This question comes up a lot around here, and I am asking it today especially because of the Dallas police raid Wednesday on a crime-infested apartment complex, the Village Oaks. The DMN put “Oak Cliff” in the headline. And when I read it, I said to my laptop screen, “Dude, that’s not Oak Cliff.”

But when I looked at it on the map, I realized it’s just west of Interstate 45. So if you’re counting Oak Cliff as anything between I-45 and Cockrell Hill Road, then the Snooze is right.

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I must admit, however, that I really never go anywhere east of Marsalis. So my Oak Cliff runs from Marsalis to Cockrell Hill, which roughly is the bounds of what we cover in the Oak Cliff Advocate.

It would make sense to call anything in the wedge between interstates 30 and 45 Oak Cliff, but nowadays, we claim parts of West Dallas too. The Belmont Hotel and Jack’s Backyard, for example, technically are in West Dallas and not Oak Cliff.

And then the other question: Where is the southern boundary? The Advocate coverage area only stretches to about Ledbetter, but I certainly consider anything east of 67 and north of Duncanville as part of Oak Cliff. That includes Red Bird, which has its own identity, but it’s still Oak Cliff, no?