Council puts off 'Exchange Place' street name again as Harwood's Confederate namesake enters the debate

The Dallas City Council on Wednesday delayed for a second time a proposal to rename part of North Harwood Street "Exchange Place" for the Texas Stock Exchange, pushing the decision to its Oct. 28 meeting.

Council Member Jesse Moreno of District 2 moved to postpone the item for two weeks, saying some colleagues had unanswered questions and needed more time, according to CandysDirt.com's account of the meeting. No roll call was taken, but a majority backed the delay.

Still short of a supermajority

The change would cover three blocks of North Harwood in Uptown, where backers want the address to reflect Dallas' push to become a financial center under the "Y'all Street" label. Because Harwood is a historic street name, city code generally bars renaming it unless three-quarters of the council agrees to waive the rule.

The proposal drew a 9-5 vote last month, three votes short. Council Members Adam Bazaldua, Paula Blackmon, Bill Roth, Cara Mendelsohn and Paul Ridley voted against it then.

A new argument from opponents

Wednesday's debate turned to the street's history. The name, given in 1872, honors Alexander Harwood, a longtime county official from Dallas' early years who had served as a Confederate captain, CandysDirt reported.

Bazaldua said he had been lobbied with that history but objected to renaming only the portion that serves the financial district while the name stays on the rest of the corridor through downtown and Black and Hispanic neighborhoods to the south. He said any renaming should cover the whole corridor.

"What we're being asked today is to only address a portion of it for the elite business community of our city, but let's leave the Confederate name running through the brown and black communities," Bazaldua said.

Mendelsohn said courting financial firms should not mean Dallas abandoning long-standing street names while claiming a different reason. "Either we erase those names or we don't," she said, adding that it was not fair "to parse a street and pretend it's about that."

Bazaldua also said supporters wanted the delay to line up more votes, and that he had heard some colleagues had changed their positions. Backers, as the Dallas Business Journal summarized them, say the new name would cement Uptown as the center of a growing financial corridor; critics say the city should deal with the Harwood name as a whole before changing one segment.

The item returns to the council's Oct. 28 agenda.

Sources

candysdirt.com

bizjournals.com