A new urban park is set to open in Downtown Dallas in the coming months.
Harwood Park, a nearly four-acre park nestled in the East Quarter neighborhood of the Central Business District, was developed by the Dallas Park & Recreation Department in partnership with one of the region’s most influential nonprofits — Parks for Downtown Dallas.
Todd Interests, a commercial real estate firm investing in the surrounding area, also contributed $1 million toward the park’s construction.
Groundbreaking was held in October 2021. The area where the park was developed formerly consisted of parking lots and unused buildings, as previously reported by The Dallas Express.
Despite the modest gains made by revitalization efforts in recent years, Downtown Dallas has been wrought with crime, homelessness, and vagrancy, prompting the deployment of roughly 45 security officers by a local nonprofit.
The new urban park will feature a number of amenities, including an interactive splash pad, a multi-function sports court, a dog park, a gold ring arbor, and a playscape for kids.
Willis Winters, the former director of the Park & Recreation Department, posted images of some of the playground equipment, which was styled after Columbian wooly mammoths.
“Colombian Mammoths, which once ranged across Texas and Dallas, have been resurrected by landscape architect Christy Ten Eyck in the children’s play area at Harwood Park in downtown Dallas. Opens this Fall,” wrote Winters in a Facebook post.
The new park also comes with an amphitheater, a designated area for food trucks, and the neighborhood’s first pickleball court, reported The Dallas Morning News.
“The park department is getting more requests for pickleball courts than they know what to do with, and they have very few in the Dallas system,” said Amy Meadows, president and CEO of Parks for Downtown Dallas, per DMN. “We tend to see them more out in the suburban communities. And so we anticipate that this pickleball court can get a lot of use.”
