A Dallas resort’s sculpture garden serves as the final resting place for a bit of history: a propeller from the RMS Lusitania, the British passenger ship torpedoed by a German U-boat off the coast of Ireland during World War I. It belongs to real estate billionaire Harlan Crow, whose mother, incidentally, survived the sinking of the SS Athenia, the first British ship to be torpedoed by Germany in World War II. The propeller is one of more than a thousand artworks and artifacts—including pieces of the Berlin Wall—at the Crow-owned Hilton Anatole, which boasts one of the largest such collections of any hotel in the country. Of the remaining Lusitania propellers, one rests on the ocean floor, another was melted down, and the other resides at a museum in Liverpool. But this one—some seventeen tons of bronze, its chipped blades permanently stilled—sits beneath the Texas sun on a path leading to the three-acre JadeWaters Resort pool complex, within sight of lanyard-bedecked conventiongoers and children splashing in sunscreen-scented, turquoise-hued bliss.
This article originally appeared in the August 2024 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline “Blades in the Grass.” Subscribe today.
