Fair Park: The Art Deco World's Fair That Stayed

Most world's fairs leave behind a water tower and a fond memory. Dallas's nineteen thirty-six Texas Centennial Exposition left behind an entire neighborhood of Art Deco buildings that still stands today as one of the most complete exposition complexes anywhere on earth.

The Texas Centennial Exposition was a world's fair celebrating one hundred years of Texas independence from Mexico. Dallas won the right to host it by pledging nearly eight million dollars in bonds and the use of Fair Park, which had been the home of the Texas State Fair since eighteen eighty-six. More than fifty new or refaced buildings were constructed for the event, all in the Moderne and Art Deco styles fashionable in the thirties. Dallas architect George Dahl led the design team, pulling in noted sculptors and muralists to adorn nearly every facade.

The fair ran from June sixth to November twenty-ninth, nineteen thirty-six. More than six million visitors attended, including President Franklin Roosevelt. For a city still clawing out of the Great Depression, the exposition was a thunderclap of civic confidence.

When it closed, Dallas kept almost everything. Today roughly sixty percent of the original exposition buildings still stand at Fair Park, making it arguably the largest intact collection of Art Deco exposition architecture in the world. The Hall of State, the Women's Building, the Dallas Museum of Natural History, the Music Hall, and the Cotton Bowl stadium all survive from that construction campaign. The grounds are also home to the State Fair of Texas, which has been held here every October since its earliest years.

Fair Park was designated a National Historic Landmark in nineteen eighty-six, exactly fifty years after the exposition that created it. It sits about two miles east of downtown Dallas, covering two hundred seventy-seven acres, a time capsule of the streamlined optimism that a Depression-era city built to prove it could dream as big as any place in the world.