DALLAS — It took years of planning and an engineering masterpiece to build Klyde Warren Park over Woodall Rodgers Freeway between Uptown and Downtown Dallas in 2012.
Even still, city leaders have had their eyes on expansion since its installation. Now, just six years later, the city’s cornerstone park is set to receive a massive, $76 million expansion that will be completed as early as 2022.
The focal point of plans unveiled Thursday is a 20,000-square-foot pavilion between St. Paul and Akard Streets that will house a sprawling visitor center and event space.
Also included in the 1.2-acre expansion is more green space, including an added deck on the south side of Akard Street.
Construction is scheduled to begin next year.
Renderings: Here's what $76 million could do to Klyde Warren Park
The central purpose of Klyde Warren Park’s installation, which began in 2009, was to connect a once-segmented downtown area.
“I love that the chasm that Woodall Rodgers Freeway created between downtown and uptown is now in our rearview mirror,” Mayor Mike Rawlings said in a Thursday press release.
The $76 million injection will continue that mission, according to Jody Grant, the chairman of the Woodall Rodgers Park Foundation, which was formed in 2004 and oversaw the initial deck park project.
“This project fulfills the vision we outlined when we began talking about decking over Woodall Rodgers a decade ago,” she said, “and it is the next step in improving the connectivity of the Park and the Arts District with the West End, Victory Park, and the Perot Museum.”
The park in its current form boasts more than 100,000 visitors each month, and park officials claim it’s generated $2 billion in economic development. Those officials project the expansion will create another $850 million boost.
The expansion plans unveiled this week were years in the making. Renderings released in 2016 showed an expansion of the downtown park – including a “sky park” pavilion similar to the one that lives on in the 2018 iteration.
Back then, the proposed $90 million project included additional bells and whistles like a “sky bridge” connecting Klyde Warren to the Perot Museum a little more than a quarter-mile down Woodall Rodgers and a large-scale expansion of an Olive Street Plaza.
Those plans won’t be part of the next installment, but could very well remain part of a grander plan for the park.