2009: The First of Two Openings in the Same Month for a Light Rail Station in South Dallas

September 14, 2009

Fair Park station became one of the four original stops of the Green Line of the Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART), an agency serving the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex of Texas, to be opened to the public. Fair Park station is in the South Dallas neighborhood of the Lone Star State city famously nicknamed “Big D.”

This station owes its own name to the longstanding recreational and educational complex where it is located. A National Historic Landmark, Fair Park is home to both the Cotton Bowl stadium and the annual State Fair of Texas. Many of the buildings within the complex were constructed for the Texas Centennial Exposition held there in 1936.

What most notably sets Field Park station apart from other DART stations is its architecture. The husband-and-wife artistic team of Brad and Diana Goldberg based their design for the station on the Art Deco style that flourished worldwide during the 1920s and 1930s. The Goldbergs’ more specific and immediate sources of inspiration were those Art Deco buildings that had been created for the centennial exposition. An inaugural ceremony took place at the station at this time to further and more formally mark the transit facility’s debut.

The Green Line, which is one of DART’s four light rail lines (the fifth line is a hybrid rail service), now consists of 24 stations and covers 28.6 miles (46 kilometers) altogether. The DART light rail system in its entirety encompasses a total of 73 stations and 93 miles (149.7 kilometers).

Photo Credit: Andreas Praefcke (licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en)

For more information on Fair Park station, please check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Park_station