The last of four downtown Dallas parks will be the most playful

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They will create paradise by tearing up a parking lot.

In fact, parks for Downtown Dallas will demolish several – nearly four acres – as the nonprofit is creating a new green space next to the densest residential area in the center of the city.

Tuesday’s groundbreaking ceremony for Harwood Park, at the east end of downtown and just blocks from the Dallas Farmers Market, will kick off the foundation’s most family-friendly project to date.

From this concrete desert of broken parking lots, a sustainable rain garden, extensive green lawns, more than 200 trees and, perhaps most beautifully, “ghost mammoth” playground structures will emerge, reminiscent of the time when these creatures roamed today’s inner city.

Harwood’s construction also holds a promise: it will be the last of four green spaces proposed in the 2013 update of the 2004 downtown park master plan. Carrying out this plan is a big deal for a city that spends millions – over and over again – developing lofty plans that never get off the drawing board.

“Harwood Park is the culmination of 20 years of work involving some of Dallas’s most iconic landscaping, architecture, planning, and urban development personalities,” said Robert W. Decherd, parks chairman for Downtown Dallas.

Decherd, a city center planning and design leader for 40 years, is also the chairman, president and CEO of DallasNews Corporation, which owns The Dallas Morning News.

Looking south from the northern boundary of future Harwood Park on Jackson Street, a concrete desert of parking lots – some empty and others still in use – currently extends to Young Street. The warehouse and garage building, 312 South Harwood, protruding into the parking lot on the right, will be used for the park when the green space opens in 2023.(Elias Valverde II / employee photographer)

Since its inception in 2015, Parks for Downtown Dallas has worked with the city to build Pacific Plaza, which was completed in October 2019, and West End Square, which opened in March. Carpenter Park will be completed next spring; Harwood will follow in 2023.

After completion, each green area is owned and operated by the city. The projects are funded with $ 39.4 million approved by voters in the 2006 and 2017 bond programs and $ 56 million in committed private investment.

More than half of Harwood Park’s space will be dedicated to “family and play,” said Amy Meadows, Parks President and CEO for Downtown Dallas, as we walked through the property a few days ago.

Amid a variety of play equipment, children can climb, hide, and slide through replicas of Colombian mammoths believed to have made their home in north Texas 100,000 years ago.

Christine Ten Eyck, founder of Austin-based Ten Eyck Landscape Architects, paid close attention to the history of the Harwood area when designing the park. She hopes that the play structures – like other elements in the room – will inspire both adults and children to reflect on what happened in this land long before it became an urban hub.

But fun comes first at Harwood, with an emphasis on local residents’ wish lists, including a kiddy wading pool, two dog parks, and a flexible playing field that’s striped for basketball, pickleball, tennis, and volleyball.

Ten Eyck, who grew up in Dallas, has also woven her trademarks for sustainability and recycling throughout Harwood Park.

The east-west promenade, which will be built over a one-story section of Wood Street, will feature a rain garden or biosewhale that will catch the water from the area and use it to feed the plants.

Ten Eyck sees this type of low impact design as an effective ecological teaching tool for students and as a kind of homage to the various tributaries of the Trinity River that once flowed through this country.

It also places great emphasis on reusing previously discarded items, as visitors will see on Harwood’s “gold ring” umbrella structure. The multipurpose pavilion in the northwest corner of the park will feature latticework of some of the decorative aluminum rings that once adorned the parking garage that was demolished to make Main Street Garden.

This 2005 photo shows the large rings that adorned a downtown parking garage that was later razed to build Main Street Garden. Some of these rings are used in a lattice structure in Harwood Park.(MICHAEL AINSWORTH / 90593)

In addition to providing a mental and physical health boost for visitors and a cleaner for the environment, Harwood Park offers another “green” lesson – that of cold, hard cash. Even before a single tree was planted, the park’s promise sparked an adjacent development that will bring tax revenue to all Dallas residents.

Todd Interests, developer of the high-rise retail, office and housing project East Quarter, cites the future Harwood Park as the trigger for his decision to move to the far east of downtown. Last year Todd Interests and East Quarter Partners donated $ 1 million to build the park.

In turn, Decherd said, East Quarter development will greatly enhance the area where Harwood Park will sprout.

“It is really important to recognize the leadership gift that the East Quarter partners have given the park because investors who benefit directly from these downtown public parks should also contribute financially [Todd Interests CEO and founder] Shawn Todd demonstrated it, ”Decherd told me.

This rendering shows the shaded “Goldring” pavilion that sits next to one of Harwood Park’s many lawns and will incorporate the recycled trim rings from an old parking garage in downtown Dallas.(Ten Eyck landscape architects)

One of the biggest challenges in making Harwood Park a reality is that it is the only one of the four parks for downtown Dallas green space that has to deal with existing buildings within its boundaries.

The derelict one-story brick building at 408 S. Harwood St., built in 1930, will be remodeled and remodeled to serve as a parking service building that will include offices, restrooms and a common room. McCoy Collaborative’s local conservationist Nancy McCoy will play a key role in this transformation.

Meadows hopes the common room will eventually host exhibits that explain the science behind the biosewhale, the history of the Colombian mammoth, and the recent history of this part of downtown that went from being a residential neighborhood to a car repair shop to the hub of the film industry’s mixed-use today Downtown district.

A second building within the park, the warehouse at 312 S. Harwood, will most likely be vacant by the time the park opens. Since the park department does not have a maintenance team specifically responsible for the inner city, one option is to convert the 12,000 square meter building into an operations center specifically for these green spaces.

The 1930 building at 408 South Harwood is being redesigned to serve as the parking service building for the new Harwood Park.(Elias Valverde II / employee photographer)

Two other buildings, each anchoring a corner of Young Street on the south side of the park, remain outside the park plan.

The lovingly cared for structure on S. Pearl Expressway 317, which still bears an old “Ballet Dallas” sign, remains in private hands. The park boundary runs directly behind it and the adjacent parking lot.

Parks for Downtown Dallas owns the building on the opposite corner at 412 S. Harwood St., a three-story building dating from 1924. It plans to eventually sell the building and use the proceeds to supplement park maintenance costs.

In addition to the four green spaces that Parks created for Downtown Dallas, our downtown area is also home to Klyde Warren Park, operated by the Woodall Rodgers Park Foundation, and Main Street Garden and Civic Garden.

Once Parks for Downtown Dallas’ to-do list is complete, downtown parks will have grown by 23 acres, or about 17 soccer fields, from 2009 to 2023.

This is a lot more tree-lined paradise and a lot less unsightly parking lots.

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