Mammoths are on the loose in downtown Dallas, but don’t be afraid, they mean no harm. The two beasts – I suggest we call them Dirk and Erykah – are actually 18-foot-tall powder-coated steel play structures created in Finland for downtown’s newest addition, Harwood Park, which opens at public on September 23.
The 3.8-acre, $20.3 million park replaces a patchwork of surface parking lots a few blocks from the Farmer’s Market in what developers have dubbed the East Side. It is the fourth and final park created by Parks for Downtown Dallas, the nonprofit organization founded by DallasNews Corporation board member and former general director Robert Decherd, after Pacific Plaza (2019), West End Square (2021) and Carpenter Park (2022).
With the opening of the park, the organization changed its name to Downtown Dallas Parks Conservancy, with the mission of maintaining the parks it created. “The original idea that we would team up with the city, finish the parks and stop this just doesn’t make sense,” Decherd says. “Advocacy for downtown parks must be consistent and uninterrupted. »
The preserve is dedicated to the future, but Harwood Park makes a point of looking to the past, embracing the city’s history – ancient, modern and everything in between. These play structures, for example, recall the Colombian mammoths that roamed the region around 12,000 years ago, before drought and warming temperatures contributed to their extinction. (Looks familiar?)
The park’s design was by Austin-based landscape architect Christine Ten Eyck, a Dallas native with a long family history in the city: her great-grandfather, Joe Earl Lawther, served as mayor of Dallas from 1917 to 1919.
The creation of the park was as much a work of archaeological discovery as it was of landscape architecture. Among the objects buried beneath the site: fuel tanks, walls and basements dating from the late 19th century, when the area was primarily residential.
The park is divided in two by a dug “rain garden” which will capture water for irrigation while providing drainage. Its path follows the route of Mill Creek, which ran directly through the park site before being poured into a culvert in the late 19th or early 20th century as a means of flood prevention. The plantings come from species native to areas surrounding the Trinity River. “We try to pay homage to what was here before,” says Ten Eyck. “It wasn’t always a concrete landscape.”
Among the remnants of this bygone era is a majestic, century-old American elm tree that occupies a central location in the park. Construction crews nicknamed him “Chuck Norris” because he seemed impossible to kill.
The tree is a vestige of the residential period of the site. But by the 1920s, this character had changed, devoting itself to the automobile service sector. In the early 1930s, the city changed again, this time becoming the center of Dallas’ film industry. The park cleverly integrates two historic buildings along Harwood Street that reflect these changes.
The first, a two-story structure, was built in 1917 for the automobile industry but was converted for use as a film distribution center, complete with a fireproof storage vault. Theater owners across the region were collecting their movies (along with their tickets, popcorn, and other essentials) and returning them when they finished showing. It will now serve as the park’s maintenance center. The second building, built in 1940 to serve the film industry, has a small exhibition space and will house public restrooms and other park operations facilities.
The buildings provide an attractive backdrop to the park’s green spaces, their blocky intrusions creating a series of what Ten Eyck describes as distinct “outdoor rooms.” Their incorporation is a significant victory for the preservation of Dallas, even though four lesser buildings were demolished when the park was created. Another historic building adjacent to the park, a facility for Paramount Pictures at the corner of Young and Harwood streets, is being restored by the conservancy and will be sold to support the organization’s endowment.
“It’s a great example of working with what’s there, even with some of the clutter, which I don’t think Dallas is always very tolerant of,” says Nancy McCoy, a preservation architect who collaborated on the project. “Any time you can connect the history of our city, it’s more interesting.”
The park also includes remains of a nearby structure, now defunct. At its northwest corner is a pavilion with screens of gold rings that once enlivened the facade of the former Statler Hotel garage, which was demolished to make way for Main Street Garden Park. The rings were salvaged from the “boneyard” of abandoned architectural features maintained by the Parks and Recreation Department. “Let’s leave it to Dallas to be sentimental about a parking lot,” says Ten Eyck.
The pavilion faces a lawn, the Gold Ring Green, and is set on a plinth so that it can serve as a stage for concerts and other forms of performance.
A larger wedge-shaped lawn occupies the central space of the park, providing a spectacular view of downtown Dallas. These views, at the moment, are compromised by an unfinished and unsightly garage that runs along the park’s northern border along Jackson Street. But that will change as a protective avenue of chinquapin oaks matures.
Among the park’s amenities are two dog play areas (for large and small dogs, respectively) and a basketball court that can be converted to pickle ball. In addition to the mammoths mentioned above, the play areas also include a fountain and other play equipment.
The park, along with its three siblings, is both iconic and a contributing factor in the evolution of the city center, paving the way for a welcome change from a purely commercial to an increasingly residential character. With the pandemic, this change, already underway, has only accelerated.
The process is clearly evident at Harwood Park, where the neighboring East Quarter Residences, an upscale development, has oriented its entrance to be on axis with that of the park.
“These are century-old assets,” says Decherd, of the four parks. “If properly maintained, they create an urban neighborhood environment that is not only different; it’s very attractive.
It’s up to the city to harness that potential and ensure that these extraordinary amenities – and they are extraordinary – propel Dallas toward a sustainable and equitable future.
