The history of the Dallas parks begins with City Park, 1876, continues with the creation of the Park Board, May, 1905, 100 years ago, and treks on to better and better indoor and outdoor facilities for the citizens of Dallas. Today, the Dallas Park and Recreation Department takes care of 21,000 acres of park land, 17 urban lakes, 146 miles of trails, 47 Recreational Centers, 6 golf courses, 22 swimming pools, 4 spray grounds, 5 tennis centers, 254 outdoor tennis courts, 154 outdoor basketball courts, 252 athletic fields, and 267 playgrounds. And it's all there waiting for the citizens of Dallas! You have no excuse. All of you out there?keep STROLLING THROUGH THE PARKS and PLAYING IN THE PARKS!

Dallas, called Big D, is the eighth largest city in the United States and rests on 343 square miles of rolling prairie. To meet the growing recreational and cultural needs of its citizens, the Dallas Park and Recreation Department maintains more than 23,018 park acresone of the largest municipal park systems in the country. Dallas has over 400 individual parks, including community centers, swimming pools, athletic fields, and a metropolitan zoo. From such well-known places as Fair Park, home of the State Fair of Texas and the Texas Centennial Exposition of 1936, to Dealey Plaza, and to lesser-known neighborhood parks, Dallas parks have a rich history stretching from the days when Dallas was a western boom town to a 21st century metropolis. Historic Dallas Parks explores the origins and early development of this nationally recognized system with interesting background stories and facts and illustrated with photographs and historical documents from the collections of the Dallas Municipal Archives.

Those individuals remembered as the "founders" of cities were men, but as Elizabeth York Enstam shows, it was women who played a major role in creating the definitive forms of urban life we know today.

As the first woman editor for Dallas Morning News, Pauline Periwinkle was a catalyst for numerous local reforms and was widely read by women across Texas. Viewing women's clubs as an ideal vehicle for familiarizing women with the needs of their communities, she was a driving force behind the establishment of the Women's Congress, the Dallas Federation of Women's Clubs, the Equal Suffrage Club of Dallas, the Dallas Women's Forum, and the Texas Women's Press Association.