Community Park Update
A portion of the empty parking lot where homes once stood.
November 25, 2024
Note: This is an update to a previous blog: Community Park Saga
It’s back to fundamentals for Fair Park’s long-promised community park that is to be built on land where nearly 300 homes were bull dozed in the 1960s and 1970s to make way for a 4,000-space lot for State Fair of Texas parking.
Fair Park First (FPF), Fair Park’s nonprofit manager, presented a scaled-down community park plan at a November 21, 2024, Dallas Park and Recreation Board meeting. The plan is designed to cut costs and return to a vision of serving Fair Park’s neighbors. Cut out is a $30 million parking-garage complex and other splashy features that would have conformed nicely with Big D’s Big Spending ethos.
Instead, the new plan returns to essentials with community-oriented amenities like lawns, gardens, walkways, market spaces, and playgrounds. It also scales down a planned entertainment pavilion that apparently was designed to generate revenue. Now the plan is for small pavilions and a community stage. Although the parking garage removal is a big money saver, it was also an unpopular feature for Fair Park’s neighbors who border Fair Park’s Fitzhugh Avenue eastern perimeter.
Another vital component – accommodating neighborhood pedestrians with safe and attractive access to the community park – is still in process.
Today there is a tall iron fence (pictured) that separates almost all of Fair Park from its neighbors. The photo looks out onto South Fitzhugh Avenue which is a wide and busy road and will require traffic mitigation near the park site to be pedestrian safe.
Making the new park accessible and safe for pedestrians should be a high priority.
Options being discussed by FPF include traffic-slowing measures, multiple fence openings and building a pedestrian bridge over Fitzhugh Avenue. A planned extension of the Santa Fe Trail that will loop around Fair Park will eventually provide additional pedestrian and bicycle access.
Without the significant budget cut, the chances of the park getting built seemed remote ever since the month’s long (and ongoing) saga of possible mismanagement of donated funds came to light. There are still unsolved problems between FPF and its for-profit management partner OVG360, but FPF officials say community park funds are now segregated and managed by The Dallas Foundation. Putting up a firewall between FPF’s community park efforts and other Fair Park business hopefully will assure current and potential donors their funds will go toward the community park.
Despite that, there appears to be a reset of hope that many had lost after the heartbreaking public allegations of missing donor funds, finger pointing between FPF and OVG360, and FPF’s temporary fund-raising suspension (now lifted).
The community park’s significant budget cut is a big step toward getting the park built, but a change in leadership at FPF, now under the direction of FPF board member and now board chair, Veletta Forsythe Lill, has park-board members publicly expressing confidence that the new leadership can get this park over the finish line.
I hope they’re right. This may be the last chance for a critical piece of Fair Park restoration to take hold. It may have nothing to do with the beautiful (and crumbling) Art Deco buildings but has everything to do with the legacy of the people who lived in those homes taken by the city through imminent domain and condemnation. They are just as much a part of Fair Park’s history as is the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition.
It’s an ugly story but one that deserves commemoration by building the community park instead of offering more broken promises.
Smaller Scale Community Park Data
Original, larger footprint: 18 acres
New footprint: 10 acres (for context: Klyde Warren Park, 5.4 acres)
Finalized budget: $39.1 million*
Amount raised: $30 million
To raise: $9.1 million in 18 months*
Construction start: After 2025 edition of state fair*
Park completion: Late 2026*
Source: Fair Park First, November 21, 2024 presentation
* Estimates