Klyde Warren Park

Hailed as one of the first and most successful deck parks built over a busy highway, Klyde Warren Park was realized through a creative visioning process and public-private partnership.

The freeway had severed Dallas’s two largest cultural districts — the downtown Arts District and Uptown– for many years. Restoring the connection by bridging the gap has transformed the roadway into a connected public realm.

A simple, elegant plan is flexible enough to accommodate a wide variety of community, arts, and cultural events. Bisected by the existing Olive Street Bridge, the 5.2-acre park is organized around a sweeping pedestrian promenade shaded by a continuous canopy of specimen pond cypress. The promenade draws visitors through the park past a botanical garden, a reading room, an event lawn, and a children’s garden with an interactive water feature.

A large public plaza adjacent to Olive Street includes an interactive fountain and connects a restaurant terrace, a performance pavilion, and a casual takeout kiosk to the street. A series of arches establish a strong architectural rhythm through the park landscape architecture, and groves of trees buffer the interior spaces from the busy adjacent surface streets.

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The park incorporates many of the area’s most prominent museums and universities in its programming and places them in an environment featuring a palette of regionally appropriate trees, shrubs, and ornamental plantings, of which over 50 percent are native to the North Texas area.

Since opening in 2012, the economic reinvestment in the surrounding area has exceeded $6.2 billion.