An urban oasis

Born from the ashes of crime-ridden apartments, the Twelve Hills Nature Center is a reclaimed refuge amid developed Oak Cliff

Story by lauri Valerio | Photos by Can Türkyilmaz

Traces of demolished apartments remain — scattered pieces of broken concrete, wire and pipe hidden among grasses and weeds. Yet this plot of land in north Oak Cliff isn’t an overgrown ruin but a carefully planned and maintained urban nature preserve, the Twelve Hills Nature Center. The Oak Cliff concrete jungle is an inextricable part of Twelve Hills, an oasis striving to reclaim the native blackland prairie that once covered the city.

Twelve Hills, located north of Davis and south of the Stevens Park Golf Course, has been a nature center for only a few years, but the land it inhabits could tell stories of disputes, deterioration and destruction from decades past.

The apartments

Not much of note happened on the land before the late 1950s, when a complex of 12 apartment buildings — some adorned with chandeliers and carpet — were built on roughly 20 acres and came to be called the Twelve Hills apartments.

“It was a nice community. There were always children out,” says Jarrell Carter, who grew up in the apartments from 1961-1969. “There was a swimming pool in the center of every apartment complex. It was sort of a meeting place. After work, after dinner, people would sit around the swimming pool and talk.”

Some of the land was undeveloped and Carter would frequent a limestone outcropping known as “the rocks.”

“It was really easy to go down, dig around and find fossils and shells. It wasn’t a nature preserve, but it was nature right in your hand,” Carter says.

Times changed. During the 1970s, fires, theft and crime became more frequent at the apartments. By the ’80s, Twelve Hills had deteriorated and neighbors were calling for its demolition. Only 35 people lived in the 500 units by 1989. Eventually, the buildings were vacated, windows were broken, walls and roofs collapsed and the decaying complex attracted even more crime.

A series of Dallas Morning News articles in the late ’80s and early ’90s exposed holes in a City of Dallas plan to renovate derelict apartments with federal funds. Twelve Hills was the centerpiece of the plan. After reports that investors would benefit from renovations more than the low-income families who would move in, the city backtracked and began exploring demolition costs. The initial estimate of a $280,000 cost to taxpayers skyrocketed to more than $1.2 million when the buildings were found to be seeped in asbestos.

Finally in 1992, the apartments were torn down and the debate began over what to do with the land, which the city had taken over because of the landowners’ failure to pay taxes.

“This land and how it is used will be critical to the neighborhoods around it,” Bob Stimson, who at the time was a Dallas city councilman, told the Dallas Morning News in 1996. “As the city goes after more and more property for back taxes, especially deteriorating apartment complexes, this will continue to come up.”

An oasis

At a 1999 neighborhood meeting concerning the land, Bebe Gomez of St. Cecilia Catholic School stood up and said that talks of a gated, high-end housing development would do nothing to help the community, that walls and gates would only divide it. This was before Dallas ISD took over part of the land and before entrepreneur Matt Holley bought the rest. The community had been debating different options, including residential development on all 20 acres.

After the meeting, Jennifer Touchet and several neighbors moved by Gomez’s words discussed creating a nature preserve that could serve the neighborhood as well as the entire Oak Cliff community.

“In our original vision, we talked about how we would love to be a model for other distressed communities and what they could do with tracts of land,” Touchet says.

The site for her represented hope and redemption, she says.

“It wasn’t just the land. We were about a vision and values and trying to bring something, bring a different set of values to the neighborhood,” Touchet says. “When the apartments were there, they were really bad. There were fires and drug dealings. A lot of people, especially older people, wanted some healing to happen in the neighborhood, and I think that’s what we did.”

Touchet and a group of individuals passionate about the cause asked an urban biologist to visit the property, look at the plants and wildlife, and advise whether it was worth