The Changing Face of Fair Park and South Dallas

As the city acquired land through eminent domain in the 1970s, it promised amenities for the neighborhoods closest to Fair Park. Instead, they got parking lots.
Elizabeth Lavin

Fair Park and the neighborhoods around it are poised for incredible growth. This time, city and community leaders are insisting they won't repeat the mistakes of the past.

Cranes can be seen between the trees in the communities surrounding Fair Park. New apartments, retail, and public infrastructure improvements are coming adjacent to the amenity that is most commonly used during the three weeks of the State Fair of Texas.

Developers and policymakers regularly hold community meetings to solicit input from longtime residents and community advocates. These stakeholders watch the activity with a mix of excitement and wariness. They’ve been here before, staring down changes that will leave South Dallas in a very different state than it is today. The realities of what followed the previous talk of progress tested their resilience time and again.

Historically, progress in Fair Park has rarely benefited its neighbors. So will this time be different?

Fair Park, circa 1932, before the park was expanded and before I-30 cut the communities around it off from the rest of Dallas.
Courtesy of Dallas Municipal Archives

The most obvious change to the neighborhood is the highway. Interstate 30 was routed through this part of the city in the 1950s, cutting it off from the rest of Dallas. The freeway’s construction displaced residents and made it difficult for those who remained to use public transportation; the highway eventually contributed to the demise of the city’s robust streetcar system. Its placement sharpened the divide between northern and southern Dallas.

Later, the city expanded the park’s footprint, growing from its 80-acre beginnings in 1886 to its current 277 acres. The progress once again came at the expense of the wood-frame houses owned by Black families. In the ’60s and ’70s, the city offered those families much less than what they paid for those homes, sometimes as little as 65 cents per square foot. White property owners typically received more than four times that amount.

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