Lake Highlands North Park will soon be home to an aquatic center with a six-lane lap pool, children’s pool and bathhouse.
More than 50 years ago, the pool was called Skyline and nearby neighborhoods were sparsely populated. The captions with these historical photos of the Lake Highlands North Park area were told to Keri Mitchell by Sally Rodriguez, Dallas Park and Recreation Department’s historian, in 2012.
All photos are courtesy of the Dallas Municipal archives and curated by Rodriguez. She authored the book “White Rock Lake,” available at area bookstores and through arcadiapublishing.com.
• Read Keri Mitchell’s Q&A with Rodriguez here.
1961
“This was the Dahman farm [south of what is now Church Road]. You see the farmhouse? We actually added a new pavilion in just about the same area, and it kind of looks like a farmhouse. You can still see that tree line where the house used to be. That was the driveway.”
1964
“After we purchased it, it became a service center. The service center is now at Fair Oaks. And so you can see the outbuildings there. There’s the house; I bet they used that for an office. And you see that the Lake Highlands High School A hall is under construction. There’s nothing else there. And right there [north of Church], you see David Goforth’s farm, who is the nephew of Church Goforth. They had to widen the road because you see, it was just this little two-lane blacktop. It was funny because it just widened from Audelia to Skillman.”
1970
“You can tell by how white this concrete is around the pool, that’s new. The concrete, as it gets older, looks brown. But see how white these streets are? These are newer streets. Look at all the homes that have now come up. Look at all the open fields. We used to have a problem with skunks getting into the school. I graduated in ’74, and when I was here, there was a practice field on what is now the softball field. And there was a fence, and the band would practice in the mornings, and the cows grazed on the other side of the fence.”
Here is a map of the area today:
Look for aerial photos of other neighborhood parks in future issues.
