Dallas Releases Plan for Southern Gateway Deck Park in Oak Cliff – NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth
More than 50 years ago, the construction of Interstate 35E split and destroyed neighborhoods in Oak Cliff and South Dallas.
Now residents could soon see part of the efforts of the Dallas Department of Transportation and the Texas Department of Transportation, with a 5.5-acre deck park in Oak Cliff being built over a section of I-35E connecting South “doing the wrong thing.” put”. Dallas neighborhoods.
Dallas on Tuesday released its master plans for the Southern Gateway Deck Park, which is part of the Southern Gateway Project.
Stage One of the deck park spans Ewing and Marsalis Avenues on I-35E, adjacent to the Dallas Zoo, and includes a lawn and over 250 trees.
It will also include other functions requested by the community, with a stage and pavilion, children’s playground, special food truck area and a multi-purpose building.
Photos: “An Opportunity to Do Wrong Right”: Dallas Reveals Plan for Southern Gateway Deck Park in Oak Cliff
This 2.8-acre section “aims to open to the public by the end of 2023,” said the Southern Gateway Public Green Foundation, a private not-for-profit that manages the park, on its website.
Construction of the park itself is slated to begin in 2022 after construction of the deck that will support the park is completed. TxDOT started this work in July 2020 and is about halfway through.
The park is a public-private partnership between the Southern Gateway Public Green Foundation and the city, TxDOT and the North Central Texas Council of Governments. It will cost approximately $ 82 million, with $ 35 million from the Foundation for the park and a total of $ 7 million from the Dallas City bond funds and $ 40 million from NCTCOG for the deck.
The foundation, which manages the public park as part of the partnership, decided in 2017 to build the park in two phases due to a lack of financial resources.
Phase two of the park’s schedule depends on securing additional infrastructure funding. Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson signed a letter Tuesday from a coalition of state mayors supporting President Joe Biden’s infrastructure package.
He told Sharon Grigsby of The Dallas Morning News that the Southern Gateway Deck Park fits Biden’s call to correct injustices in neglected communities with public infrastructure.
“This project is exactly within that framework,” Johnson told Grigsby. “Not only are we doing what we need to connect these communities from a civil engineering standpoint, we’re also doing things within the park to raise that equity.”
According to a task force study, the park connects two of the lowest-income census areas in Dallas. The 10th Street Historic District, a city of the freedmen, was populated by former slaves and was considered a landmark in 1993.
But the construction of I-35E in the early 1960s separated the area from the rest of Oak Cliff.
A pedestrian walkway called 12th Street Promenade is an attempt to reconnect the area to a Latino-majority community across I-35E that Grigsby wrote “is exemplified by the bustling atmosphere on Jefferson Boulevard.”
The walkway is lined with “interactive information” about former and current notable residents of Oak Cliff.
[ad_1]
