Digging up the $15M redo for downtown Dallas’ bronze steers and Pioneer Cemetery
The convention center redo will involve remaking, but not exhuming, the once-contentious intersection that became a tourist attraction.
By Robert Wilonsky, Columnist Aug 26, 2026
The southeast corner of Young and Griffin streets in downtown Dallas is 4.2 acres of history, mythmaking and dealmaking in the shadow of what will be the most expensive do-over in this city’s history. A PR man reminded me Monday that tourists from Sweden, Japan and Switzerland love that hillside full of sculpted steers and trail drivers, probably for the same reason they used to come to town and wonder where J.R. lives.
I’d heard in recent days from preservationists concerned that workers were scanning, surveying and kicking up dirt in the adjacent Pioneer Cemetery, where, from the 1850s until 1921, many of Dallas’ founding families were buried. Historians, used to seeing history erased in this town, feared the footprint of the $3.8-billion convention center would stomp all over the cemetery and require disinterring men and women for whom streets and neighborhoods are named.
So I asked the city what’s up. Eleven minutes later, I got a response. With an exclamation mark, even: “That’s not true!”
Which is what happens when you’re the last in line to ask what’s up with the primordial cemetery where four early mayors are buried, and where a faux pasture is grazed by 32-year-old bronze Longhorns conceived by developer Trammell Crow, who, critics said back when, just wanted to kill a hotel.
Which is what happens when you’re the last in line to ask what’s up with the primordial cemetery where four early mayors are buried, and where a faux pasture is grazed by 32-year-old bronze Longhorns conceived by developer Trammell Crow, who, critics said back when, just wanted to kill a hotel.
I received that extremely prompt nuh-uh, along with links to a statement (with a bold-faced “There are no plans to disturb any burial sites or remains at Pioneer Cemetery”) and vague plans (“a vibrant, welcoming destination that connects history, art and community”) for the park’s proposed makeover. If and when it happens, city officials say, it will encompass all of Pioneer Park — the cemetery and the bronze sculptures created by Glen Rose artist Robert Summers in the 1990s.
