If you’ve thought about Fair Park at all in recent months, I’ll bet you a Fletcher’s corny dog that it was only to tip your hat to the do-gooders hosting massive food drives there amid the pandemic — or to wonder if the 2020 State Fair of Texas midway will actually open in these times of social distancing.
As for the latest round of work aimed at turning the 277-acre park into a jewel that’s inviting to the public year-round, it’s understandable if you’ve long had Fair Park fatigue.
This city has been creating, commissioning, evaluating — then forgetting — plans to “fix” Fair Park since I was a Central Texas junior high student, circa 1970.
After a half century of big talk, the historic neighborhoods of South Dallas that surround the park — many of whose residents had their land stolen to expand the State Fair — are still holding an empty bag of broken promises and outright lies.
I get it if you have tuned out completely from the it-never-seems-to-go-anywhere Fair Park discussion. But this month comes a development that should give us all a reason to re-engage, especially at this moment of reckoning on how we can move forward to acknowledge — and as much as possible right — the historic racial wrongs in Dallas.
For those of you who threw out your playbook, the city in late 2018 awarded the job of operating the park to nonprofit Fair Park First and its for-profit partner, Spectra. Since then, the nonprofit has devoted itself to creating a master plan, sharing it with residents and business owners in the surrounding communities, and relentlessly massaging the proposal based on that feedback.
Thursday, after several months of delays wrought by COVID-19, Fair Park First presented the final master plan to the Dallas Park and Recreation Board and won the representatives’ hearty support.
It was a huge — if almost universally unnoticed — moment because now, at long last, Fair Park First has a detail-rich proposal that allows it to begin the serious fundraising necessary to transform this concrete behemoth into the green space that this neighborhood and all park visitors deserve.
Raising the amount of money needed just for phase one — $85 million — is not a job I envy. But Fair Park First board president Darren James said during the Thursday meeting that his team is already talking with prospective donors and has had “interest from one of the leading private citizens in Dallas that’s looking to give us a gift that we are using to move forward.”
He wouldn’t get more specific when I called him Friday, but he’s adamant that now that potential donors can see the juicy details of Fair Park’s transformation, the dollars will follow.
The biggest ticket item in phase one — and the most critical piece of the project, in my opinion — is ripping up the sea of concrete along Fitzhugh Avenue to create a 14-acre Community Park designed with a vibe akin to Uptown’s Klyde Warren Park. Free of fencing and accessible to all, the park will include a large tree-bordered lawn, a water feature, children’s play areas and a remembrance garden.
And what a shameful history there is to remember on these acres that City Hall and the State Fair of Texas ripped away from African American families and businesses.
It’s a story that can’t be retold too often: After a consultant told the city in 1966 that Fair Park was unpopular because of “the poor Negroes in their shacks” and that City Hall should “eliminate the problem from sight,” the city cheated homeowners with low-ball offers and tried eminent domain to take other properties.
Five years later, more than 300 properties had been scraped away, devastating the lives of families who had called this neighborhood home for a generation or more.
That sordid reality is why Park Board president Calvert Collins-Bratton is most focused on the first phase of what could be a 20-year project. “We cannot fail these neighbors who have lobbied and advocated and poured blood, sweat and tears into this area for so many years and gotten only empty promises,” she told me after the meeting.
Phase one also will include the small MLK Gateway Park at one of the Fair Park entrances off Robert B. Cullum Boulevard and a 2-acre-plus music green that will soften and connect the area between the Music Hall and the African American Museum.
To compensate for the hundreds of parking spaces lost to green space, phase one also will include a parking structure at the northeast end of the Community Park. Even under the rosiest fundraising scenario, don’t expect to see the signature park finished until 2024.
Other highlights of the master plan — additional small parks along Fair Park’s edges and the Blackland Prairie Trail — are even further down the road.
Park Board member Daniel Wood, who represents the district that includes Fair Park, expressed everyone’s point of view Thursday when he said he loves everything about the master plan — except the one thing he hates: the time involved to get the work done.
“But if there’s any group that can make this happen, it’s this group,” Wood said.
Wood wasn’t alone in his endorsement; I didn’t hear a negative voice in the bunch as Park Board members gave the project an enthusiastic thumbs-up.
Collins-Bratton told me that she knows there’s still skepticism — deservedly so, given how many false starts Fair Park neighborhoods have endured. But she expects the reaction “will be shock and surprise” when people see the many trees and 16 new acres of green spaces in phase one.
Now that Fair Park First cleared the Park Board hurdle, the nonprofit can begin the process of selecting a landscape architect and finding those deep-pocket donors.
The nonprofit seems to have done its community engagement homework in the course of hearing from more than 500 neighborhood voices. One of those, Dolphin Heights leader Anna Hill, who has consistently been fighting for decades for a better Fair Park, told me Friday that she’s cautiously optimistic.
Hill doesn’t just care about Fair Park, she spends time walking there — when the heat doesn’t make the concrete-heavy landmark unbearable. “I’m a sight to see — mask, gloves and carrying a peach tree limb,” she laughed. She told me she’s never run into any trouble there, but as she celebrates her 80th birthday this week, she’d rather be safe than sorry.
Hill actually helped advise another nonprofit that competed against Fair Park First for the right to take charge of things there. So it’s not insignificant that she is feeling at least a little hopeful about the master plan.
After reviewing the final 55-page proposal Friday, she said it looks good — at least on paper. “I like all the pockets of green space. That’s better than a lot of cement. … Those trees and lawns are what Fair Park should have had in it a long time ago.”
Hill also pointed out that, for longer than she can remember, she’s been disappointed a bunch of different ways in the neglect and empty promises made about Fair Park.
She is especially worried about whether Fair Park First will find that $85 million. “If they don’t get funding, it may not come through. … Is it going to be years before you get someone to back you?”
Dallas has always proven itself bighearted when it comes to philanthropy. Now is our chance to begin healing one of this city’s old open wounds by planting the long-promised Community Park and other accessible Fair Park green spaces.
