What Halperin Park Actually Looks Like Now That the World Cup Tents Are Gone

In May, hundreds of people packed the great lawn at Halperin Park for a ribbon-tying ceremony, a marching band from Townview, and a poem from the city's new poet laureate. In June, the park hosted six official FIFA World Cup watch parties, complete with an Adidas ball replica and a McDonald's photo bus. By September, most of that is gone. What's left is a Tuesday afternoon on a deck over a freeway, and that quieter version is the one worth paying attention to if you already live in Oak Cliff.

The thing nobody predicted about Halperin Park is that its real function isn't spectacle. It's routing. The park physically closed a gap in the street grid that had been open since the 1950s, and now that the sponsors and screens have packed up, you can see what that closure actually changed about how people move through this part of the neighborhood on an ordinary Saturday.

The Deck That Reopened a Street

When Interstate 35E was built through Oak Cliff in the 1950s, it cut directly through what had been a thriving Black commercial corridor and one of the area's earliest Freedmen's towns, according to landscape architecture firm SWA, which designed the park alongside Dallas-based HKS. The highway didn't just add traffic noise. It severed 12th Street, one of the original paths connecting the neighborhoods on either side.

Halperin Park's Phase One, which opened May 9, rebuilt that connection. The park includes a walkable promenade called the 12th Street Promenade, laid out along the original path of the street the highway erased. That's a different kind of amenity than a playground. It's a repaired route, and it means someone walking from the Ewing Avenue side toward the Dallas Zoo no longer has to detour around the freeway trench to get there.

April Allen, president and CEO of the Southern Gateway Public Green Foundation, has described the project's tagline as "Park with a Purpose," and pointed to the 40 percent of Dallas's population that lives in South Dallas while accounting for only 15 percent of the city's tax base as the gap the project is meant to help close. Whether it closes that gap is a longer story. What it has already done, four months in, is put a working sidewalk where there wasn't one.

What's Actually There Right Now

Phase One covers about 2.8 acres, running from Ewing to Lancaster avenues directly over the highway. A second phase, still in design, would extend the park toward Marsalis Avenue and bring the total footprint to roughly 5.3 acres, adding a dog park and a direct connection to the Dallas Zoo.

For now, what's open includes a mass-timber bandshell and pavilion, a great lawn, a treehouse-themed children's playground with a rain curtain water feature that trickles down in an S pattern from an alcove ceiling, a splash pad, and a two-story terrace with views of the downtown skyline and, on a clear day, the Ferris wheel at Fair Park. There's also a dedicated food truck area and an indoor event room for dining and community gatherings.

Getting there is straightforward if you know the options, which weren't obvious during opening weekend traffic.

The rooftop terrace is worth noting for a specific reason beyond the view. It sits high enough above the highway trench that it was already being floated in the spring as a good vantage point for the city's Fourth of July fireworks, since the sightline runs straight toward downtown and Fair Park.

The Walk Down 8th and 7th Streets Got More Interesting Too

Halperin Park didn't arrive in a vacuum. Bishop Arts, a few blocks northwest, has spent the past two years adding restaurants that make a park visit easy to turn into a full afternoon rather than a stop.

Pane Nostro, a family-run Italian restaurant that spent its first years in McKinney, relocated into the former CocoAndré Chocolatier house at 508 W. 7th Street. Owners Dion Gazzaruso and Adalberto Lujan had wanted a Bishop Arts location from the start but couldn't find the right space until the move finally happened. The restaurant serves a menu that ranges across Italian regions, from bucatini all'Amatriciana to classic carbonara, with a mostly Italian wine list and a full bar.

A few blocks over, at 240 W. 8th Street, Trapeze is opening this year in a fully renovated bungalow. The restaurant comes from Peter Novotny and Dan Murry, who run the Deep Ellum bars Ruins and Armoury D.E., and it leans into Oak Cliff's own French history. The neighborhood was settled in part by La Reunion, a French utopian colony established around 1855, and Bishop Arts still marks that history every July with a Bastille Day celebration on North Bishop Avenue. Trapeze's kitchen is run by New York chef Jeremy Spector, who has worked at Balthazar and Gramercy Tavern, and the restaurant sits in a designated conservation district, which meant the renovation had to preserve the home's original exterior look even as the interior was rebuilt from the studs.

Nearby, Komé is bringing its hand rolls and sushi to Bishop Arts this year, opening a sister location to its popular spot in The Hill development inside the former Isla & Co. space. It's one more sign that the corridor between the park and Bishop Arts proper is filling in rather than staying a gap between two separate destinations.

None of this means the park created the restaurant wave. But the two are close enough in distance and close enough in timing that a Saturday now plausibly looks like: park in the morning, walk to Bishop Arts for lunch or dinner, home by evening. That circuit didn't exist a year ago.

Two More Ways Neighbors Are Spending Their Saturdays

Halperin Park isn't the only green space locals have been using this fall. Oak Cliff Nature Preserve, a 121-acre site off Pierce Street with more than eight miles of hike and bike trails, remains a regular draw, with the White Trail seeing the most foot traffic near the trailhead and the trails farther out offering more solitude. The preserve holds a monthly volunteer workday on the first Saturday of the month, and the next one is scheduled for October 3.

Lake Cliff Park has also hosted regular wellness programming this year, including yoga and walking sessions aimed at the neighborhood rather than visitors from elsewhere. Between the preserve, the lake, and now Halperin Park, Oak Cliff residents have more genuinely different outdoor options within a short drive than the neighborhood has had in years.

What Phase Two Adds

The current version of Halperin Park is still incomplete by design. Phase Two, still in the design and engineering stage, is expected to extend the deck toward Marsalis Avenue, adding a second pavilion, more gathering space, a dog park, and a direct pedestrian connection into the Dallas Zoo itself. Project leaders have estimated the completed park could draw more than 2 million visitors a year and generate over $1 billion in economic impact over its first five years, based on a preliminary analysis from the University of North Texas at Dallas.

Those numbers matter for the neighborhood's long-term investment picture, but they're not really what changes a Tuesday afternoon. What changes it is smaller: a sidewalk that reconnects two sides of a street the highway split apart seventy years ago, a terrace that turns a highway view into a place worth sitting still for, and a stretch of Bishop Arts that now has enough new kitchens to make the walk over worth it on its own.

If you're already living in Oak Cliff and wondering whether the park earns repeat visits once the novelty wears off, the early answer looks like yes, quietly, on the days nobody's watching.

Questions about property near Halperin Park, Bishop Arts, or elsewhere in Oak Cliff and the surrounding South Dallas neighborhoods? Contact Diane Bearden for a personalized market consultation.