Waking A Sleeping Giant
Revitalizing historic Fair Park in Dallas
By Dan Biederman
Photos: Biederman Redevelopment Ventures
Fair Park is a 135-year-old urban park nestled just outside of downtown Dallas on a 277-acre plot of land. The park has an impressive list of accolades—the site of the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition and the 1937 World’s Fair, one of the largest collections of Art Deco and architecture in the United States, and a National Historic Landmark on par with the Alamo.
A Complex History
The original 80-acre tract that eventually became Fair Park was established in 1886 as the grounds for the first State Fair of Texas—now a staple event of North Texas and the largest state fair in the country. In 1904, the land was acquired by the city of Dallas and became its second public park and one of the nation’s largest urban parks. Over the ensuing decades, the campus continued to grow with the addition of a 3,500-seat theater, livestock coliseum, and the acclaimed Cotton Bowl, then the largest stadium in the South.
The site’s major transformation came in 1936 when Fair Park was selected to host the Texas Centennial Exposition, celebrating the 100th anniversary of Texas’s independence from Mexico. Within 14 months, the campus was transformed from an early 20th-century fairground into a crowning example of cutting-edge Art Deco and “Texanic” design. The campus added several buildings for the event, as well as the renovation of existing structures to match the new artistic style of the park. Among the improvements to the park were the addition of hundreds of murals and sculptures by renowned artists and craftsmen from across Texas and beyond. Dallas’s first cultural district was established on the land that included an art museum, aquarium, outdoor amphitheater, and a natural history museum, among others. Fair Park was truly the crown jewel of Texas.
Over the remaining years, Fair Park’s campus grew, but its once highly regarded reputation began to falter. Since it’s heyday, a long list of setbacks transpired—financial shortfalls, tensions between neighboring communities, management turnover, loss of tenants, and a lack of ongoing preservation and maintenance. These issues and many more led to a loss of identity, relevancy, and use. The site had become a sleeping giant that would awaken once a year for the state fair or an occasional event, but then would quickly return to a state of dormancy and neglect.
Putting The Park Back In Fair Park
The Dallas Park System comprises almost 400 parks and over 20,000 acres of parkland, making it one of the nation’s largest systems. The complexities of managing a site like Fair Park are extensive and would be a burden on any parks department, let alone one the size of Dallas. In 2014, the mayor convened a task force to discuss the future of the park. Recommendations included enhanced access and activity, “to put the park back in Fair Park,” and a public-private partnership to manage and market the park.
In January 2019, these recommendations took form when the new operators of the park—Fair Park First, Spectra, and Biederman Redevelopment Ventures (BRV)—were handed the keys to the castle. Fair Park First is a nonprofit created to oversee the new management. Spectra is a nationwide venue-management team focused on day-to-day operations and maintenance, as well as marketing, promotion, event sales, and revenue. BRV oversees the creation of an updated master plan, the subsequent development of new greenspaces within the park, and the creation of year-round programming and amenities. This new partnership’s primary focus is reestablishing Fair Park as a place of activity, opportunity, and community for Dallas and beyond.
Starting Small
Everything is bigger in Texas—a slogan that rings true at Fair Park. Fair Park was built for large-scale events, which has been its primary use since inception. Large events are important in activating a public space. They generate crowds, create marketing value and revenue streams, reach wide-ranging and diverse audiences, and activate large swaths of a site. But what happens when there isn’t an event at Fair Park? When the park isn’t bustling with thousands of visitors, the space can feel deserted and even closed for visitors.
Fair Park is many things, but one thing it struggles to be is a space for recreation and leisure on an everyday basis, year-round. BRV has stepped in with a slate of free programming and amenities, all with the goal of activating the park and building an everyday audience. The company’s philosophy is to program first and then everything else will follow. The small, everyday things—classes, free Wi-Fi, movable seating, and clean restrooms—can have a big impact on a public space.
BRV has begun implementing this placemaking philosophy with a series of free pop-up programs at Fair Park. These programs have already demonstrated that, if there is quality, people will come. In its initial test run, a single park day averaged 500 visitors—half coming from surrounding neighborhoods and with an average dwell time of one and a half hours. Previously, Fair Park averaged 80 visitors on a non-event day. This highlights the promise that programming can have on a public space.
Turning Grey Into Green
Fair Park is meant to be an open, public park, but the campus is more hardscape than greenspace. In tandem with the ongoing programming, BRV has led the development of an updated master plan in partnership with the Minneapolis office of design firm Perkins and Will. The principal goal of the plan is to green the park. The grounds are over 75-percent impervious surfaces, primarily parking lots. This has led to the park’s alternative moniker—“fair parking.” This overarching issue is the foundation of the plan’s recommendations: turn grey into green, increase the site’s resiliency, and create more usability.
The site today consists of 200-plus pieces of public art and 40 historic buildings across 277 acres. The campus sits adjacent to four very different communities. With such a sprawling and diverse site, the plan proposes multiple nodes of greenspace—an 11-acre, signature community park, the 4-acre Music Green, four 1- to 3-acre “gateway parks” situated at main entrances, and a naturalized walking trail. These green nodes are intended to remove the grey moats of parking lots that separate the park from the communities, provide accessible park space year-round, even during major events, and create a contiguous campus.
Fair Park is primed to become the “Central Park of the South,” with the master plan as its North Star. The new campus will continue to have an unparalleled landscape of historic buildings, public art, and cultural attractions, but now, there is the added bonus of improved greenspaces designed to stitch the campus together with activities, connections, and collaborations for a multi-dimensional experience.
The community park is the first project to be implemented from the master plan. The site (a large parking lot) was historically a black neighborhood acquired via eminent domain in the 1960s, to provide the State Fair of Texas with more parking. One of the main ideas behind the new park is to give back to the surrounding community, and to build a state-of-the-art space curated by the community—from design to programming to amenities. The park will be the epicenter for daily programming and will feature Texas-sized amenities—splash pads, multiple play structures for different ages and abilities, a performance pavilion, and flex lawns, to name a few. Studio-MLA, out of Los Angeles, has been selected as the park designers, and the venue is slated for completion by 2024.
In the meantime, interim programming continues to weave a tapestry of activity on the site. BRV’s goal is to ensure that, whenever a guest arrives at Fair Park, there is always something to do—no matter the time, the day, or the season. That’s how a sleeping giant awakes.
Dan Biederman is an urban planner and developer, and the President of Biederman Redevelopment Ventures Corporation (www.brvcorp.com), which plans, revitalizes, manages, and programs parks, public spaces, and neighborhood streetscapes in 28 states and six countries. If you have interest in learning how to revitalize or create an urban park or public space, email ContactUs@brvcorp.com