Katherine Homan remembers how the construction of Interstate 35E in the 1950s and \u201960s left the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas broken.<\/p>\n
Within Oak Cliff, a chunk of the Tenth Street Historic District community, one of Dallas\u2019s oldest Black neighborhoods, was demolished to make room for the multilane highway. The connection it once had to the rest of Oak Cliff was gone through eminent domain.<\/p>\n
Dozens of families were displaced, commercial investment in the area stagnated and property values dropped in certain parts of the neighborhood.<\/p>\n
That did not stop Ms. Homan, 85, and her family from moving into a fixer-upper on Handley Drive Street in Oak Cliff in 1974.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople were already griping about how it had interfered with their life there,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Today, the highway stands as a cautionary tale of mid-20th-century urban planning, though now with a green twist: In May, Halperin Park opened directly above Interstate 35E \u2014 a roughly five-acre elevated park that attempts to stitch together the stretch of Oak Cliff that the construction of the highway tore apart decades ago.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s a history that exists all over the state and all over the country,\u201d said April Allen, who lives in the neighborhood and is the president and chief executive of the Southern Gateway Public Green Foundation, which manages the park. \u201cThe freeways were built in alignment with redlining maps and intentionality around dividing neighborhoods, and we have this opportunity to really heal those wounds.\u201d<\/p>\n
Halperin Park is now the second park in Dallas built directly above a highway, and it is one of several other projects throughout Texas that are reconnecting communities and making life easier for pedestrians in a state that relies heavily on cars.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo do this in a neighborhood like ours, I think, is a real example for other cities about how you can transform communities,\u201d Ms. Allen said.<\/p>\n
The divide in this part of Dallas dates back well before the highway was built. After the Civil War, freed slaves began living in a neighborhood known as Tenth Street. City records show that by 1900, the Tenth Street neighborhood had two churches, a school, drugstores and saloons. It was a thriving neighborhood until the middle of the 20th century, when construction began on what would become part of a highway that stretches from Laredo, Texas, to Duluth, Minn.<\/p>\n
The construction of Interstate 35E was part of the Interstate Highway System, a public works project that spawned thousands of miles of new roadways across the country with the support of former President Dwight D. Eisenhower. But it created a barrier between the mostly Black residents of Tenth Street on the east side and a predominately white community on the west side.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe did this in every city,\u201d Ms. Homan said of Mr. Eisenhower\u2019s project. \u201cHe just plowed through wherever he needed the road to go and did not really look at where it was going to be cutting through.\u201d<\/p>\n
After Interstate 35E was constructed, the demographics of this part of Dallas began to change. As schools and neighborhoods integrated, many white residents moved farther north within Texas in a wave of white flight. Today, Oak Cliff has a large Latino and Black community.<\/p>\n
In 2016, the Texas Department of Transportation began planning improvements to Interstate 35E, which led to community meetings in the Oak Cliff area. At one meeting, Ms. Homan met Paul Carden, 36, who also lived in the area. Together, Ms. Homan and Mr. Carden helped play a role in what would become Halperin Park.<\/p>\n
Mr. Carden, who grew up on the east side of Interstate 35E, said he remembered hearing stories from his grandparents about how the highway changed the neighborhood.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe version of Oak Cliff I grew up in was vastly different than the one they originally moved to,\u201d Mr. Carden said.<\/p>\n
Growing up, he said, he also felt the impact of the highway, even playing football with his cousins.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy aunt\u2019s house was directly back onto the freeway itself,\u201d he said, \u201cso out of bounds was essentially the freeway\u2019s right of way.\u201d<\/p>\n
The idea for Halperin Park was inspired, in part, by Klyde Warren Park, another green space built over a freeway in downtown Dallas. Before Klyde Warren Park opened in 2012, walking from downtown to the Uptown neighborhood meant crossing a bridge over eight lanes of traffic as cars rushed below. In the summer, the Texas sun turned the bridge into a sweltering stretch of concrete and exhaust.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur founding fathers in Dallas did a lot right, but they didn\u2019t establish a central park,\u201d said Rob Walters, who serves on Klyde Warren Park\u2019s board of directors. \u201cSo we\u2019ve had to infill or reverse engineer with Klyde Warren and other downtown parks to create more green spaces.\u201d<\/p>\n
Klyde Warren Park now draws more than two million visitors a year. On weekends, food trucks set up around the park, feeding tourists and residents from across North Texas.<\/p>\n
There are hopes that Halperin Park will attract the same kind of crowds as Klyde Warren Park, though some residents have expressed concerns about its long-term impact on the surrounding neighborhood.<\/p>\n
Phil Gibson, a longtime Dallas resident and president of the Cedar Crest Merchants Association, said that residents have been largely \u201cover the moon\u201d about the new park. But, he said, there have been some concerns about gentrification.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur goal is to develop the area,\u201d Mr. Gibson said, \u201cbut not displace people in a way that they can\u2019t afford to live there.\u201d<\/p>\n
Klyde Warren Park and now Halperin Park have other cities across the country, including Austin and El Paso in Texas as well as Little Rock, Ark., asking Dallas the same question: How can they build their own?<\/p>\n
Karla Windsor, a senior program manager with the North Central Texas Council of Governments, said a key to building these parks was support from all sides, including the community, local governments and the private sector.<\/p>\n
Halperin Park was built and paid for in two parts<\/a>. The deck of the park, which cost about $47 million, was paid for using funds from the North Central Texas Council of Governments and bonds from the city of Dallas. The amenities for the park, which cost about $75 million, were paid for with money raised by the Southern Gateway Public Green Foundation.<\/p>\n A similar project completed in Houston in 2023 was funded through a similar public-private partnership. The project, the Kinder Land Bridge, was built to connect the north and south sides of Memorial Park, which had been previously divided by a road that cut through the wilderness park.<\/p>\n Chris Ballard, the president and chief executive of the Memorial Park Conservancy, which operates the park, said that unlike other park projects, the land bridge also benefits the environment and wildlife.<\/p>\n \u201cI hope that this project can serve as this example of what can be done and how it can be done in a really thoughtful way that thinks about people, wildlife, water ecology and resilience,\u201d Mr. Ballard said.<\/p>\n Not to be outdone by Dallas and Houston, El Paso has a proposal to build a park<\/a> over Interstate 10, and Austin is also planning a similar project over Interstate 35<\/a> that could connect East and West Austin.<\/p>\n In McKinney, a suburb north of Dallas, city officials had considered plans to take a different approach, building a plaza under, rather than above, a highway deck. The project, called the Lower 5 Plaza Project, was put on hold after federal funds that would have been used to build the project were rescinded. The city had expected to receive a federal grant for the project, but those funds were pulled back after the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.<\/p>\n Bill Cox, the mayor of McKinney, said the city was still looking for ways to improve pedestrian crossing, especially as the city continues to grow.<\/p>\n \u201cIncreased foot traffic,\u201d he said, \u201cis not going to go away.\u201d<\/p>\n On a recent morning at Halperin Park, a few children were playing on the playground while others were making crafts at an indoor building. Food trucks were lined up nearby for hungry visitors. Watching children play there, Mr. Carden, who lives in the area, said, gave him reason to believe the neighborhood\u2019s next generation might inherit something different.<\/p>\n \u201cThe idea that those kids won\u2019t grow up with the same division and separation,\u201d he said, \u201cor the haves and have not, or the wrong side of the highway that we grew up with \u2014 to me, that\u2019s just one of the greatest joys.\u201d<\/p>\n Jeff Adelson contributed research.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Katherine Homan remembers how the construction of Interstate 35E in the 1950s and \u201960s left the Oak Cliff…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":325456,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[116388,102,43498,104,103,116386,116387,27],"class_list":["post-325455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-dallas","tag-area-planning-and-renewal","tag-dallas","tag-dallas-tex","tag-dallas-headlines","tag-dallas-news","tag-parks-and-other-recreation-areas","tag-roads-and-traffic","tag-texas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=325455"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325455\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/325456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=325455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=325455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=325455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}