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Dallas' Klyde Warren Park spawns a new generation of urban parks

Jody and Sheila Grant took a fantasy idea of building a deck park over Woodall Rodgers in 2004 and turned it into a template that's being copied by cities throughout the country.

Last weekend, Jody and Sheila Grant stood at the east end of Klyde Warren Park and surveyed 10,000-plus people gathered en masse to eat, drink, make merry and see the Christmas tree come to life.

“Look at that,” Sheila says. “It doesn’t get better than this. We’re a successful, mini United Nations. It brings tears to my eyes when I think of all these people meeting each other and the friendships that are being formed.”

“This is spectacular,” agrees her husband of more than five decades. “This has given us more joy than anything we’ve ever done outside our family.”

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By “this,” the founder and chairman emeritus of Texas Capital Bank and his constant companion in life mean marshaling an idea that most people considered a flight of fantasy in 2004: Build a stretch of greenery over one of Dallas’ busiest freeways and connect downtown with Uptown.

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It has accomplished that dream and so much more.

Today, Klyde Warren is considered a world-class urban haven that’s providing a template for a new generation of innovative parks here and throughout the country.

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In February, construction began on Dallas’ Southern Gateway Public Green project, a massive $666 million reconstruction of a large section of Interstate 35E and State Highway 67 near downtown through Oak Cliff.

This 5.5-acre park, which will be built in front of the Dallas Zoo, is an opportunity to unite the eastern and western pieces of Oak Cliff.

In October, the Plano City Council gave its blessings to a deck park that would cross over the Dallas North Tollway at Legacy Drive and connect the Shops at Legacy and Legacy West mixed-use developments.

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Urban parks over freeways and ones transforming parking lots, rock quarries, railway tracks and even a long-abandoned trolley station are cropping up around the country, as cities look to add greenspace, revitalize their downtowns and energize downtrodden neighborhoods.

Pittsburgh is considering one for its economically beleaguered Hills District, which is thought to be the inspiration for Steven Bochco's TV series Hill Street Blues.

“Klyde Warren is one of America’s superstar parks,” says Ed McMahon, a leading park expert at the Urban Land Institute in Washington, D.C. “It’s done an enormous job of reconnecting downtown Dallas, generating millions of dollars in property value and providing a new front porch for the city.

“It’s galvanized renewed interest in these sort of parks all over the country,” he says. “We’ve learned that if you design a city around cars, you’re gonna get more cars. But if you design a city around people, you're gonna get more people and better places.

"Klyde Warren Park is a great example that proves that point.”

Fil Choulramountry, a designer of parks and museums at HKS, agrees.

“Dallas’ mentality has been, ‘If there’s land, let’s make money on it.’ With the advent of Klyde Warren Park, the value has gone up. But it’s not about property value. It’s about cultural value,” says Choulramountry, who’s worked with Klyde Warren for four years. “Jody, Sheila and Kit [Sawers, park president] have been able to tap into the intangible assets — the drive, the desire for a safe place to gather — something that people can do in the city that makes it their city.”

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Labor of love

Fourteen years ago, Jody joined Dallas’ Inside the Loop Committee, where the idea of building a deck park over Woodall Rodgers Freeway had been rattling around for years without a champion.

Banker Jody was thinking about boosting the Dallas economy. Arts-lover Sheila wanted to create a cultural heart for more than just Dallas' advantaged class.

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The Grants kicked in a million bucks to get things off the ground. Jody became chairman of the Woodall Rodgers Park Foundation. Sheila chaired its capital campaign.

Like most projects, the park cost more, took longer and created more angst than anyone imagined.

If you’ve ever remodeled a kitchen with your plus-one, you can appreciate the marital challenges that remodeling downtown might have created. But Jody and Sheila seemed to take it all in stride.

A lesser couple would have caved when the economy tanked in 2008 and nearly killed the park before the first bridge expanse was put into place.

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Instead, the Grants, known for sweet-talking, not strong-arming, somehow pulled in $52.2 million in private donations — including $10 million from Dallas billionaire oilman Kelcy Warren, who named the park after his then-10-year-old son.

In October 2012, Klyde Warren Park became an instant hit. Six years later, it’s hard to imagine Dallas without it.

“Dallas needs to give a big Texas thank-you to Kelcy Warren,” says Sheila. “It is easy to have a vision. It is hard to implement that vision. It takes people like Kelcy Warren to come along and help fund it.”

Beacon of success

Two years ago, the Urban Land Institute held its annual meeting in Dallas. McMahon, a senior fellow at the nonprofit that focuses on land use, used it as an opportunity to show off Klyde Warren’s accomplishments to 7,000 attendees.

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They were blown away, he says.

“There’s an expression: A picture’s worth a thousand words, but a real project’s worth a thousand pictures,” says McMahon. “Once people actually saw the real thing, it was like, ‘Oh my God! Why didn’t we think of this before?’ The immediate impact is so obvious.

“They’ve done an excellent job in programming — the soft infrastructure side, the activities, the classes, the events. People didn’t realize you could accommodate that many different things going on in one place.”

McMahon points out that libraries and parks used to be at the tail end of municipal funding.

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“People finally realize that parks are an engine of community revitalization and economic development,” he says. “Klyde Warren Park has gotten attention well beyond North Texas. We’re getting inquiries from cities all over the country. It’s remarkable the way things have changed.”

Last week, the Grants and Sawers traveled to Atlanta for a confab with representatives from 14 other urban parks that are completed or in the making.

The group, called the High Line Network, was the brainchild of Robert Hammond, founder of the extraordinarily popular High Line, a 1.45-mile-long elevated park built on a former rail spur on the west side of Manhattan.

Sheila is a close friend of Hammond’s. Jody and Hammond’s father went to high school together in San Antonio. So when Hammond asked the Grants to help pull together a park consortium, they provided the seed funding.

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“This is a whole new field,” says Sheila. “It’s not like a symphony or a ballet or a museum where there has been a blueprint for centuries about how to run them. I really wanted to fund it so that all these groups could get together and help each other.”

The group toured Atlanta’s BeltLine, a former railway corridor around the metro core that’s under development in stages, including the Bellwood Quarry.

“Sheila and Jody are so admired by this group,” says Sawers. “They don’t have to be doing this. They volunteer their time and their funds to help with this. They’re real ambassadors for urban parks.”

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The folks from Lowline in New York were there. They plan to use innovative solar technology to illuminate an underground historic trolley terminal on the Lower East Side of New York City that was left fallow when trolley service was discontinued 70 years ago.

“All these places are turning over former industrial spaces and making them user-friendly green spaces for people to gather,” says Sawers. “They have the zeal of the newly converted. It’s great energy.”

The Grants say the meeting was about shared knowledge and group therapy.

“You learned a little bit from each of them,” says Jody. “They’re all trying to get to best practices.”

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“And they’re all trying to do something special for their communities — make the space welcoming to all,” says Sheila.

Coming full circle

In October, Dallas announced Klyde Warren Park Phase 2 — or, as Mayor Mike Rawlings calls it, “Klyde Warren 2.0” — a 1.2-acre, $76 million expansion that will include a two-story pavilion in front of Hunt Consolidated headquarters between North St. Paul and North Akard streets.

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Figuring to tap into the nearly 1.5 million people who frequented Klyde Warren this year, VisitDallas is moving its visitor center from the Old Red Courthouse to the first level of the new building.

“We’re going to build a significant building with VisitDallas as our tenant,” says Jody. “Completing that will be my and Sheila’s last effort as it relates to this property.”

“We want to see the park continue to get better and better and better,” adds Sheila. “It’s won 30 awards. It’s doing well, but perfection is the aim.”

“She’s been working on perfection for me for a long time,” he says.

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She nods toward him: “He’s a work in progress.”