08/15/2026
Evenings at Dallas City Hall
During my early thirties, when I was working my favorite job of my career (to-date). I LOVED working at City Hall. One thing in particular that I enjoyed was driving to the office in the evenings / late at night. I liked to time my drive to the evening sunset, my favorite time of day. My office was a Herman Miller cubicle in the basement of City Hall, and, for the most part, it would be empty at night, except for janitorial staff, Dallas Police security, an employee or two monitoring real-time or special event traffic at the Traffic Management Center at City Hall, and the 311 / 911 systems down the hall. City Hall was a 24 / 7 operation, and 24 / 7 operations are something that I like. But there was one more draw to going to City Hall at night.
An older employee, Del Crouser, was often there, working. Del was a bit of an eccentric. He didn’t have immediate family, some brothers and distant relatives. The City of Dallas was his life. He had lived in Dallas all of that life, and he knew the history of all things in Dallas like no other (presumably a tall tale or minor amendment to history happened sometimes, but that’s a privilege that Del earned over a lifetime in town). Once, while driving to Oak Cliff from downtown, I drove us over the Corinth Street Viaduct (which Del pointed out to me is one of many bridges that, architecturally, was repeated across the country in depression-era, early mid-century construction. Del said that, at Corinth and the relocated Trinity River Channel, the Hormel Plant used to exist, wafting an unpleasant smell across the area. Our short, yet informative car ride ended at the Oak Cliff Municipal Center, which Del taught me used to be a telephone exchange building for the legacy Bell Telephone System.
Although he wasn’t a licensed engineer, Del was more knowledgeable about all things than I, a newly-minted professional engineer, was. Del was an incredible draftsman, also, dating back to technical, hand drawing, into the digital age, with his knowledge of Microstation, which was (is) the language of state Departments of Transportation.
Del was the mastermind behind first drafts of major corridor transportation projects, like the (still) proposed Project Pegasus reconstruction of I-35, the (currently) under construction I-30 Dallas Canyon reconstruction, the (completed) Dallas Horeshoe (I-35 / I-30) direct connections, and the (also completed) US75 / Bryan reconfiguration for the DART Green Line.
Del left the city (he finally retired), and his health wasn’t great. I left the city (I moved to Virginia with my wife-at-the-time, a baby, and a toddler, and life moved on. Eventually, word-of-mouth spread that Del had passed away. Before I left the city, in the summer of 2014, del gave me a flash drive with a trove of digital history, artifacts of city history, historical photographs, memoirs, letters and the like. In that sense, Del’s memory lives on, but, more importantly, I’ll always remember Del as a mentor and a friend.
