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Historic place

Lake Cliff Park (amusement park)

300 E Colorado Blvd, Dallas, TX

Charles Mangold's 1906 amusement park billed itself as the Southwest's Greatest Playground; the city bought it in 1914.

📅 1906–1914🏛️ ParkDemolished
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The story

Charles Mangold opened Lake Cliff as a private amusement park in 1906, billed as the Southwest's Greatest Playground. The lake itself was created in 1890 for the Llewellyn Park Country Club. The park had a roller rink, with a hard white maple floor and a military band, and a shoot-the-chutes ride.

A fire in 1913 destroyed the skating rink, the grand entrance gate and the shoot-the-chutes. The city of Dallas bought the park in 1914. A pool and bathhouse arrived in 1921, and the pool closed in 1958. In the 1940s the city shifted the focus to sports fields and courts. Today it is a 45-acre park in the Lake Cliff Historic District with a rose garden and a pergola.

What's There Now

It is a city park around a small lake with a rose garden, paths and sports courts.

Everything that was here

Did you know?

Hare & Hare designed the stone pergola in 1944.
Wynne B. Woodruff designed the rose garden in 1934.
George Kessler produced a master plan in 1919, but no evidence of it being built survives.

Nearby history

Burnett Field

1500 E Jefferson Blvd · 767 m away
A Dallas ballpark that began as Gardner Park, hosted early Cowboys practices, and lost pro baseball in 1964.

Cliff Queen Theater

661 E Jefferson Blvd · 1.3 km away
An Oak Cliff picture house that gave free shows to the unemployed during the Depression and was torn down in 1958.

Dallas Sportatorium

1000 S Industrial Blvd · 1.7 km away
A wrestling arena that hosted a weekly country music show, burned in 1953, and was torn down in 2003.

Texas Theatre

231 W Jefferson Blvd · 1.7 km away
The Oak Cliff movie house where police arrested Lee Harvey Oswald on November 22, 1963, and which now shows repertory fi

Reunion Arena

777 Sports St · 2.0 km away
The arena where the Mavericks and Stars played for two decades, and where Reagan accepted the 1984 nomination.

Dallas Morning News Building (Young Street)

508 Young St · 2.3 km away
The newspaper's Young Street complex housed its operations for about six decades before the paper left in 2017.

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Sourceshttps://tclf.org/landscapes/lake-cliff-park