The State Fair Was The Worst Thing To Happen To Fair Park

Fair Park’s Promise: A Cycle of Feast and Famine

As the State Fair of Texas kicks off, a vibrant energy fills the air in South Dallas.

The aroma of Fletcher’s corny dogs (one of my Mimi’s personal favorites), the bright lights of the Midway, and the sound of crowds shuffling through the gates are a yearly tradition for many. After I’ve now lived in the area for four years, this tradition has taken on a new, more complex meaning.

After years of visiting the fair as an outsider, I’m now a resident. And from this perspective, the annual spectacle is a powerful symbol of a deeply rooted problem.

For all those years, shuffling around in the sun, eating the overpriced food, I never once thought about the neighborhood I was standing in. Now, living right on the border of the Fair Park grounds, I can’t help but notice the stark contrast between the bustling fair and the struggling community that surrounds it.

This stark dichotomy, as I discovered through painfully insightful conversations with longtime residents, is not accidental—it’s the result of decades of neglect and intentional policy that has starved the community of basic services and infrastructure.

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Even after spending only a few minutes in South Dallas you can’t help but wonder: How is it possible for Fair Park to be a city-owned facility generating around $80 million dollars in revenue annually (as of 2023), yet the neighborhood still looks like this?

Each year, South Dallas residents deal with inconveniences like traffic jams along surrounding avenues and illegal parking within our neighborhoods. Outside of the lucky folks who get to stand outside, waving fairgoers into parking lots, how is Fair Park really beneficial to those of us who live here?

The Post-War Dream

Fair Park resident Willie Mae Coleman recalls the serendipitous beginnings of her own neighborhood of Bertrand. She explained how the homes in her area were built for servicemen in WWII and their families. Most of the original families, like the one she bought her house from, were white, and lower income.

When I asked her what Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue used to look like, she said “-that’s Forest Avenue. There used to be good grocery stores, bakeries and all that when I was a child on that street”. Around that time, the Forest Theater would’ve still been open as well (until 1965).

The Historic Disconnect: From Displacement to Neglect

The city of Dallas’s relationship with the Fair Park neighborhood is built on a foundation of broken promises and displacement. In 1968, the city approved a plan to acquire 42 acres of land to expand Fair Park, displacing hundreds of Black families.

As Coleman recalls, families were forced to sell their homes, many of which were already paid off, and were left to start over. She points out how the land they were removed from became little more than vacant cement lots, and a promised park and green space never materialized. This historical displacement set a precedent for how the city would continue to treat the neighborhood.

That may be largely due to the fact that when impacted homeowners formed the Fair Park Block Partnership, figures like mayor Erik Jonsson and city attorney Alex Bickley were completely dismissive of them. The group was able to pull off a meeting with the city attorney inside Fair Park in February of 1969. After that, the city ignored them for months, then just proceeded to condemn people’s homes with impunity. Any meetings or “wins” granted by the city were mostly performative. Seems like not much has changed on that end. Jim Schutze’s ‘The Accommodation‘ goes further in depth on this phenomenon.

This history of inequity is not just in the past. I’ll point to a telling quote from Dallas City Council member Adam Bazaldua from earlier this year: “What we have to do is be thoughtful about the gentrification that is coming in, that’s inevitably coming in.” This sentiment, that gentrification is an unavoidable force, feels to many like an official endorsement of the displacement that has plagued the community for decades.

They don’t cater to us like they cater to other folks.

Simmie Graves, Fair Park resident

This is a stark contrast to other developments in Dallas, like the Tom Thumb grocery stores that have opened in other parts of the city. The lack of similar developments in the Fair Park area, despite its large population, is seen by many as a clear example of the city’s political indifference.

As another longtime resident, Simmie Graves, puts it, the lack of businesses is “because Black people live here. They don’t cater to us like they cater to other folks.” The fast-food restaurants on Robert B. Cullum, for example, are clearly positioned as “a pit stop for Fair Park patrons,” not as a convenience for residents.

Ssanitation, code and police departments operate differently in our neighborhood. In the State Fair’s off season, it is impossible not to see or feel. And this isn’t news. Civil rights leader J.B Jackson called out the city’s conniving back in 1969; “The city is trying to sweat us out”.

An Unaccounted-for Revenue Stream

One of the most vexing questions for residents is how an entity like Fair Park, which generates a reported $80 million in annual revenue, can exist alongside a community with crumbling streets, stagnant water, and rampant illegal dumping.

As Donald Payton, a local historian, explains, a significant portion of the Fair’s revenue has historically been hard to track. He recounts how the fair was once a “laundromat” of cash with no monitoring system, and how some vendors profited immensely without any benefit to the community.

He even recalls a particularly egregious example: a dunking booth called “Hit the Trigger, Duck the N****r” that was a cash cow for its operator.

Absurdly racist attractions such as these inspired South Dallas legend Juanita Craft, then leader of the  NAACP Youth Council, to lead a Fair Park boycott in 1955. This year makes only 70 years since the anniversary of this boycott.

This lack of transparency and accountability has continued to this day. The millions generated from events like the Texas-OU game, where parking can cost $100 a car, are seen by residents as “gravy money” that never finds its way back into the neighborhood. The city’s promise of community investment from Fair Park revenue never materialized, as Graves notes, “they just shut that off. Didn’t do nothing.”

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“They’re Coming.”

As a Mill City resident myself, I wasn’t here too long before I realized we are still making the same mistakes today. “They’re coming. And they just go right over our heads. While we’re asleep, and while we’re out gossiping about each other, tryna put each other down, stealing from each other, these people step right in and buy everything,” Coleman said.

She expresses her sadness about “kids running wild”, recent shootings, and “strange” people hanging around local trap houses. “Now that’s [trap houses] one thing that’ll go. When they come, they’ll get rid of the drug houses.” she says confidently. 

That too, is already set in motion. Just in the last few months, I’ve seen Dallas SWAT execute 3 raids in my corner of the neighborhood. Each time they come out, they make a show of their militarized caravan, Kristi Noem-style. It makes one wonder if the A&E Network is still producing episodes of Dallas SWAT, or are DPD officers just more into the theater aspect of law enforcement.

In June 2021, DPD posted a photo captioned “Rollin to another op!” In it, officers wearing helmets and rifles hang on to the sides of an armored SWAT vehicle as it makes its way down Malcolm X Blvd into South Dallas. 

What’s most ironic about the drug houses in our community is that Dallas manufactured this problem itself. The city created an incubator for this type of crime. Although the city frantically rushed to remove Black families from their Fair Park homes, they were in absolutely no rush to actually do anything with them. This inevitably led to the abandoned properties being used for squatting, hard-drug use, and unregulated sex work.

What’s Next? The World Cup Threat

The upcoming FIFA World Cup, set to be hosted in Dallas, is being touted as a huge economic boost for the city. But for many in the Fair Park area, there is a deep-seated fear that the neighborhood will once again be left behind. The city’s pattern of prioritizing events over community needs is well established. The police, for example, can “spare swarms of officers for traffic/crowd control” during the fair but have a response time of up to four hours for 911 calls in the surrounding neighborhoods.

The neighborhood, which was once a tight-knit community, is now suffering from a lack of cohesiveness and increased crime, which residents like Coleman attribute to the city’s neglect. The city’s response to this is often militarized police raids, which many see as a continuation of the city’s long-standing effort to “disappear people from South Dallas.”

The residents of Fair Park deserve more than temporary, event-driven prosperity. The city has a responsibility to invest in the community that hosts one of its biggest economic engines, not just for a few weeks a year, but for a sustainable, dignified future. As the FIFA World Cup approaches, there is a renewed call for the city to change its ways and finally deliver on the promises made to the community.

Redefining Community, Again

Some community leaders are desperately clinging to the prospect of the Community Park at Fair Park as a win, suggesting that it’s “better late than never.” Except not really, because a recreational greenspace on the Fitzhugh Ave border of Fair Park has been an unfulfilled promise since 1968, with a number of developments like Main Street Garden (2009), Klyde Warren Park (2012), and Ronald Kirk Pedestrian Bridge (2014) having opened since then. 

Those of us who live in the area are constantly told that Fair Park is open and accessible to everyone in the South Dallas community year-round, despite irrefutable evidence against that claim. 

For my neighbors and I to access the park by foot, we’d need to cross Fitzhugh’s 6 lanes of traffic, without any assistance from crosswalks, stop signs, stop lights, or disability inclusive infrastructure. 

Even if we weren’t considering its ugly history, what’s stopping the City of Dallas from providing residents within the vicinity with a few Fair Park perks? Would free season passes or a coupon book for the cheap artery-blocking food really cost that much? Or does the city of Dallas wish for us to lie down and be grateful that they haven’t facilitated our removal once more?

How could the city of Dallas’s approach to development and community investment be structured to ensure that residents of neighborhoods like Fair Park receive lasting benefits from major city events, rather than just temporary traffic and crowds?

Though the State Fair’s arrival heralds the deadline for the city’s answer this year, Fair Park residents can only hope the city can answer this by FIFA’s arrival next year.