The once-empty space over 14 lanes of interstate highway traffic coursing through the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas is now an exceptional new development open to the public: Halperin Park. The $300 million freeway capping project includes a playground, splash pad, band shell, large lawn, and linear walkway that resurrects an erased section of a historic street.
Joining the widely celebrated freeway-capping Klyde Warren Park, which opened its first phase over a stretch of a recessed downtown freeway in 2012, Halperin Park is a community-centric model for addressing the divisions wrought by highway building.
Reconnecting a neighborhood
Designed by architecture firm HKS and landscape architecture firm SWA, the cap park reconnects part of Oak Cliff, a South Dallas neighborhood cut up by the 1950s-era highway-building boom.
At the time I-35E was constructed, Oak Cliff was home to a thriving Black community. As in many other non-white neighborhoods in cities across the country, the community was shattered by highway construction and the decades of disinvestment that followed.
“While it’s a park to reconnect communities, it’s also a park that we wanted the communities to feel like they helped design; they helped influence the programming,” says Todd Strawn, managing principal for SWA’s Dallas studio and lead designer on the project.
During the planning process, a “community-first plan” was developed through extensive outreach, focusing the project on outcomes like improving access for schools in the surrounding area, increasing shade, and reducing the heat island effect in the neighborhood.
Balancing recreation and economic development
As it officially opens, the 2.8-acre park is forging a small but meaningful reconnection in the area. Its design honors the neighborhood’s history while also encouraging the economic development it needs.
The park features a mixture of uses. Kids can scramble up the jungle gym or cool off on the splash pad. The band shell can host concerts and performances, while the lawn serves as a place for picnics or just relaxing with a book. SWA and HKS also thought of the park in relationship to the rest of the city, designing an elevated terrace walk and seating area that gives visitors a new vantage point.
“You get up on top of that and you’ve got these fantastic views of downtown, over the zoo, and over South Dallas, which is super lush with the tree canopy,” Strawn says of the elevated area. “There’s a lot of green space that you see that wasn’t really perceived previously.”
This elevated section doubles as the roof of a multipurpose pavilion that can host events and house pop-up vendors. There’s space nearby where food trucks can park, and an enclosed building for fully indoor events and activations.
Russell Crader, global practice director for arts and culture at HKS, says these spaces give the park flexibility for both recreational and economic activity. “We basically have a tool kit,” he says. “I think those are what will allow the most change over time as the neighborhood starts to say, ‘I want a different type of program.’”
A technically challenging design
The park is also a pioneering example of the use of mass timber, which is still rare in the Dallas area. Three sections of the park have mass-timber elements, including the curving band shell. The material, which is more lightweight than traditional steel and concrete, helped reduce the overall weight of the park—a critical detail as it spans the interstate.
“A lot of people say, ‘Oh, this is a park, and you just get to do your whimsical gestures however you want to,’” Crader says, noting the reality is that the many technical challenges involved with capping a freeway required rigorous engineering studies. “There’s a real balance of science and art that coalesces here in the park.”
Nearly a decade in the works, the project was driven by the Southern Gateway Public Green Foundation in partnership with the city of Dallas and the Texas Department of Transportation. This is just the first phase of the project. A second phase now in the design and engineering stage would bring the park’s total area up to 5.3 acres. Fundraising is still underway.
As ambitious as the project is, the future of freeway cap parks is looking dim. The Trump administration has targeted such neighborhood reconnection projects by rescinding more than $2 billion worth of unspent funding that had previously been established for efforts like freeway cap parks and highway-to-boulevard conversions.
Strawn contends, however, that there is every intention of completing Halperin Park’s phase two. “There are a lot of hoops and loops to jump through,” he says. “The goal right now . . . is somewhere in the next five or six years that phase two would come online.”