Part of our series The Future of Fair Park, this column tells one of the park’s recent success stories.
Ron Natinsky does not excuse nor apologize for the mess in his office in the Texas Discovery Gardens on the Fair Park grounds. It just is what it is — chaos piled all over the floor, spilling out of file cabinets, documents and drawings and God knows what else — because Natinsky, the former Dallas City Council member now in charge out here, swears he’ll never, ever look at it himself.
“This stuff …” He emphasizes the word as though it were a profanity. “This is the way I walked into this office. All of that was left over from the previous operation. So what is this? It’s just stuff. It’s files, it’s reports, it’s studies. It’s watercolor renderings of dreams that they might do out here. This is no way to run a business.”
It’s no better just outside his office door, where a fried electrical breaker box (“That alone cost us $15,000.”) sits next to two worn-out condenser fans whose battered blades no longer spin. It took two tours over a couple of afternoons for Natinsky to itemize each replacement and repair spread over the Texas Discovery Gardens’ majestic, manicured 7.5 acres.
We began in the mechanical room inside the building, where the heating, ventilation and air conditioning system was being held together with duct tape the first time I saw it. He then showed me the once-unwalkable walkway outside along the 40-foot fountain and the expanded enclosures inside the reptile shack whose previous inhabitants were killed by the deep freeze of February 2021.
Opinion
All told, said Natinsky, Texas Discovery Gardens’ executive director, the nonprofit has spent a fortune to do what City Hall couldn’t and what Oak View Group, Fair Park’s just-ousted private operator, wouldn’t.
Ron Natinsky in the mechanical room, where he has spent a fortune of the Texas Discovery Gardens’ revenue making repairs just to keep the building operational.
Anja Schlein / Special Contributor
“This place was the epitome of what Fair Park had turned into over the years,” Natinsky said. “We’ve spent right at $1 million in cold, hard cash to keep this place in the shape it is, to make it functional. The city should have paid that million dollars. But we did it.”
And Fair Park, and South Dallas and the rest of this city, are much better off for it.
When I went out there a couple of months ago, the arts-and-crafts giant Michaels was onsite filming a holiday ad with a big-screen-sized crew using as its home base the perfectly preserved Portland Cement House, built for the 1936 Texas Centennial. When I returned a couple of weeks ago, on a Friday afternoon in the heat of State Fair of Texas setup, workers were prepping inside and out for a wedding the next evening.
I ran into the couple doing their final walk-throughs along the spacious lawn, called the Grand Allée, and asked how they chose Texas Discovery Gardens. The groom-to-be said they’d toured a few of the nearly 200 recommended local sites on The Knot, never expecting to wind up at Fair Park. “But after we got here, after a long day, it was a no-brainer,” he told me. “Just look at the place.”
The entrance of the Texas Discovery Gardens at Fair Park, which opened during the 1936 Texas Centennial at the Hall of Horticulture
Anja Schlein / Special Contributor
There aren’t many success stories at Fair Park these days — the Music Hall and the African American Museum and the newly renovated Cotton Bowl and … um. If there were, we wouldn’t be in the midst of a series about what ails Fair Park (over and over and over).
But time and again, Park and Recreation officials and Park Board members — and, look, anyone who’s ever been there — point to Texas Discovery Gardens as one of the few wins out there. In large part, that’s because of a former council member who was downsizing around 2018 and initially just needed a place to stash the enormous garden-train collection he’d assembled.
“It’s amazing what Ron has done out there, especially not getting a lot of support over the last seven years,” said park department director John Jenkins. “Just to see school kids coming in daily — we haven’t seen that in 20 years. Texas Discovery Gardens is definitely an example of an organization that was able to persevere through adversity. I was worried about TDG seven years ago.”
I asked Jenkins why.
All he’d say was, “Because of the previous operations.”
The Butterfly Garden at the Texas Discovery Gardens is the historic venue’s main attraction, but not its only one.
Anja Schlein / Special Contributor
As recently as 2019, by which point Fair Park had been handed over to a private operator, the Texas Discovery Gardens, then under the longtime leadership of Dick Davis, was operating at a loss. It had, at best, a single attraction: its famed butterfly house. I would bet most people still think that’s all it is, rather than a sprawling, lush wonderland that actually puts the park in Fair Park.
Little wonder it’s finally turning a profit, according to Jenkins and Natinsky, with that money going back into maintaining the facility, which opened in 1936 as the Hall of Horticulture. Money made from entrance fees, wedding rentals, weekend festivals and one-offs like last year’s Lektrik: A Festival of Lights will also go toward restoring the rainy-day fund, never more imperative than now, as it always seems to be flash-flooding at Fair Park.
Natinsky said he was first appointed to the TDG board when he started asking why so many things were broken and going unrepaired, how the snakes died in the freeze, why the banisters on the staircase were loose, why the stone walkways were caution-taped-off, why there wasn’t a single ramp for moms with strollers or patrons in wheelchairs, why the HVAC pipes were being held together with duct tape and prayer.
Ron Natinsky, executive director of the Texas Discovery Gardens, standing along the path once roped off because it was broken and inaccessible. Under Natinsky, the TDG has had to spend $1 million on repairs the former private operator was obligated to make but didn’t.
Anja Schlein / Special Contributor
Natinsky, who served on the City Council from 2005-2011 and is now semi-retired, told me he essentially pestered the board for so long they finally said, Here, you take the keys if you think you can do a better job.
Which he did. And he did.
Natinsky had seen how a public-private partnership could work: He was on the council in 2009, when the city turned over the Dallas Zoo to the Dallas Zoological Society. But what he saw at Fair Park was the other side of the coin: He told me that during its failed tenure as Fair Park’s operator, OVG refused time and again to replace or repair anything, even during emergencies that threatened to upend scheduled (and paid-for) events or, God forbid, the butterfly enclosure.
Natinsky would ask, demand, plead; they would always say no; so he would find and pay for the piece and its installation. In the end, Texas Discovery Gardens is contracted to manage the building, operate the building, program the building — not to make sure it doesn’t fall down. But the old Hall of Horticulture thrives today where so much of Fair Park crumbles because one stubborn former council member cared more and had to spend more than anyone else.
“It’s just an example of what can be done at Fair Park,” Natinsky said at the end of our second visit, shrugging off the compliment. “What matters to me, what gets me swelled up inside, is seeing a mom rolling her little stroller through the front doors, coming here two or three times a week with her kids. I’m having fun doing what I’m doing because for some strange reason, I have the magical skill set to be able to deal with all this. This facility is kind of like a unicorn.”
Sure is. For all kinds of reasons.