The waymark coordinates are located at the main entrance on Parry Avenue to Fair Park. Today, the Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) Gren Line stops here. Since the 1886 the Parry Avenue entrance has been the ceremonial and historic entrance to Fair Park. It, and the rest of Fair Park, got a major Art Deco makeover for the Centennial in 1936.
The irony of Fair Park is that is even here at all. All the exhibit buildings built for the 1936 Texas Centennial Celebration along the Esplanade (except for the Hall of State) were intended to be temporary, so they were literally built of wood, plaster and chicken wire. The amazing statues in the niches of the buildngs along the Esplanade: made of concrete, and supposed to be junked.
So how did these buildings survive? Easy: Dallas ran out of money and lacked the funds to tear them down, so they sat there. For decades, they city couldn't find the money to do large-scale demolition at Fair Park so it put a few thousand dollars worth of repairs into the buildings every 10 years or so, to freshen paint and patch plaster.
By 1986 the buildings were in a terrible condition, and Dallas was thinking about finally tearing them down. EXCEPT in the intervening 50 years people in Dallas and all over Texas had come to love these shabby buildings and the 1930s atmosphere of Fair Park. when the municipal conversations about tearing down the plaster and chicken-wire buildings at Fair Park started up, the Friends of Fair Park group stood up, raised a LOT of private money, and started pressing the City to join them to preserve and protect Fair Park.
They were successful. Fair Park was listed on the US National Register of Historic Places later that year, and that was the easy part. Fair Park got its first big maintenance and stabilization projects over the next several years.
About 30 years later, Fair Park was due for another round of big-dollar projects, an effort was more about restoration and modernization than stabilization and rescue. The 1936 Centennial murals along the Esplanade, long thought destroyed, were found under layers of paint and plaster. The ones that survived were stabilized and conserved. Others had to be re-created. The concrete Esplanade statues got some care. The golden accent on the tower building was cleaned and replaced, and its decorations restored so it gleams again. Bronze statues of at the Esplanade fountain, which had been removed after the Centennial, were recreated from photographs and replaced in their historic spots. In 2002 the Famous Texas Woofus (lost after 1941) returned to preside over the cattle barns area.
Mama Blaster LOVES Fair Park, and remembers the days when it was very rundown. It's great to see the changes and evolution of Fir Park, now finally appreciated.
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From Texas: A Guide to the Lone Star State:
9. FAIR PARK, in East Dallas, main entrance on Parry Ave., covers 178 acres of landscaped grounds and is the site of the State Fair of Texas. The Texas Centennial Exposition was held here in 1936, the Greater Texas and Pan-American Exposition in 1937.
In 1886 the State Fair of Texas was organized, and 100 acres of land purchased in 1887. Since then it has developed rapidly into one of the State's major enterprises. Twenty-one of the Centennial buildings of 1936 were retained as the permanent home of the State Fair. In a setting of trees, shrubs, lawns, and lagoons, the buildings of cream limestone, relieved by murals and trimmings of rose-colored Texas granite, reflect the ancient Aztec style of architecture in straight formal lines, combined with modern treatment with a leaning toward sharp angles and large unbroken planes.
Of the permanent Fair Park buildings, the six museums, the Texas Hall of State, also a repository for records of the Dallas Historical Society, the Museums of Natural History, Fine Arts, Horticulture, and Natural Resources, maintained by the Dallas Park Department, remain open throughout the year. Other important buildings are the Auditorium, the Petroleum and Educational Buildings, and the Amphitheater. The museum buildings are grouped about the lagoon in the southwest section of the park. George L. Dahl was director general of the group of architects who designed the buildings.
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Fair Park Museums are part of the Civic Center of Dallas, and are the property of the city. . . "