3 May 14 - 20, 2026 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents A Fair Future For generations, city leaders and residents have wanted more for Fair Park. Will it soon finally become all it can be? BY AUSTIN WOOD W hat is Fair Park? What is it supposed to be? At City Hall, officials commonly refer to it as Dallas’ crown jewel. The sprawling campus of Art Deco edifices and midways has hosted an Elvis concert, World Cup matches, a Martin Luther King Jr. speech and 97-consecutive Red River Ri- valry games in its 140-year history. And ev- ery year, the State Fair of Texas attracts over 2 million visitors to the fairgrounds, leaving North Texas residents with their own at- tachments to Big Tex and the Hall of State. The State Fair, however, only operates 24 days each fall, attendance is dropping, and the Cotton Bowl hasn’t consistently hosted major concerts since the 2000s. Structures commis- sioned for the Texas Centennial Celebration in 1936 represented one of the largest collec- tions of exposition-style Art Deco buildings in the world at the time, but most now sit in paint-chipped decay and need millions of dol- lars in repairs after years of neglect. Questions over how to activate the grounds year-round have plagued Dallas of- ficials for decades. City leaders have imple- mented plan after plan designed to maximize the campus, with most — such as the city’s now-infamous management con- tract with the nonprofit Fair Park First — falling short. The residential neighborhoods around Fair Park in South Dallas normally get left behind as well. At a March Park and Recreation Board meeting, Park and Recreation Director John Jenkins called Fair Park “the toughest politi- cal issue to solve in this city.” So why does the city keep knocking its proverbial head against the wall? Fair Park’s potential isn’t up for debate. The 277-acre site sits only a few minutes away from downtown Dallas, abuts major thoroughfares like Interstate 30 and offers prime real estate that could be- come an economic engine for the city. Key to the Future, Problems of the Past Hasani Burton, a South Dallas resident and real estate investor, said unlocking Fair Park’s potential could be key to Dallas’ future. “Here’s the reason we keep talking about it at the end of the day: it’s because of the economic potential,” Burton said. “In maximizing economic potential, flat out, we’re talking about on a local level, on a na- tional level, and as we keep aspiring to be the type of global city that we’re becoming on a global level.” Having assumed control from Fair Park First in 2025, city officials have unveiled plans they believe will finally bring a sus- tainable vision to the grounds. Proposals in- clude redeveloping parking lots into a hotel and retail district to organically create reve- nue for the park. The plans, they say, will bring Fair Park closer to what it should be — a year-round destination driving economic growth for neighboring communities and the city as a whole. Dallas has struggled to keep up with the grounds for almost as long as they’ve been around. City and state officials quarreled over responsibility for Fair Park almost im- mediately after the end of the Centennial Celebration, and by 1985, noted Dallas ar- chitecture pundit David Dillon was compar- ing the city’s treatment of the 277 acres to that of an “embarrassing poor relation-eligi- ble for periodic handouts.” Handouts, in the form of periodic bond funding for stopgap maintenance needs, didn’t address the problem, as Dillon saw it. The real problem, “as it had been for de- cades,” he wrote, was the lack of a clear vi- sion for the crown jewel’s future. A need for an effective long-term frame- work was part of what drove Dallas leaders to delegate management of the grounds to Fair Park First in 2019. Billed as “public-pri- vate” at the time, the Fair Park First privat- ization ended after an audit found the nonprofit’s hired operations manager had misspent nearly $6 million in donor funds. By the time the City Council terminated the contract in 2024, decay was evident: mainte- nance requests around the park had gone unanswered, and the esplanade’s center- piece fountain no longer spouted water. “They didn’t change the filters for the water pumps, and it clogged all the pipes,” Daniel Wood, who represents the Fair Park area on the Park and Recreation board, said. “So it cost millions of dollars.” After the Fair Park First contract ended, the Park and Recreation Department and the park board were tasked with leading the revi- talization. Officials have tried to tackle the most pressing maintenance concerns and added events like weekly farmers markets in an attempt to turn the traditionally seasonal venue into an everyday asset for residents. Still, the park’s $50 million plus in esti- mated deferred maintenance needs far exceed the department’s financial resources. The Fair Park Coliseum needs over $3 million in re- pairs alone, while the expected total to repair the music hall sits at roughly $1.6 million. Wood pointed to the city’s dubious track record of maintaining its buildings. That re- cord is well documented and has persisted in recent years amid the debate over the fu- ture of Dallas City Hall. Reports estimate the building needs more than $350 million in deferred maintenance, as part of a $1 bil- lion-plus total expected to fully modernize I.M. Pei’s brutalist city headquarters. “We’re not 100% in the clear either, be- cause it was under our control for many years and we neglected it,” Wood said. “We don’t do any better. I think we’ve learned our lesson, and we’re trying to do better now. So there’s a lot of lessons learned. There’s a lot of love for Fair Park right now. So I think we’re in a better place.” The reason for Wood’s optimism comes from the proposal’s emphasis on a hybrid public-private model with the city operating alongside private partners and nonprofits, which he said “will hold each other account- able,” as opposed to previous unilateral management by private entities or the city. Vana Hammond is one of two remaining members who were on the park board at the time of Fair Park First’s inception. The com- munications professional previously worked 12-hour shifts during the State Fair as a Dallas Police officer and said the venue has never lived “fully up to its potential” in her lifetime. She also said that she’s cautiously optimistic about the plan and thinks the city has reached a crucial point in Fair Park’s history. “I do not think we have too many more bites out of the Fair Park apple before people are like, ‘Ah, we’ve heard about Fair Park for 10 years. Nothing’s changed,’” Hammond said. Walled Off Resident Norma Shaw walks the fair- grounds almost daily. She’s originally from Chicago and, despite what she called a “stigma for South Dallas,” bought a house in the neighborhood after first landing in Ce- dar Hill. While she said she knows now that the grounds are open to the public daily, she didn’t when she first arrived in 2013 — a misapprehension many Dallas natives oper- ate under. “It’s blocked off. Just walking up, you can’t see what’s going on,” Shaw said. “That’s been my experience with Texas, is that if you don’t know where to go. You may not see that you’re standing right in front of the building where all the people are inside.” Between miles of parking lots, fences and a noticeable lack of pedestrian crossings on Fitzhugh Avenue, connecting Fair Park to the neighborhood isn’t easy. Neighborhood advocates have called for the fences to come down, and officials outlined a need to inte- grate Fair Park in South Dallas as one of the reasons for privatization in 2019. Shaw said that while she’d like to see bar- riers come down, the real issue is marketing. “The visibility is the problem. It’s not the fence, it’s the visibility,” Shaw said. Since taking over, park department staff have outlined five pillars for success at Fair Park. The first focuses on fostering | UNFAIR PARK | Photo by Mike Brooks Delphine Ganious’ family has lived in South Dallas for generations. >> p4
