Highland Park Shopping Village
a.k.a. Highland Park Village
Jct. of Preston Rd. and Mockingbird Ln., Highpark, TXHighland Park Shopping Village, Highland Park, Dallas County, Texas, is a complex of seven detached commercial units focused on a central pedestrian and automobile parking plaza. In plan, the Village is noted for its enclosed parking areas within architecturally cohesive commercial blocks. The complex represents a pivotal point in the evolution of the shopping center as a distinctive building type in twentieth-century architecture in the United States. The Village is a hybrid of the community and regional shopping centers as defined by the real estate industry. As such, it houses today, as it did historically, a combination of grocery, drug, and related retail/service businesses typical of a community shopping center as well as department stores, restaurants, and a theater more typical of a regional shopping center. This unusual combination located in a high-income community made the center an important proving ground for many of the first suburban department and chain stores in Dallas including Hunt Grocery Company (1931), Skillern & Sons drug store (1932), Volk Brothers (1935), and Sanger Brothers (1950). Thus, the complex provides an excellent representation of the role of the shopping center in facilitating the decentralization of the downtown commercial core of cities across the United States. In this particular case, the Highland Park Shopping Village contributed to the decentralization of downtown Dallas and the northern expansion of commercial and residential development that continued into the late twentieth century in Dallas. Highland Park Shopping Village was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1997 in the area of Commerce at the local level of significance and in the areas of Architecture and Community Planning and Development at the national level of significance.
Highland Park Shopping Village is the result of several urban developments occurring over the course of the twentieth century in Dallas as it did in most major urban areas of the United States. First, the city's development pattern in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries centralized most retail, banking, and commercial services in a central business district, then gradually dispersed these functions as economic trends changed. Second, national shifts in transportation and residential land use patterns created a demand for different commercial centers that are embodied in the complex. Finally, the Village reflects the establishment and promotion by real estate developers and architects during the twentieth century of the shopping center as a new building type.
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 1997.
The National Register of Historic Places is the official list of the Nation’s historic places worthy of preservation. Authorized by the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, the National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places is part of a national program to coordinate and support public and private efforts to identify, evaluate, and protect America’s historic and archeological resources.