The Most Perfect, Charming, Elegant, Graceful, Cozy, Genteel, Affluent 2.2 Square Miles in Texas
My thirty years in Highland Park.
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The changes in Highland Park Village were inconvenient for those of us who wanted to pick up a loaf of bread without feeling that we had to be groomed for a movie set, and now we find the same changes occurring within our neighborhood. Highland Park's notoriously strict building codes suddenly seem completely ineffective at reining in the steroidal structures that are replacing older, more modest homes. Building to the absolute limit the codes allow makes good financial sense to speculative builders. Good architects, however, advise their clients of the impact a design will have on the surrounding neighbors. Homeowners shouldn't have to apologize after the fact—"I didn't know it was going to be so big." But affluent two-income home-buyers don't come here looking for cute redos.
Noble efforts by Park Cities Preservation and the Park Cities Historical Society to identify landmark buildings and keep the character of the old neighborhood intact are garnering publicity but not much ground. When homebuilders purchased a noted stone-and-glass Howard Meyer house on Rheims Place and announced plans to raze it, preservationist groups expressed outrage and mounted a grassroots campaign to save it. Ventura Custom Homes responded with an unprecedented offer to resell the house at the price they'd paid for it ($1.6 million) to anyone willing to restore it. No valid offers appeared. According to the Dallas Morning News, Ventura then offered to give the house to anyone willing to move it to another lot and pay up to $3,000 in moving costs. No one stepped forward. After many extensions, the house was bulldozed in June. A red-tile-roofed Spanish Revival house, which seems to be the mansion of choice these days, is now rising on the lot.
THE BIGGEST DRAW FOR THIS NEIGHBORHOOD is the Highland Park Independent School District, which covers Highland Park, University Park, and a small portion of Dallas. The district appears on almost any short list of the best public schools in the country. Parental involvement and pride in the schools are legendary. Mothers and, now, more fathers, continue the tradition of serving lunch in the cafeterias to all twelve grades. Teachers and principals, some of whom were once students in the system, came and stayed their whole careers, sometimes teaching a second generation.
The good schools keep our neighborhood young. Consequently, Highland Park schools are at capacity. Ugly portable buildings have taken up permanent residence at all four elementary schools. People who make the expensive decision to buy here are sometimes dismayed to learn that public school is no longer free. Participating in school sports now costs $250 per student. Fundraisers and parent support groups have multiplied since the advent of Robin Hood, the now-notorious school-finance law that diverts a percentage of our school taxes to needier districts.
With their revenue capped, Highland Park schools are scrambling to trim budgets. The HPISD has never received federal funds, a peculiar point of pride that may stem from the fear of outside interference fostered in the Bubble in the desegregation days. A former school-board member says that the small amount of federal money for which the district might qualify has never seemed worth the administrative costs or restrictions that might follow. The current belt-tightening, however, may force the board to take another look at federal funds for special education and girls' athletics. The next thing you know, we'll put fluoride in our water supply.
The struggles with Robin Hood have made statewide inequities in education, which previously did not affect us, hard to ignore. Recent budget cutting means that English teachers at Highland Park High School, who once taught four classes of 20 to 22 students, now have five classes of nearly 30. "It takes at least twenty minutes to mark an essay thoughtfully," says an English teacher with nine years' experience who is departing for a private school this fall. "I can't be the kind of teacher I like to be with thirty kids."
EVEN THOUGH I THOUGHT MY CHILDREN'S elementary school in the eighties was cozy and academically excellent, I worried that the excessive homogeneity of skin color (only this year did Highland Park get its first African American resident homeowners) and socioeconomic background was giving them a distorted and obsolete view of the world they would have to live in. We took some comfort that Armstrong Elementary drew from SMU's married-student housing, which had a sizable number of kids whose first language was not English. Attending birthday parties for children at Hawk Hall, which housed SMU's Perkins Theology School's married students, was reassuring evidence of our multiculturalism and diversity.
But a copy of a letter in my files suggests that the brief "global" exposure may not have been enough. In middle school, my youngest son and some classmates were assigned a project to write a skit about knowing right from wrong. My son brought home their effort for me to type. ("My mother is a typist!") The sixth graders had chosen to write the entire skit in black dialect. The plot involved knocking off a liquor store. I typed the skit verbatim and attached a letter to the teacher indicating my dismay and suggesting that the racist skit offered an excellent opportunity for talking about the problems inherent in growing up in a neighborhood so devoid of other races. "From a writer's standpoint," I said, "they need to know that they will write a better skit if they use the dialect they know best, their own middle school slang. Has Eddie Murphy taught them that one has to be black to be funny?" If I was a bit zealous, it was because earlier in the week, I had attended a high school basketball game at which our students, the host school, had chanted "White trash, white trash" to the visiting team, students, and parents from an outlying suburb. Our kids needed to learn that they too were ripe for stereotyping.
In 1981 a couple of enterprising Highland Park seniors, Philip Chalk and Evan Wyly, did just that with a clever satirical poster titled "Do You Belong in Highland Park?" The poster displays a pair of bored, preppy-looking teenagers with a sporty red Mercedes parked in front of the school. They are attended by servants in livery (one being the popular high school chemistry teacher) who are bearing silver trays of gifts and their schoolbooks. A list of questions on the poster purports to determine whether you belong in Highland Park: "Do you . . . Love things, use people? Have cyclical genes: HPHS-UT-HP? Refer casually to 'The Club'? Dash off checks at age eight? Scamper off to Young Life camp, forget your Bible, and never notice? Find everything sooooo tacky until someone else says otherwise?"
Arrows pointing to the girl's head list its contents as "the Dallas Country Club menu memorized, otherwise empty." Her glove compartment contains 27 casually misplaced parking tickets for Daddy to take care of, a deposit on her room at Hardin House, near UT, and the rush guides for SMU and UT.
The boy is wearing Ray-Bans, rose-tinted, of course. His wallet contains "nine gas cards, seven spare fifties, and four phone numbers: Pop's lawyer, Ruby's Bail Bonds, Rolex repair, and Carlos, who sells . . . well, anyway, Carlos."
In the past decade, required community service at the high school and mission trips sponsored by local churches have aimed to right the balance for kids in a neighborhood where being mindless of the needs of others is so easy. But political issues seldom intrude on everyday life. Our town, ever mindful of appearances, actually had an ordinance on the books prohibiting political signs in yards until someone pointed out that while it might keep things tidier, it is also unconstitutional.
YEARS AGO DALLAS USED TO BE described as "the city that works." Highland Park is "the city that works the way Dallas used to work." That is a compliment and an indictment. The planting and maintenance in our parks and common areas are creative and flawless. Emergency response time from our public safety officers is two minutes. Roadwork, sidewalk repair, tree trimming, recycling, and trash pickup are handled promptly, with the least inconvenience to the resident. My discarded Christmas tree disappears from my parkway only minutes after I drag it there. Crews in Highland Park often work around the clock to minimize disruption, unless the noise involved is of a higher decibel than creek frogs or our summer cicadas. The small public library, with its helpful staff and online accessibility, invariably has the books I want to read.
Local elections in Highland Park are rarely contested. The occasional school-board controversy gets everybody out to vote, but for the most part, this neighborhood deplores confrontational politics. It's not that politically powerful people don't live here; it's just that when everyone is presumed to think alike, political expression seems to be beside the point. One of the things people give up by choosing to live here is personal political clout in the city of Dallas. I lift my pen to address some outrage in Dallas and then put it down, realizing that I can't even vote in a Dallas election.
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