I firmly believe that if Fair Park was actually put in the hands of Humann, he and Anderson would have settled their differences and worked to make a better Fair Park. Both their hearts were into it. But the city saw fit to hand it to a Philadelphia company, so here we are...
The Humann plan, if he could have re-built trust with the philanthropy and civic community that at the same time was doing things like moving the science museum to Uptown, music hall to the arts district, etc. etc. due to a lack of trust in the city & the complexity of doing things at Fair Park (that is the big conditional if statement) would have been the best thing to happen to Fair Park of the options available to us at the time. That was not a guarantee to happen, and it would have had its own politics too. But, in the long run, I don’t see how we support the kind of civic life and investment in institutions we should all be happy to see at Fair Park without the benefactors that make things like say the Arboretum successful.
I've had a few talks with John Jenkins and Ryan O'Connor of Parks. The key is year round programming. One thing that came from those chats is introducing GLM (https://www.goodlocalmarkets.org/locations) to the Park dept and allowing them to set up at parks and Fair Park. There needs to be more year round programming, obviously, especially that can conduct during Fair season as well. But I have some ideas.......
This was a great piece. My whole life, I've read about plans for Fair Park and then watched them all fizzle out just in time for a new plan. I wonder if part of the reason for this is because we don't have a good answer to the "what is Fair Park for" question.
Part of trying to answer this question is reckoning with what it used to be. After the expositions of 1936 and 1937, the south side of the park was designed as a civic center. Around the lagoon was a natural history museum, a museum of fine arts, an aquarium, a science museum, and a garden.
Over time, Dallas chose to move those institutions out of Fair Park. Instead of investing in what could have been a great cultural center, we slowly extracted everything out of it.
That's part of the problem today: the institutions that were birthed in Fair Park still exist. They just exist somewhere else. That purpose for Fair Park is fulfilled elsewhere.
We need a vision for the space that's more than just having it be better utilized year round. That is what so many of the recent plans distill down to. Find tenants for the buildings. Book more concerts. Book more festivals. This connects back to your "Theory of a City" post. These plans all take the form of: "We have a world class space, it should be a bigger asset."
Much to think about. I look forward to your next post.
I firmly believe that if Fair Park was actually put in the hands of Humann, he and Anderson would have settled their differences and worked to make a better Fair Park. Both their hearts were into it. But the city saw fit to hand it to a Philadelphia company, so here we are...
The Humann plan, if he could have re-built trust with the philanthropy and civic community that at the same time was doing things like moving the science museum to Uptown, music hall to the arts district, etc. etc. due to a lack of trust in the city & the complexity of doing things at Fair Park (that is the big conditional if statement) would have been the best thing to happen to Fair Park of the options available to us at the time. That was not a guarantee to happen, and it would have had its own politics too. But, in the long run, I don’t see how we support the kind of civic life and investment in institutions we should all be happy to see at Fair Park without the benefactors that make things like say the Arboretum successful.
I've had a few talks with John Jenkins and Ryan O'Connor of Parks. The key is year round programming. One thing that came from those chats is introducing GLM (https://www.goodlocalmarkets.org/locations) to the Park dept and allowing them to set up at parks and Fair Park. There needs to be more year round programming, obviously, especially that can conduct during Fair season as well. But I have some ideas.......
This was a great piece. My whole life, I've read about plans for Fair Park and then watched them all fizzle out just in time for a new plan. I wonder if part of the reason for this is because we don't have a good answer to the "what is Fair Park for" question.
Part of trying to answer this question is reckoning with what it used to be. After the expositions of 1936 and 1937, the south side of the park was designed as a civic center. Around the lagoon was a natural history museum, a museum of fine arts, an aquarium, a science museum, and a garden.
Over time, Dallas chose to move those institutions out of Fair Park. Instead of investing in what could have been a great cultural center, we slowly extracted everything out of it.
That's part of the problem today: the institutions that were birthed in Fair Park still exist. They just exist somewhere else. That purpose for Fair Park is fulfilled elsewhere.
We need a vision for the space that's more than just having it be better utilized year round. That is what so many of the recent plans distill down to. Find tenants for the buildings. Book more concerts. Book more festivals. This connects back to your "Theory of a City" post. These plans all take the form of: "We have a world class space, it should be a bigger asset."
Much to think about. I look forward to your next post.