Fair Park, Dallas

Fair Park (Dallas, USA): detailed description, address and photo. Opportunities for sports and recreation, infrastructure, cafes and restaurants in the park. Reviews of tourists.

Fair Park is not even a park, but a complex with an area of more than 1 sq. km with entertainment and educational facilities, which is considered a vibrant city landmark and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Many buildings on its territory were erected for the Texas Centennial exhibition in 1936, as a result of which the site got its name, becoming the second public park in the city.

The exhibition lasted six months and forever changed the face of the site, which turned from an ordinary fairground into a unique Art Deco quarter. At that time it was assumed that the buildings would be temporary, but it was decided to save many of them. See acronymmonster for nickname of Georgia.

Today, the park is visited annually by about five million people. The 24-Day Texas State Fair, the largest state fair in the country, is the busiest.

The most touristy of all the Fair Park buildings is the Top of Texas tower, opened in 2013. The height of the tower is 150 m.

One of the finest examples of Art Deco on the grounds of Fair Park is the State Hall, which was built at an astronomical cost of $1.5 million at the time. This palace has become the most expensive building in all of Texas. The State Hall is decorated with ornamental metal elements made in the Potter Art Metal workshop. The curved façade features 23m-high limestone columns, while blue tiles are meant to evoke the state’s official flower, the lupine. In the center, above the entrance, there is a 3.4-meter bronze statue of the “Texas Warrior”, an archer, covered with gold leaf. The hall stands at the end of the State Esplanade, 460 m long, on both sides of which six exhibition pavilions are lined up.

The Old Mill tavern was one of the few exhibition buildings not designed in the Art Deco style. Today it houses a restaurant.

The Magnolia Lounge and former Hall of Religion is a little-known project by New York architect William Lesquez who represented European modernism. The design incorporates elements of Art Deco architecture, but overall the building stands out from the crowd of exhibition pavilions in Fair Park. Currently, a professional “Theatre ’47” operates here.

The African-American Museum is open today in the Hall of Negro Life. The permanent exhibition features works by such distinguished African-American artists as Romar Burden, Jacob Lawrence, Larry D. Alexander, John T. Biggers, Clementine Hunter, Benny Andrews, Edward Mitchell Bannister, and Artello Beck.

The Leonhard Lagoon is a peaceful and romantic place in a natural landscape. In 1986, the sculpture of the Earth became part of it. There is a building near the lagoon, which is sometimes called the “Palace of Science” – the Museum of Nature and Science with a planetarium was opened in it, which moved to Victory Park in 2012 (the old building is still used for some expositions). And the History Building, where the Museum of Natural History once worked, is a monolithic square box with three openings at the entrance, trimmed with decorative aluminum lintels. In 1988, a series of landscaped terraces were created in the northeast corner of the building.

The concentric plaster arches are called “Bend Shell” and are also made in the Art Deco style with Art Nouveau elements in the reinforced concrete building behind. The pylons surround an open amphitheater with five thousand seats.

The Star of Texas, opened in Fair Park in 1985, remains the largest Ferris wheel in North America.

Texas Discovery Gardens was originally the agricultural pavilion of the show. Since then, they have been redesigned in order, including adding a minimalist glazed greenhouse to the pavilion.

The Cotton Bowl stadium was built in 1932 and, thanks to subsequent improvements, has grown to its current capacity of more than 92,000 people. Various sports competitions have been and are still taking place here; in particular, in 1994 the stadium was expanded again so that it could host the World Cup.

In 2007, the park received an art deco gondola lift called the Texas Skyway. It lifts visitors to a height of 20 m above the ground and carries them from about half a kilometer.

The music hall in Fair Park, built in the Spanish colonial style, was originally the pavilion of the General Motors company. The building is distinguished by six towers with cast semicircular domes. Until 2009, the Dallas Opera House was located here, and today a summer music festival is held here.

The most touristy of all the Fair Park buildings is the Top of Texas tower, opened in 2013. The tower is 150 m high and was created solely for viewing purposes. At the base of the tower, museum displays are sometimes opened dedicated to the 1936 exhibition and the state fair.

Developments

Fair Park hosts several notable city events on a regular basis. First, of course, is the Texas State Fair, the largest state fair in the United States, which has been held since 1886, opening on the last Friday in September and continuing until the third Sunday in October. It also hosts Earth Day in April and the North Texas Irish Festival on the first weekend in March.