Lake Cliff Park

For seven years Lake Cliff advertised itself as the greatest amusement park in the Southwest, and it was built to sell real estate. Charles Mangold and John Zang, whose name is on the boulevard, put together a syndicate that bought some fifty acres on the Oak Cliff side of the Trinity, and the park opened on 4 July 1906 with buildings by the Dallas architects Lang and Witchell. Twelve thousand people came through the gates that first night. Within two seasons there was a casino theatre seating two thousand five hundred, a roller rink of eighteen thousand square feet of white maple, a bathing pavilion with seventy dressing rooms, a circle swing, a shoot the chutes water ride, a roller coaster and a Japanese village. The point of all of it was to draw home buyers across the river and lift the value of Oak Cliff land. Two disasters finished it. The Trinity flood of May 1908 submerged the streetcar tracks that fed the gate, and a fire in late March 1913 took the rink, much of the water slide and the ornate entrance, more than fifty thousand dollars of damage and reportedly uninsured. The Dallas Park Board agreed in October 1914 to pay fifty five thousand dollars for forty four acres, the sellers keeping the clubhouse, the bowling lanes and the theatre. A private pleasure ground became a public park, and later gained a rose garden, a pergola and a pavilion. Oak Cliff itself had been a separate incorporated city until a depressed economy carried a vote for annexation to Dallas in 1903, by eighteen votes.