Photo courtesy of Stevens Park Golf Course.
Stevens Park Golf Course belongs to the neighborhood.
When it and everything else was closed during the coronavirus pandemic, it became a workout center, picnic spot and walking course for neighbors. It is the downhill sledding headquarters of North Oak Cliff snowstorms. And when it was time to modernize the course in 2005, neighbors stepped up to get it done.
A handful of neighborhood residents raised money and pushed the city to use bond funds to fully renovate the course all at once.
The Stevens Park course was originally built with 9 holes in 1924. It was later expanded to 18 holes, but it had sand greens that were raked.
“It was a funky course,” says director of golf Jim Henderson, who has worked at the course since 1988.
They didn’t want to do the job piecemeal, so it was completely overhauled to the tune of $8 million, including new greens, fairways, sprinklers and a maintenance barn, as well as erosion control in 2011.
The group of neighbors who spent five years working for that project formed a nonprofit called North Oak Cliff Greenspace that still raises as much as $50,000 a year to maintain the course and surrounding areas, including the Kessler Parkway trail, amounting to about 2.5 acres of garden beds, plus signage and cart paths.
The nonprofit partnered with Kessler Neighbors United to raise half the money needed to renovate the tennis courts on the parkway, with the city paying the other half, and they raised $60,000 to place a pedestal clock near the clubhouse.
“Even though we’re in a big metropolitan area, our individual neighborhoods pull together, and it’s amazing what we can get accomplished,” Henderson says.
From the beginning, neighbors have driven the park’s development. An Oak Cliff business association pushed the city to acquire land from what was then part of the Bishop Dunne Memorial Home, an orphanage, to expand to 18 holes in 1926.
Stevens Park has never been the most difficult course in town, but the environment is unbeatable — unfenced in a beautiful historic neighborhood, with views of Downtown and rolling hills. It’s a unique urban golf experience.
Since it’s hemmed in by the neighborhood, space didn’t allow Colligan Golf Design’s 2011 rework to make the fairways longer. New technology allows anyone to drive the ball farther. You couldn’t play a pro tournament there, but it’s a fun course that’s meant to be entertaining for golfers of any level, Henderson says.
It hosted high-school tournaments back when Sunset High School was a golf powerhouse, and at a time when women were excluded from many golf spaces, Stevens Park was a hub for women’s tournaments.
Image via the Dallas Morning News Historical Archives
Henderson says municipal golf courses were overbuilt in the 1990s and by the year 2000, there was a bit of a lull in the market. But since
its renovation, Stevens Park Golf Course has always been very popular, he says.
The popularity of the sport swung upward after the pandemic because it’s easy to maintain distance outdoors on a golf course.
“The golf course is an anchor to the neighborhood,” he says. “And it’s really neighbor driven.”
Stevens Park Golf Course
Where: 1005 N. Montclair Ave.
Course rates: $12-$57
More info about Stevens Park Golf Course and North Oak Cliff Greenspace.
