The Ferris Plaza Live Oaks

In 1998 the city and the corporation across the street proposed removing 21 mature live oaks from this plaza, by most accounts to move a roost of grackles along with them. Arborists, the Texas Historic Tree Coalition and the mayor stopped it. Nineteen of the oaks are still here and the plan is not. This is a grove rather than one tree: nineteen live oaks ringing a single fountain in a plaza of nine tenths of an acre. The fountain is the place to stand, and it puts several of them over your head at once. The largest trunk in the group runs to about eleven feet round; across the grove the trunks average roughly 30 inches through, from 21 up to 36. They reach about 50 feet. The tree coalition dates the present grove to a replanting in 1949 and 1950, which period photographs of the plaza confirm, so call them 75 years old. Ferris Plaza itself is older and was the front door of Dallas, laid out under George Kessler's city plan directly opposite Union Station, a decade before Dealey Plaza existed two blocks away. It is named for Royal A. Ferris, who paid for the fountain. In 1965 more than 2,000 people assembled under these trees for a march led by the NAACP in support of the voting rights protests at Selma.