Wynnewood North & Wynnewood Village

In April 1946, with veterans coming home to a city that had nowhere to put them, a Navy officer named Angus Wynne Jr. announced the largest development Dallas had ever seen: 820 acres of Oak Cliff farmland south of Illinois Avenue, 2,200 houses, 1,000 apartments, and a shopping center in the middle of it all. The newspapers called it the country's largest privately owned housing project. He named it Wynnewood, after his family's old homestead outside Philadelphia. Michelle lives in the northern piece of it.

The plan

The land had been assembled before the First World War by banker E.J. Gannon, who expected Dallas to grow south and was wrong for thirty years. It passed to Wynne's uncle Toddie Lee Wynne, and in 1941 a new four-lane "superhighway" — today's Zang Boulevard — was cut straight through the middle of it. Angus came home from the Navy in the summer of 1945 to find the family had already hired Hare & Hare, the Kansas City firm that inherited George Kessler's plan for Dallas, to lay out the whole tract. Their plan is the reason the streets curve: they were bent on purpose to slow cars down and keep through traffic out, with only a few entries from the big roads.

Roscoe DeWitt, the architect who finished Stanley Marcus's house after Frank Lloyd Wright walked away, designed eighteen floor plans in traditional, ranch, and modern versions. The first permit was issued in February 1946 on Salerno Street, and the Henry C. Beck Company set up prefabrication mills on site to turn out a house frame in half a day. They were the first houses in Dallas built on concrete slabs. Shortages of everything — sheetrock, floorboards, bathtubs — slowed things down, but the first families moved in early in 1947, veterans paying nothing down and $54 a month. Wynne named the streets for his war: his own ship, the USS Nicholson, and the battles it fought at Salerno and Anzio, plus Eisenhower, Nimitz, Bradley, and Halsey.

The Village

Wynnewood Village opened in 1949 with seventeen stores in a single strip designed by DeWitt and his partner Arch Swank. Its one new idea — a cantilevered canopy over the sidewalk, protecting shoppers and the plate-glass storefronts from the weather — became the template for every strip center in Dallas. Nobody saw it coming. When a shoe repairman named Harvey Titsworth applied for a $4,000 veteran's loan to open a shop there, the VA turned him down on the grounds that the shopping center had no potential.

"The shopping center has no potential." — the Veterans Administration, declining a $4,000 loan, 1949

Within a few years the Village had a 1,000-seat movie theater with a neon tower, a 73-room hotel where residents parked their visiting relatives for $4 a night, a bank with Wynne as president, branches of the downtown department stores, and, at the back of Volk's, four live monkeys in a glass house that children named Matilda, Remus, Zeppo, and Elvira. In November 1960 Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson drew 2,500 people to a rally in the parking lot. By 1970 it was 104 stores on 59 acres, the largest open-air center in the city. Then Red Bird Mall opened five miles away in 1975, and the long slide began.

The hotel, the theater, and the professional building are gone. The original 1949 strip is still there, under a modernized face, and the current owner has spent the past several years filling the center back up — two grocers, a fitness club, and, as of this spring, a Target. Whatever you think of the new façades, the Village is busier than it has been in decades.

Wynnewood North

In November 1949, Wynne opened the sixth section of the development: about 120 acres north of the Village on what had been John Wright's farm, the most heavily wooded part of the tract. Wynnewood North was meant for larger lots and better houses. The company laid the streets and sold the lots to individuals and builders, but Wynne and his construction chief Luther Clark kept design review over every house that went up. The streets here are named for destroyers — Manus, Monssen, Hoel, Mayrant, Woolsey — and Bizerte, for the North African battle where Wynne's ship distinguished itself. In the 1950s, so many doctors lived on South Manus that people called it Pill Hill.

Wynne wanted modern houses. He opened a DeWitt & Swank "Revere Quality House" on Mayrant that first month and charged a quarter to tour it. In 1952 he partnered with the Dallas chapter of the American Institute of Architects on a thirteen-week television series about designing a house, which ended in 1953 with a real one on Bizerte: the "Vacation House," designed mostly by a young Bud Oglesby, board-and-batten and Roman brick, fully furnished, $55,000, with an eight-day Braniff trip to Havana thrown in for the buyer. Dallas mostly declined the invitation. The builders who actually filled the neighborhood — the Smith brothers, Rouse Howell, Hicks Coleman — sold sprawling, well-built ranch houses, because that is what Dallas wanted. The result is what you see today: ranches under big oaks, with a handful of genuine mid-century experiments scattered among them.

One of the best stories is about trees. A stand of post oaks in the open pasture across Llewellyn from the first houses on Monssen was a lovers' lane for Oak Cliff teenagers before the street was paved. When an American Home Realty executive bought the lot in 1955, he had his house turned diagonally on the site so the oaks could stay.

Today

Wynnewood North is about 300 homes between Vernon Avenue and Zang Boulevard, Illinois and Clarendon, a few minutes from downtown across the river. The Dallas Observer named it the best neighborhood in the city in 2012. Since 2024 the neighborhood has been working toward a conservation district — a zoning tool that would set standards for the scale and exterior architecture of new construction, and nothing else: not paint colors, not interiors, not landscaping. The city held its pre-application meetings this July.

Michelle lives here and has been part of those conversations. If you're wondering what a conservation district would and wouldn't mean for a house you're considering, or simply what it's like to live under Wynnewood's oaks, she's the one to ask.