The 40-acre Judge Charles R. Rose Park, in the Highland Hills neighborhood just north of Interstate 20, features a restored Blackland prairie, hike and bike trails, playgrounds, and an outdoor classroom. But Molly Morgan, the Texas director of the Trust for Public Land, which developed the park, first mentions the pavilion.
The park planners didn’t expect to put it there, but the community wanted a place they could hold a family reunion or even a wedding. “Everyone deserves to have a place nearby where they can take a beautiful picture with their family,” Morgan says.
Over the last decade, the Trust for Public Land has helped Dallas ISD transform school playgrounds into community parks. It has acquired hundreds of acres of urban green space that it plans to turn into nature preserves. Like Woody Branch Community Park, 82 acres of prairie and meadow sandwiched between Interstate 35E and West Ledbetter. Or Big Cedar Wilderness, nearly 300 acres of hills and hiking trails that will, for a weekend, stand in for Arkansas in a pinch. (The Trust would also like your opinion on its design.) It has funded the first segment of its work in transforming Five Mile Creek into a trail system through southern Oak Cliff, beginning with the Westmoreland DART station into Kiest Park.
And next month, the Trust will open its first of 15 neighborhood parks in each council district. (One is “at-large,” meaning it can go anywhere. They’ll develop these in three phases; the first five are here.) This Dallas Greening Initiative involved analyzing vacant city-owned land where housing or something else could not be built.
The parks are small, between a third of an acre and 3.6 acres, strategically located in neighborhoods where between 2,000 and 4,000 residents don’t have a park within a 10-minute walk from their home. The smallest location on High Vista, near Marsh Lane, will replace a concrete stub adjacent to the long-anticipated Park Forest Branch Library. The one in Pleasant Grove, on Lake June Road, is a Dallas Water Utilities parcel next to a drainage culvert turned community art project.
And the first, called Bushmills Neighborhood Green, is designed around a series of ponds in Lake Highlands with bird watchers in mind. It will open in just a few weeks. Eighty-one percent of Dallasites now live within a 10-minute walk of a park, in large part because of these types of neighborhood-sized investments. (Only 60 percent checked that box in 2017.)
Ahead of next month’s opening, we sat down with Morgan to talk parks. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
TLR: What have you learned about how neighborhoods think about parks?
Morgan: People often have a preexisting idea of what a park is. It’s what they might see on the news, right? It might be a really big, visible park. With that comes some concerns about what a ‘capital-P Park’ does in a neighborhood, but pretty much everyone wants something they can use daily. It is important for us to always make sure that we go in with pretty much a blank slate, especially on those Greening Initiative sites.
A park can be a trail and a bench and trash cans and lights. It can also be something that’s more activated and has some play equipment or a shade structure. As long as people know that they can dictate what their community needs, people are really excited about it. They are excited about the opportunity to offer input—and that they’ll be able to go use that park in a year or two.
Our work is embedded in community. When we’re building something new, people think it’s going to be the shiniest thing, right? And that’s appropriate in some places, but the investment needs to match the neighborhood need, which oftentimes is functional. I don’t want to say they’re not highly designed, because they’re beautiful.
But they’re not all Klyde Warren.
Exactly, yeah.
So you run into situations where a person’s preconceived notion of a park comes from seeing these enormous projects on the news. Does that tell you there’s a lack of access to green space in a lot of communities, that they don’t have a reference point in their own neighborhoods?
There is a lack of usable green space in a lot of neighborhoods, and that’s what we were thinking about for the Greening Initiative—locating open places in neighborhoods that are already pretty much developed. Not everybody thinks of nature as being in an urban space. Using the park design to get back to bringing nature into neighborhoods has been interesting, too, because people think of nature as ‘big nature,’ like going out to a prairie site or a national or state park. The fun part is people starting to see that they can have a mini version of what’s elsewhere.
It can be part of my daily, weekly life instead of a destination you have to plan for.
The first Greening Initiative Park is Bushmills Neighborhood Green, and there’s been a lot of funding that has gone into cleaning up the vegetation along the ponds there so people can experience them again. We’ll also be reseeding that whole area to adjust what pops back up. We’re cleaning up the vegetation along the alleyways and areas along the rail line that are creating some unsafe places where people can hide. It has a walking trail with benches for bird-watching or just sitting and talking with neighbors. It has lighting, but it’s much more passive recreation than something more highly programmed; these ideas came from the neighborhood.
The Greening Initiative started with discretionary dollars from Mayor Eric Johnson, who directed the Trust to build new neighborhood parks in all 14 Council districts and another ‘at-large.’ How did TPL pick that up and pursue what this looked like in practice?
We have a great relationship with the city’s appointed ‘greening czar,’ [Container Store co-founder] Garrett Boone, and the mayor’s office. We worked with some city departments and our GIS [Geographic Information Systems, basically data mapping] team to analyze a list of city-owned sites that will improve park access in neighborhoods. To be candid, we’re thinking through the delivery of these new projects, but we are also thinking about supporting existing park sites that maybe need a little extra love. Because that’s a need we hear often too; ‘well, my community might not need a park site, but the one that I have only has a bench.’
Over the past 10 years, we’ve been really focused on access. Everyone deserves a park within a 10-minute walk of their home. Dallas is at 81 percent, so there’s still work to be done, right? But access gets harder and harder, and one area that Dallas could be more competitive with its peers is in amenities and investment. It’s making sure that parks in general have the facilities and amenities that people need, and the same quality ones that our peer cities do.
Not everybody thinks of nature as being in an urban space.
Molly Morgan, the Texas director of the trust for public land
The Greening Initiative site in Pleasant Grove, for instance, is right off Lake June, which is essentially a six-lane highway. How are you thinking about access, because it’s one thing to build a park, but what if people can’t safely get to it?
Access is important, and it’s an interesting part. On our bigger park sites like Big Cedar Wilderness or Woody Branch, there are a lot of conversations around parking and vehicular access, which is critical to people being able to come and use the site. But take that Lake June site: The council person advocated for a crosswalk to connect the Pleasant Grove Branch Library across the street to that park site so that residents can easily walk to it. So that’s going to be a really exciting thing to happen and really needed.
How have you seen the city approach using green space to improve surrounding connectivity and infrastructure?
We are all thinking through not just the recreation component of a project, but the transit components. Is it wide enough to meet federal ADA standards? How are you incorporating things like safe routes to schools or connections to medical facilities? Those are all important.
We’re trying to get people away from traffic while trying to solve that first-mile, last-mile problem. How do I get to the light rail station? How can I safely walk to my park? That became very real when I had my daughter; there are so many sidewalks where you can’t walk with a stroller and a kid next to you. You need to invest enough for comfort if you want people to use those spaces.
The Five Mile Creek work you’re leading is essentially a trail project that snakes east from the Westmoreland DART station. It appears the design is informed by the risk pedestrians face in that pocket of Oak Cliff.
There are areas where you’re walking along that creek way and it’s crazy beautiful. There are almost canyon walls of limestone from which you can look down into a vista that makes you feel like you’re in the Hill Country. But in many cases, there isn’t a sidewalk. We’ve seen families walk on a busy one-lane street to get to the grocery store from their homes in the neighborhood and back. It’s really easy in those spots to envision how the trail is going to provide that safer transportation. When the vegetation is cleaned up that hasn’t been cared for in a long time, it is going to be one of the most beautiful places in Dallas to walk. Right now, if you didn’t know that was going to be there, you might not see it.
But what did the Katy Trail look like before people came in and took ownership of it and cleaned it up? It’s hard to imagine what it looked like before, because it’s magical now. There are areas of Five Mile where there’s significant gray infrastructure, but there’s still these magical pockets with beautiful nature, and the majority of it is like that. It’s not just about the transportation or the trail part of the project. It’s also cleaning up the vegetation, building some systems that help us maintain the waterway. Those things are connected.
Plans for Five Mile were first presented almost a century ago, which envisioned it as Oak Cliff’s version of what Turtle Creek eventually became. I was curious about what you think the public should know now that the Trust is bringing a version of that to life.
The original plan for Dallas was born of the City Beautiful movement. When George Kessler planned the city, the idea was that people should be connected to each other and to better civic life through green spaces. In Dallas, that looks like green spaces that come off the streams, the creeks, the tributaries. It’s not just a beautiful amenity. It connects people to institutions. It connects people to each other. It’s for people to feel more engaged about their own city so that they are more active in their civic life.
I think what’s special about Five Mile is that there’s still the opportunity to do that, even more than 80 years later. There is still the ability for us to deliver what was initially called for. We have this incredible asset that connects us from the Westmoreland DART rail station to Kiest Park, from South Oak Cliff Park and South Oak Cliff High School to For Oak Cliff and Glendale Park, from UNT Dallas to Paul Quinn College, and then all the parks along the way.
The rest of the city’s trail network—and the VA Hospital—is right along this path, so you can see how bits of the infrastructure around the trail itself ended up being what the land use called for. It is connecting those institutions. The trail is the piece that’s missing, and it’s the heart of the system. That’s why it’s still important.
Five Mile, Woody Branch, and Big Cedar all have significant canopies. There has been a renewed national interest in wilding or re-wilding these spaces—how are you approaching those strategies?
You want people to experience the natural landscape. For Big Cedar or Woody Branch, it means taking the great environmental things that are there and making sure that we’re preserving them and protecting them so that future generations can experience them. Woody Branch has these giant bur oaks, but the next succession of those bur oaks isn’t able to survive because there is invasive privet. There are unmaintained trees; they’re good trees, but they aren’t getting the same intervention they would get if they were in a prairie, where once in a while there would be a burn. Or there were things like bison eating young saplings, or, you know, turning over the grass. There’s some natural processes we’re missing there.
So even things like hackberries and cedars are more present in that landscape than they would have been in their natural environment, and that prevents the old-growth species from having their next generation thrive. So it does require some intervention. You want the next generation of people to get to experience the next 50-year tree that is huge and the acorns are giant, and to be around something so majestic. But it means that you do have to address some of those other things.
If you look at a historic map, Woody Branch had meadow land and prairie land tied with the tributaries of the streams, so we have to go back in and punch in some of the meadow areas so that we can have a balanced ecosystem that allows both areas to thrive and survive. If you look on it in a map, it will still look like there’s canopy there, but all the older species that are providing that ecological benefit and that variance in the forest quality will die out.
In our engagement, we found that people want a designed experience that has a gradient into a more natural or wild place. You want to have the feeling of, ‘I’m so small in nature and there’s something bigger than me,’ but you have to be comfortable to get there.
Budgets are getting tighter. The city of Dallas anticipates a budget shortfall in the next fiscal year. We all know how volatile federal funding has been in the last few years. Are you comfortable with the funding outlook considering how many projects the Trust is leading in Dallas?
I’m comfortable with how we deliver our work here at TPL, but I wouldn’t say that I’m super comfortable with the maintenance conversation. I don’t think anyone is. I think maintenance is something people don’t usually want to talk about across the country; it’s not the sexiest thing to talk about, but it’s critical to site maintenance in neighborhoods and the city looking and feeling the way we want it to.
In the past, TPL has really covered and funded 100 percent of our time on project delivery. And I’m starting to think about how we deliver help with some of the maintenance while at the same time we’re doing community work on a pretty efficient budget. There are some things that a public agency is more primed to do than an outside group is, but we want to be a part of the solution. I think that it’s a perennial conversation, but that is particularly important right now. I know there are other organizations too who are doing a lot on that front. Organizations have endowments for how they’re maintaining the bigger park spaces. I think that could take a huge load off the community park spaces, and it’s something that we need to continue to think through.
People deserve these places, and it’s our job to come together from a private and a public standpoint to figure out how we maintain and care for those places so they don’t miss out on the things they deserve.
Matt Goodman is the co-founder and editor of The Lab Report. matt@labreportdallas.com.