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Things to Do at Klyde Warren Park

From chess, lectures, yoga, and a lending library to movies, knitting, and dance lessons, Klyde Warren Park aims to offer outdoor activities for just about everyone.
By Shashana-Pearson-Hormillosa |
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photography: DTC courtesy of Dallas Children's Theater; Tap Dancers by Billy Surface; all others istock

For decades, Dallasites haven’t had much choice when it comes to green-space venues that are perfect for outdoor activity. But Klyde Warren Park is about to change all that, and on a grand scale.

The deck park over Woodall Rodgers Freeway represents a paradigm shift for Dallas, both in the scope of its engineering and in its range of sport and cultural opportunities.

Physically, the park bridges the gap between Uptown’s shops, restaurants, and residences and downtown’s arts and business worlds. Less tangibly, but perhaps even more significantly, the park bridges a gap in community that has existed in the city for years.

Once upon a time, Dallas was known for its great parks. As far back as the 1920s, the City of Dallas provided outdoor areas for its citizens to gather to enjoy each other and to be entertained—by movies shown on outdoor screens; by fitness programs like tennis, badminton, and croquet; and by offering a way to beat the Texas heat with wading pools and swimming pools.

In 1985, the city even won the National Gold Medal Award from the National Recreation and Park Association. But then, the recession that swept across the country in the 1980s and early ’90s washed out much of Dallas’s economy. The economic downturn had a devastating effect on the city. The city’s parks budget faced significant funding cuts, and the once-well-used parks began to fall into disrepair.

The opening of Klyde Warren Park is Dallas’s first real attempt since then to get some of its outdoor-recreational mojo back.

To entertain the citizenry, the park will feature specialized programming from partner organizations representing a range of interests. These partners include the likes of the Dallas Museum of Art, the Dallas Opera, The University of Texas at Dallas, the Dallas Children’s Theater, and the Dallas Center for Architecture.

From architectural tours, Mah Jongg and chess games, knitting, and fitness classes to live jazz and guest lectures by business-industry leaders, there will be ample opportunity to connect and find personal and professional enrichment—all with the backdrop of a lush “garden” in the middle of downtown Dallas.

A GREEN CITY
In 1995, Veletta Forsythe Lill was serving as a City Council appointee to the Central Business District’s “gateways and linkages task force” when she first saw official mention of a deck park over the Woodall Rodgers Freeway. The report presented ideas to the City Council, on which Lill served from 1997 to 2005, to link neighborhoods and to erase the impact of freeways in and around downtown.

“Dallas was just coming out of a difficult financial period,” recalls Lill, who in November will leave her post as executive director of the Dallas Arts District, a role she has held since 2009. “There wasn’t funding, and there wasn’t a singular person to carry [the idea] forward. There can be a vision for the city, but that vision needs a champion.”

In 2002, after a year and a half of research on 25 years’ worth of data, city planners issued a long-term plan for returning Dallas to a Golden Age of parks. A “Renaissance Plan for Dallas Parks and Recreation in the 21st Century” declared that “great cities are known for their great parks.” The report established a strategy for renovating more than 400 parks across the city and reinvigorating the city’s sense
of community.

“Dallas is a big-vision city. A whole series of proposed park projects is transforming Dallas into a green city, and it’s exciting to be a part of that,” says James Burnett.

Burnett is founder of The Office of James Burnett, which designed the master plan for Klyde Warren Park, including the park’s size, location, and rough form. “I was blown away throughout the whole process by the optimism of the committee and the chief city planners who were behind this project,” he says.

Three years later, the Dallas City Council outlined obstacles downtown Dallas faced in creating critical mass, and strategies to overcome them. It included a proposal to build a deck park over Woodall Rodgers Freeway. The following year Dallas citizens approved a $20 million bond package that would help fund the ambitious plan—and Klyde Warren Park was born.

YEAR-ROUND PROGRAMMING
By the time construction began in the fall of 2009, the Woodall Rodgers Park Foundation, which manages the operations, programming, and maintenance of the park, had raised more than $56 million in city, state, and federal funding, and millions of dollars in private funding.
By the end of this year, the park foundation will have raised the entire $110 million needed to fund the park, more than $53 million of it from private sources.

“The philanthropic community here is very vigorous,” says Dan Biederman, president of Biederman Redevelopment Ventures Corp., who served as a consultant on the park project. “It’s the individuals who made money in oil and gas and put it back into building the city.”
Biederman is best known for his work on the restoration and renovation of New York City’s Bryant Park, which has largely served as the template for programming at Klyde Warren Park. In the late 1980s, Biederman took the derilect, crime-ridden Bryant Park and transformed it into a safe, award-winning green space enjoying a steady stream of visitors. The 9.6-acre park in Midtown Manhattan reopened in 1992 and today sees 6 million visitors annually.

Organizers are hoping to attract visitors on a similar scale to Klyde Warren Park.

In part, the 5.2-acre Dallas park comprises a 15,000-square-foot children’s garden, a 2,600-square-foot reading and games courtyard, a 4,000-square-foot dog park, several water features, a restaurant, and a performance pavilion. The park is designed so that weight capacity won’t ever be a problem. The great lawn alone can accommodate 3,000 people.

“It was clear from the beginning that we wanted this to be something that appealed to a large group of people,” Burnett says. “We wanted to be inclusive, to not make it be a one-stroke idea, but something that works for a lot of people. The key [to that] is the programming.”
So on a brisk day in February 2006—one of the coldest days of the year—a group of specially-invited Dallas citizens gathered at downtown’s Nasher Sculpture Center to brainstorm ideas for programming at the new park. What came out of that focus group was a plan incorporating art, music, personal and professional development, fitness, and educational and entertainment opportunities for adults and children alike.

And, because the grounds are 65 percent shaded, this programming is intended to happen year-round. “We were worried about the climate,” Biederman concedes. “We thought the park could be deserted on 105-degree days. The programing alleviates that.”

With the help of BRV Corp., no fewer than 30 programming partnerships culled directly from suggestions made by Dallas residents have been formed between the park and member organizations. And, organizers expect to continue adding more.

Importantly, all the programs to be offered were identified as likely lures for park visitors. And, that will be good for the park’s bottom line.
The park foundation will be fully self-sustaining, bringing in an estimated $2.7 million to $3 million in self-generated revenue annually. Although the programming is essential to the park’s success, the programming doesn’t directly result in revenue. Instead, cash flow will come from other means: sponsorships, event-site rentals, catering, and concession sales. The driving force making those income generators work, however, is a continuous flow of people into the park.

“Bryant Park got good [at programming] after a decade,” Biederman says. “Klyde Warren Park is going to open stronger than other parks, because there’s more programming ready on the first day.”

Lil has no doubt the park will be well-attended. “It’s a good time to be opening, because we’ve increased the density on both sides of the freeway,” she says. “Dallas has proved that it’s a city that loves to be outside. We like public gathering spaces, and this will be a unique public gathering space.”

STRETCHING, READING, BATTLING
“The Park will be like Dallas’ living room,” says Karen Buckner, co-owner and director of Bikram Yoga Dallas. “We’ve never had anything like this to bring us together.”

Bikram Yoga Dallas will offer a 60-minute beginner’s Bikram yoga class each week on Thursday evenings, starting Nov. 1. Buckner sees the class as a great opportunity for park visitors to sample a fitness program, and to challenge themselves into trying something they might find intimidating at first.

“People are really surprised that they can do yoga, and they are excited about the results achieved during the practice,” Buckner says. It’s not just the physical component, she adds, but the mental component that surprises them.

“Dallas really needs yoga because we are so busy in our lives, and it’s important to take a break and slow down without being stimulated,” she says. “It’s about relaxing, so that you can gain energy and have that balance. It’s less doing and more just being. The park is the perfect place for that to happen.”

The park was especially attractive to  Peggy Helmick-Richardson, president of the Dallas Storytelling Guild, who was asked by foundation staff to bring storytelling to park patrons.

“I got the immediate impression that [the organizers] so understood what the needs would be for storytelling: quiet corners and areas removed from the chaos,” Helmick-Richardson says. “Storytelling is incredibly flexible. If the environment is conducive, it will work.”
The guild has more than two dozen member storytellers who could be tapped to perform at the park. Performance materials largely depend on the performer, but can range from folktales to fairytales to personal anecdotes. For the guild, the material and performer is less important than the one-on-one connection storytelling provides.

“What we’d really like to accomplish [through the partnership] is a greater appreciation for storytelling, because it allows individuals to connect on a personal, heart level,” Helmick-Richardson says. “As Dallas storytellers, we have stories that connect us to the community. And when you have a community sharing stories, all it can do is get better.”

The Dallas Public Library also has a plan to share its stories. It will work in conjunction with the University of North Texas Department of Library and Information Sciences to donate books to help furnish a lending library at the park. Books will be be checked out, read on-site, and then returned.

Suliman Hawamdeh, chairman of the LIS department at UNT, would like to see his students help with the lending library’s operation as interns, or even as part of their student practicum.

“It’s good for our students to go out and meet people. It’s good for improving information literacy and to encourage people to read,” he says. “It’s a good idea for the library to go to the people, rather than just that the people go to the library.”

Hawamdeh sees the park’s lending library as a way to give back to the community through literature. “We look at this as an opportunity to reach out to more people, to help out and enhance literacy,” he says. “It’s part of our outreach to the public.”

In addition to the lending library, Hawamdeh hopes his team can present guest speakers and offer seminars on topics related to storytelling, reading and books, and knowledge and information management, among other things. They’ll cover anything that concerns the public, he says, and for which they can find a way to educate people.

Meantime, UNT and the Dallas Public Library have signed a memorandum of understanding together with the park. The agreement outlines that each partner, while working together, will make its own contribution.

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