WHERE IS THE BISHOP ARTS DISTRICT?

Northern Dallasites and suburb dwellers know exactly where the Bishop Arts District is. It’s Emporium Pies and Hattie’s and Tillman’s Roadhouse.

Those really in the know might also point to Bolsa and Spinster Records and the Kessler Theater as favorite Bishop Arts District spots. If that perspective makes you cringe, then you must be from Oak Cliff.

The Bishop Arts District brand seeps outside its geographic boundaries

The boundaries of Bishop Arts are set very specifically in the 1992 Dallas City Ordinance that established the area as a conservation district. The official boundaries are Seventh Street, Melba, Llewellyn and Zang.

But to many outside the neighborhood, Bishop Arts is Oak Cliff, and Oak Cliff is Bishop Arts. To them, anything cool in northern Oak Cliff can be called Bishop Arts.

Business owners and real estate developers are making efforts to brand some of the areas surrounding Bishop Arts with their own identities. But why use a different name when the Bishop Arts District already is a successful neighborhood brand?

“Yes, let’s obsess over something that people north of the river don’t care about,” says David Spence of Good Space.

Good Space redeveloped the building that houses Spinster Records and several other shops at Tyler and Davis.

Originally, Spence called it the Clinkinbeard Campus after the family that built the 1930s retail strip, but “Clinkinbeard” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. More recently, he commissioned an enormous temporary mural inside the corner space, which is visible from West Davis, reading “Ty/Po.” That’s for Tyler/Polk. Spence thinks that once Polk and Tyler are changed to two-way streets, retail and restaurants along the corridor could become a destination.

If so, why not call it Ty/Po? That’s certainly memorable.

“We’re not presuming or trying to foist that name on anybody else,” Spence says. “We are launching that with a sense of humor and with no expectation that it’s going to go anywhere beyond our campus.”

Various efforts have been made to rebrand the Tyler/Davis area, including the Tyler Davis Arts District and X+, but none really has stuck.

Jeffrey Liles of the Kessler Theater is behind X+, which he named for the “X” formed where Kings Highway crosses Davis and “+” or “plus,” where Tyler and Polk cross Davis.

When people north of the river come into Oak Cliff via Sylvan and Tyler, they can turn left at West Davis for Bishop Arts, or they can turn right for the Kessler.

That’s why Liles thought the Kessler’s neighborhood needed its own brand. If the one-half mile between Bishop Arts and the Kessler were walkable, the story might be different.

“The Bishop Arts District is essential to what makes Oak Cliff great, but there aren’t sidewalks between here and there,” he says.

Liles, a talent buyer and musician who has been on the Dallas music scene since the ’80s, also hoped that X+ would become a new shorthand for the live music scene in Dallas. For decades, musicians knew Deep Ellum meant live music, and Liles wants X+ to mean the same.

The X+ brand is a way to express that online as well.

Since before the Kessler opened five years ago, Liles and the theater’s staff have been posting videos of live performances on two YouTube channels, and they all have “Kessler X+” in their titles. It’s a search term that makes it easy for music industry people in New York, Los Angeles and Nashville to see and hear what the Kessler offers.

“X+ isn’t meant to be a real estate thing,” Liles says. “I want the artists who play in Oak Cliff to have a platform that gives them an identity and protects their creativity and protects their artistic statement.”

Appropriating The Brand

The Bishop Arts name is used as far from the district’s center as Rosemont at West Davis, where an apartment complex recently was renamed Bell Bishop Arts. And the Bishop Arts Winery is right at the corner of Tyler and Davis.

The Nazerian family’s $42 million development between the Bishop Arts District and Jefferson Boulevard is called Bishop Arts Village. New development could spring up on the corners of Zang and Davis, especially with a planned streetcar stop there.

All those things could expand even what Oak Cliffers consider to be Bishop Arts.

Jim Lake Jr., whose family company began redeveloping Bishop Arts storefronts in the 1980s, says the true Bishop Arts District is strictly within the boundaries of its conservation district.

“I guess we should be flattered” that the name is being used outside the geographic boundaries, Lake says.

Lake is also behind the revamp of Jefferson Tower, where upstarts Small Brewpub, Carnival Barker’s ice cream and Cultivar coffee are going in alongside legacy Oak Cliff businesses Gonzalez restaurant and Ramon’s barbershop.

The tower, which also has a residential component, already draws some of the same customers as Bishop Arts, but it’s something else, Lake says.

“We want to brand that with its own identity,” Lake says. “I view Jefferson as a totally different district that will be adjacent to Bishop Arts.”

North Oak Cliff

Whenlifelong Oak Cliff resident Jim Dolan tells acquaintances that he lives in Kessler, “they go, ‘Oh, so you live in the good part of Oak Cliff,’ ” he says.

Dolan grew up in Winnetka Heights — although he didn’t know it was called that at the time — and graduated from Bishop Dunne Catholic School in 1969.

His family moved into some apartments near Hampton and Ledbetter when he was in high school.

“It was a clean, modern, very suburban kind of community back in those days; very similar to late-’50s, mid-‘60s neighborhoods you would find in Richardson or Lake Highlands,” he says. “It was not mixed-race, which now I believe it is majority black.”

That area sometimes is referred to these days as South Oak Cliff or, being more accurate geographically, Southwest Oak Cliff.

In the ’60s and ’70s, Dolan says, there was no such distinction.

“We just called it ‘Oak Cliff’ and didn’t think much about it,” he says.

Using the term “North Oak Cliff” might be convenient when searching for real estate listings, but in conversation, it is an easy way to annoy the heck out of neighbors south of Clarendon.

On the outskirts of the city, when you’re closer to Duncanville than to downtown Dallas, the Oak Cliff identity can become a little weaker.

But neighbors in Elmwood, Oak Park Estates and the neighborhoods surrounding Kiest Park and Kimball High School firmly identify as Oak Cliff.

“We are trying to encourage everyone to say ‘Oak Cliff,’ ” says Old Oak Cliff Conservation League president Lisa Benskin.

That’s an inclusive attitude, and the league is working to add as many member neighborhoods in Oak Cliff as possible, including those east of I-35.

Judy Brooks grew up in Lake Highlands, but her husband graduated from South Oak Cliff High School in the ’60s, and they have lived in his grandparents’ former home near Kiest Park for over 10 years.

Hearing the word “north” precede “Oak Cliff” is something she’s grown accustomed to, but it makes her feel left out.

“If you say Oak Cliff is just North Oak Cliff, you’re wrong and you’re missing a lot,” she says.

The Oak Cliff Chamber of Commerce, located on North Bishop, sets no definitive geographical boundaries.

“People can be very offended if they feel they’re being excluded,” chamber president Kiyundra Gulley says. “Wherever you think Oak Cliff is, that’s where we say it is, too.”

West Dallas

WhenMonte Anderson renovated the Belmont Hotel 10 years ago, he drew upon the success of the Bishop Arts District, going so far as to provide a shuttle service from Bishop Arts to the Belmont.

“We couldn’t have done that without the success of Bishop Arts,” he says.

Now construction on thousands of new apartments is going like gangbusters in West Dallas. Trinity Groves is drawing Dallasites over the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge to drink and eat high-dollar meals in a neighborhood that for more than a century has been among the poorest and most neglected in Dallas.

At the turn of the 20th century, West Dallas was home to immigrants and itinerant workers; some lived in shotgun shacks and others lived in camps along the river.

When the family of West Dallas’ most notorious son, Clyde Barrow, moved there in the 1910s, they camped with their wagon on Muncie Avenue until they could build a house.

The town’s reputation for crime and shady activity was so bad that residents voted in the 1930s to change the name of its notorious main street, Eagle Ford Road, to Singleton in hopes of improving its image. The town of West Dallas wasn’t annexed into the city of Dallas until 1954.

And now, over the course of a few years, West Dallas has become the darling of real estate developers, a hotspot for hip Highland Parkers.

It’s great that some money and attention are being spent on West Dallas, but please, please don’t call it Oak Cliff, says Jeff Herrington, who lives in Kessler Park but was a founder of the Fort Worth Avenue Development Group and serves on the board of the West Dallas Chamber of Commerce.

“Interstate 30 could’ve been like the Berlin Wall in the 1960s,” he says. “No one wanted to claim West Dallas then.”

There are some who say West Dallas begins not at I-30 but at the railroad tracks, which have been there longer.

But members of the Baby Boomer generation of Oak Cliff generally agree that all of Fort Worth Avenue was considered West Dallas.

The Trinity River levees were built mostly on the labor of immigrants living in West Dallas. West Dallas lead-smelting plants, which opened in the 1930s, poisoned the air and soil, and it would be decades before any action was taken to clean up extremely high levels of lead. The sites of the smelters were federal superfund sites from 1993-2005.

West Dallas survived all that, and now it seems we’re coming for its identity. “The people who have lived there for years, they’re very proud of their community, and it irritates them that people suddenly want to call it Oak Cliff,” Herrington says.

Baptist

CLIFF TEMPLE BAPTIST CHURCH / 125 Sunset Ave. / CliffTemple.org

Building everyday people into everyday missionaries for Jesus Christ.

Sunday School: 9:30 am / Sunday Worship: 10:45 am /214.942.8601

GRACE TEMPLE BAPTIST MULTI-CULTURAL CHURCH

Sunday Worship: English Service 9:30 am / Spanish Service 11:00 am

831 W. Tenth St. / 214.948.7587 / gracetempledallas.org

Disciples Of Christ

EAST DALLAS CHRISTIAN CHURCH / 629 N. Peak Street / 214.824.8185

Sunday School 9:30 am / THE TABLE Worship 9:30 am

Worship 8:30 & 10:50 am / Rev. Deborah Morgan-Stokes / edcc.org

Episcopal

CHRIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH / 534 W. Tenth St. / 214.941.0339

Sunday: 8 & 10 am Holy Eucharist, 12:30pm Santa Misa en Español

Sunday School for all ages / Children’s Chapel / christchurchdallas.org

Methodist

KESSLER PARK UMC / 1215 Turner Ave. / 214.942.0098 / kpumc.org

9:30 am Sunday School / 11:00 Worship / All welcome regardless of creed, color, culture, gender or sexual identity.

OAK CLIFF UMC / 549 E. Jefferson Blvd. / oakcliffumc.org

Young Adult Gathering & Worship “The Cliff” 9:30 am / Contemporary

Worship 11:00 am (Bilingual) / facebook.com/oakcliffumc

TYLER STREET UMC / 927 W. 10th Street / 214.946.8106

Sunday Worship at 8:30 am and 10:50 am www.tsumc.org

NON-DENOMINATIONAL

KESSLER COMMUNITY CHURCH / 2100 Leander Dr. at Hampton Rd.

“Your Hometown Church Near the Heart of the City.”

10:30 am Contemporary Service / kesslercommunitychurch.com

Presbyterian

OAK CLIFF PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH / 6000 S. Hampton Road

Sunday Worship at 9:30 am & 11:05 am 214-339-2211 / www.ocpres.com