How Dallas's Old Money Built a City of Mansions and Then Walled Itself In: Highland Park

On the first of August, 2024, the town of Highland Park issued a demolition permit for a house at the corner of Preston Road and Beverly Drive. It had stood there since 1912. By the twenty-third, it was gone. One preservationist called it arguably the single most important house in all of the Park Cities. Nothing could have been done. Highland Park has no historic landmark ordinance. Not a weak one, not one with a waiting period — none at all. The city of Dallas, three miles south, has protected historic districts on Swiss Avenue, at Munger Place, at Junius Heights. Highland Park has nothing, because Highland Park spent the first half of the twentieth century making certain Dallas would never have any authority over it whatsoever. It began as a failure. In 1889 a Philadelphia syndicate paid $500,000 for the land and the Panic of 1893 destroyed them. Their agent, Henry Exall, lost everything he had except his horse. Then John Armstrong bought it in 1906 — a man who had already built one exclusive Dallas suburb, watched it fail, watched it get subdivided and sold down-market, and watched it beg the city to annex it. He hired Wilbur David Cook, the landscape architect who had just drawn the master plan for Beverly Hills, and set aside a fifth of the entire property as parkland. In 1913 Highland Park asked Dallas to annex it. Dallas said no. So five hundred residents voted to incorporate instead — and then spent twenty-six years fighting off the city that changed its mind, beating annexation for the last time in 1945. They won. Dallas annexed all the land around them instead, and the town was sealed forever at just over two square miles. Which left exactly one way to build anything new. The encyclopedia entry states it flatly: Highland Park could grow only by building on its few remaining vacant lots, or by tearing down old buildings to construct new ones. The last vacant lot filled decades ago. Between 2018 and 2022 the demolitions ran at a pace that alarmed even the people who live there — twenty-two permits in six months in a town of maybe three thousand houses. Hal Thomson houses. Fooshee and Cheek houses. A neoclassical mansion at Eton and Beverly. A 1929 house on Fairfax that the neighbours held a block party to try to save. The five hundred people who voted in 1913 wanted permanence. They achieved every single thing they set out to achieve. They simply never wrote a clause protecting the town from the people inside it. CHAPTERS 0:00 The House at Preston and Beverly 2:25 Land That Had Already Failed 3:51 What Happened to Oak Cliff 6:37 The Man Who Drew Beverly Hills 9:36 The Annexation They Asked For 11:11 What the Wall Bought 13:05 Who the Wall Was For 16:09 The Architects 18:32 The Village 20:39 The Trap Closes 22:33 The Demolitions 24:56 What the Wall Actually Protected 28:03 What Remains SOURCES Highland Park, TX — Handbook of Texas, Texas State Historical Association https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/highland-park-tx Oak Cliff, TX — Handbook of Texas, Texas State Historical Association https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/oak-cliff-tx Highland Park Village — Handbook of Texas, Texas State Historical Association https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/highland-park-village University Park, TX — Handbook of Texas, Texas State Historical Association https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/university-park-tx Early Development — Town of Highland Park official website https://www.hptx.org/624/Early-Development Highland Park Village — The Cultural Landscape Foundation https://www.tclf.org/landscapes/highland-park-village Demolition of Cox Mansion in Highland Park renews calls for historic preservation — KERA News https://www.keranews.org/texas-news/2024-08-23/highland-park-texas-historic-cox-mansion-demolished Century-old Highland Park home demolished over calls for preservation — The Dallas Morning News https://www.dallasnews.com/business/real-estate/2023/08/28/century-old-highland-park-home-demolished-over-calls-for-preservation-in-park-cities/