I spent a little more than an hour Wednesday morning walking Old City Park – long enough to sweat through a shirt, discover that the one water fountain out there isn’t working and meet a guy from the Netherlands who was steered to Dallas’ first park by, of all things, TikTok.
“I was looking for what to see in Dallas, and it was the first thing that came up,” said the backpacked Timothy Meijer, a computer engineer in town for work but with time to kill. He seemed as surprised as I that this 150-year-old park strewn with tumbledown old buildings – most inaccessible, some boarded-up and falling down, only one air-conditioned and another held together with caution tape – was Dallas’ premiere destination site.
We agreed to meet after his walk-through to compare notes. But I lost sight of him about a minute later, somewhere between the general store and saloon on the brick-topped Main Street, while I made my way to the battered one-room Renner School, which was built in 1888 and looks every second of its age. Pretty sure he’d seen enough through locked doors and dusty windows and hightailed it to the next stop on his to-Dallas list, the 30-foot-tall eyeball downtown, sigh.
Used to be – and this is just an old man ranting and rambling now – City Park, its official name, was packed on summer mornings with kids and their parents, campers and counselors, greeters and guides, a blacksmith and donkeys and chickens. But Meijer was the only living soul I saw out there Wednesday. If you don’t include the four Park Rangers, a couple of Park and Recreation Department workers collecting trash and blowing leaves and a security guard catnapping beneath one of the city’s oldest shade trees.
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This 20-acre site just across Interstate 30 from downtown was Dallas’ first park and led to the creation of the Park and Recreation Department, which two years ago seized the reins from the Old City Park Conservancy, which operated the place since 1967. The city says the conservancy didn’t have enough money to keep operating the park. But it also wasn’t making the kind of money parks officials thought City Park could and should generate.
The 1888 Renner School looks every second of its age, as holes in its exterior have led to water damage throughout its interior.
Robert Wilonsky/Staff writer
“The city felt they could do a better job than what we were doing,” Sharron Conrad, the conservancy’s board chair, said this week. “I know they’re making an effort, but we don’t know where it’s going to lead. It’s been a long process. And like everyone, we wait.”
City Park was planted in 1876 on land sold to the city for $600 by real estate speculator John Eakins, who, according to a voluminous Dallas parks history written by three Texas Tech students in 1976, needed Dallas to pretty up some ugly land he’d hoped to develop and dispose of in what became the Cedars. It’s like Dallas has just one story to tell, over and over and over. Well, two, if you include the one about the city hoping to find some cash under every park, tennis court and baseball field.
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Over time the city eventually stashed enough old buildings in the park to create a movie-set frontier town, which now sits between construction projects – apartments going up on the old Ambassador Hotel site and the IH-30 redo alleged to end with a deck-park-lite reconnecting downtown with the park. And for as long as I can remember, and as recently as just a few weeks ago, members of the City Council and Park Board have been promising a brighter future for the faded property once considered this city’s crown jewel.
There’s even some money set aside for City Park: around $3 million in 2024 bond program dollars alone. Some of that’s intended for the Blum House, a moldering Victorian shuttered in 2019, but most is for “site development” on hold until there’s a master plan.
Four years ago the council also voted to use $650,000 in Cedars TIF money to restore the Blum House and the Rall House, the latter intended to one day serve as leasable office space. Conrad said the conservancy has also committed $550,000 to both houses. Yet not a cent has been spent, save for $270,140 paid to SWA Group for a site study and “economic and operations analysis” approved by the Park Board in 2023 and expanded earlier this year.
Preservation Dallas Executive Director Sarah Crain has been City Park’s chief operating officer until the city took back the park in 2024 — five years after the Blum House, seen here, had to be closed due to mold, rot and a flea infestation. There’s money for a restoration that has not yet begun.
Robert Wilonsky/Staff writer
I called SWA’s managing principal Wednesday to see how goes the look-see intended to result in that City Park master plan, but never heard back. In the meantime, the Park Board has assembled a City Park task force, which is supposed to begin holding community meetings sooner than later. A February 2024 Park Board presentation said the city had hoped to have a “new management partner” for City Park by spring 2026.
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John Jenkins, director of the Park and Recreation Department, said Wednesday the city has only enough money “to stabilize the buildings, but I don’t have any for revitalization.” At the moment, he’s just trying to find someone to keep the doors open to a visitors’ center that is locked most mornings.
“We thought we had the right manager to get the place moving, but we’re back to trying to find someone with a track record of running these kinds of venues,” he said. “That’s been a setback. Once I can get the right manager out there, with the right expertise, regardless of what condition it’s in, there are still opportunities for more programming. Unfortunately, we haven’t lived up to that yet. That’s the truth.”
Sarah Crain, Preservation Dallas’ executive director, served as tour guide on my latest sojourn to the city’s first park. Until the city’s takeover in 2024, Crain served as City Park’s chief operating officer and knows this property better than most, down to the last rotting roof, sagging floor and water-stained wall. She comes out here once a month to check on the place, though every hole in every wall and every locked door makes her wonder why.
“I like to say this place was a bad boyfriend,” Crain told me after our walk. “You love it so much, but it never treats you right, and it never loves you back. But it was the best job I ever had.”
One of the original Park Avenue houses still on its original foundation, which would be a code violation in any other part of town
Robert Wilonsky/Staff writer
Because of her staff, she said. And her neighbors in the Cedars, “our best champions.” And the guests, “hundreds of kids from across the city who came to experience that tangible history.” She said there was nothing like getting to City Park first thing in the morning “and being able to see the historic outline of our buildings set against the backdrop of downtown Dallas. You don’t have an experience like that anywhere else in town.”
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Except, that historic outline is in lousy shape. And it’s not getting any better.
“Those buildings are fragile,” Conrad said. “There are real concerns about structural issues with some of those buildings. And that requires the city’s investment and constant attention.”
In the midst of yet another budget shortfall, the city manager has asked Jenkins to cut $15 million out of the park department’s $122 million operating budget. So, yeah. I get that Old City Park isn’t at the top of Dallas’ List of Things to Be Concerned About. Probably doesn’t even make the first page. Or second.
This fountain’s been at City Park for 109 years. It worked, at some point. Probably when it wasn’t in several pieces.
Robert Wilonsky/Staff writer
That’s always been the case, especially in the midst of financial turmoil. History provides a pretty solid roadmap: The Panic of 1893 was the first downturn to hit the nascent city hard. And as a result, City Park, then one of young Dallas’ crown jewels, lost its funding.
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“It was unfortunate but undoubtedly to be expected that when Dallas was faced with its first civic crisis of any magnitude, it chose to sacrifice beauty, open spaces and recreational facilities in order to lighten the burden on civic finances,” wrote those three Tech students in 1976’s history of the park system,.“It seems that all the speeches made about the need for parks as places for children to frolic in peace and safety … were only superficial rhetoric.”
City Park really needs that new plan. And this town really needs a new script.
Correction at 10:50 a.m. July 10: An earlier version of this column incorrectly referred to the Panic of 1893 as the Panic of 1983.