But the main attraction at the battlefield was its twentieth-century makeover: a tribute to Texas overstatement. Laid out like the National Mall, the park had a reflecting pool and a shaft modeled on the Washington Monument, except the reinforced concrete phallus was a few feet bigger than the one in the nation’s capital. “This is the tallest masonry monument in the world,” an elevator operator assured me as I rode to the top for a 360-degree panorama of shipping channels and petrochemical plants. “It’s in The Guinness Book of World Records.”
