on the page call it “grotesque” and “an eyesore.”
