DALLAS — After years of discussion, planners with the Trinity Park Conservancy say they have a design for the long-awaited Harold Simmons Park between the Trinity River levees just west of downtown Dallas, with a groundbreaking planned for 2024.
The 250-acre park will be located between the Margaret McDermott bridge and Ronald Kirk bridge west of downtown Dallas. Planners say they hope the park will connect West Dallas, Oak Cliff and downtown Dallas across the Trinity River.
“Most neighborhoods where I serve, they are under resourced, their infrastructure is waning – but to have something like this, that you don’t have to drive to the suburbs or drive to some other place… that the immediately surrounding communities can walk to… those kinds of things don’t happen in communities where I serve, and to have something like this within the heart of Dallas, it’s a tremendous, not only a health piece, but a psychological and emotional thing to encourage people who do live in areas that are traditionally underserved,” said Vincent Parker, Trinity River Corridor local government corporation board chair and lead pastor of Golden Gate Missionary Baptist Church.
Plans began for a then 200-acre, $150 million park between the Trinity River levees five years ago, the Dallas Morning News reported, with groundbreaking originally set for fall 2020. Since then, planners Monday released a new design by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates Inc. and the price for the park rose to about $325 million.
The proposed location was changed because the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers that controls the floodway never endorsed park construction inside the levees as approved by voters in 1998, NBC5 reported.
The park, to be named for the late Dallas businessman Harold Simmons, whose family reportedly donated $50 million, is expected to feature a two-story pavilion, play areas, a skate park, café, green space and more.
“The park we have today…has curated and developed to be a much better park. A more comprehensive park, a more contiguous park that will lend for more what we call length of stay, and it’s truly a better product,” Trinity Park Conservancy CEO Tony Moore said. “The $325 million price tag – I want to put some things in perspective. That does include an endowment for (operations and maintenance) that also includes allocations for the green floodway so it’s not entirely a full construction budget.”
Ted Flato, founding partner of Lake Flato Architects, said architects the design for the West Overlook, the largest section and entrance to the park that extends from the levee embankment along Commerce Street into west Dallas, incorporates a 1,000-foot industrial shed. Features of the West Overlook are expected to include an event lawn, café, skate and bike park, water features, play cove with a cable ferry, six two-story interactive towers, with bridges, slides, and other climbing features and more.
“Making the new buildings part of the park is the critical piece of the puzzle. So they are of the park, they’re influenced very much by some of the original characteristics of this place, which is – the West Overlook was an industrial site, so there’s a wonderful long shed, so that long, industrial shed starts to inform some of the things that we’re doing in the larger buildings,” said Flato.
Another section of the park calls for an expansion and reimagining of the Felix Lozada Gateway at the western edge of the Ronald Kirk Bridge that includes the bridge in the design, as well as the Continental Gateway on the eastern end. Plans for the Felix Lozada Gateway include sports courts and a roller skating rink.