Reverchon Park: A Guide to One of Dallas's Oldest Green Spaces

For more than a century, Reverchon Park has anchored Oak Lawn with a historic ballfield, a WPA-era iris garden, and a place to gather. Here is its history and the multimillion-dollar restoration that reopened its diamond in 2025.

Photo: Larry D. Moore, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Tucked into Oak Lawn at 3505 Maple Avenue, with a section of the Katy Trail running along its edge, Reverchon Park is one of the oldest and most storied green spaces in Dallas. It is a park where the city's history is legible: a century-old ballfield, a stone amphitheater built during the Depression, and shaded groves in a part of town where open land is scarce.

A park more than a century old

The City of Dallas purchased the original 36 acres in 1914, and the park opened the following year. It later grew to its current 46 acres. The park is named for Julien Reverchon (1837 to 1905), a French-born botanist who came to Texas with his father and joined the utopian La Reunion colony near Dallas. Reverchon cataloged much of North Texas's native flora and assembled a herbarium of tens of thousands of specimens, portions of which are held by major institutions. Naming the park for him fit a green space meant to celebrate the region's landscape.

The historic ballfield

Reverchon's baseball diamond was dedicated in 1920, with a grandstand added in 1924. Over the decades it became known as one of the best ballfields in the city, and it is often called Dallas's oldest ballpark. It has long served as the home field for North Dallas High School, and generations of amateur and youth players have passed through it.

In a fast-growing city, a hundred-year-old ballfield is not just recreation. It is continuity.

The Iris Bowl and the rest of the grounds

During the 1930s, Works Progress Administration crews built the park's distinctive stonework, including a floral amphitheater known as the Iris Bowl, formally dedicated in 1938. For years it hosted pageants and performances, and it was restored and replanted in 2010. The Reverchon Recreation Center opened in 1975. Today the park also offers meandering paths, oak and pecan groves, a large play area, and its direct connection to the Katy Trail, which links it into the wider network of Uptown and Oak Lawn.

The 2025 restoration

Like many older urban parks, Reverchon needed investment to keep its centerpiece usable. After an earlier, controversial 2019 proposal to lease the field to a private operator collapsed amid public opposition and the pandemic, the city and Dallas ISD reached a different kind of deal.

A restoration of roughly $5.5 million reopened the ballfield in April 2025. Dallas ISD contributed about $5 million, with the City of Dallas and private donors also involved, and no private commercial operator in the final arrangement. In exchange, the district secured decades of continued high school baseball at the site. The work covered the field itself along with batting cages, restrooms, concessions, equipment storage, and parking.

Why it matters for the future of Dallas

The Reverchon story is a template for how a growing city keeps its older public spaces alive: a public-private partnership, a long-term commitment from an anchor institution, and enough public attention to steer the outcome. As Dallas grows denser, century-old parks like this one become more valuable, not less. Public space is infrastructure, and keeping it takes ongoing stewardship from residents, government, and donors alike.