The Bishop Arts District

Built for a streetcar stop

The blocks now marketed as Bishop Arts exist because a streetcar line reached North Bishop Avenue in 1904, and the storefronts that went up around the stop were built for people getting off a trolley, not for people arriving by car ^[1]. The line turned ninety degrees at Davis Street and North Bishop Avenue to head south, and the stop that turn created gave a small group of merchants the reason to start building stores there, at what the nomination for the district calls simply "this busy intersection" ^[2].

The commercial core of that streetcar-era strip, roughly the blocks bounded by Ninth, Davis, Adams, and Madison, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1994 as the North Bishop Avenue Commercial Historic District: twelve acres of vernacular brick storefronts, listed as part of a broader Oak Cliff historic-preservation nomination ^[2]. That federal listing covers the historic core specifically; the retail district that carries the Bishop Arts name today runs somewhat wider than the twelve listed acres.

The nomination classifies the surviving building stock as "one-part commercial block" construction, predominately vernacular in detailing: a mix of one- and two-story brick buildings with large shop windows, transoms, and double doors repeated along the block ^[2]. Most of the buildings, in the nomination's own words, have "little architectural style," though it names two exceptions, similar Tudor Revival buildings at 400-408 North Bishop and 313-21 North Bishop, both dated to 1925, with arched door openings and castellated parapets ^[2]. That plainness turned out to matter later. A district built to impress would have been worth tearing down and replacing once the streetcar left; a district built cheap and functional was not worth the trouble of demolishing, which is most of the reason the shells were still standing decades later for a different set of tenants to lease.

What the trolley leaving took with it

Dallas's streetcar system shut down in 1956, and Oak Cliff's stretch of it went with the rest of the citywide system ^[3]. A retail strip built to catch foot traffic off a trolley does not survive losing the trolley cleanly, and Bishop Arts spent the following two decades as exactly the kind of half-emptied commercial block that gets talked about as a demolition candidate rather than a destination.

It survived the highway era that erased other close-in Dallas retail strips, not because anyone had a preservation plan running, but because nobody had the money to redevelop it either. Empty and unprofitable turned out to be the condition that kept the buildings standing.

Two developers and a boarded-up block

The turn came in 1985, when Jim Lake Sr. and his business partner Mike Morgan, working with broker Jim Lake Jr., began buying the boarded-up storefronts along North Bishop Avenue and repairing them one building at a time, according to the company's own account of its history ^[4]. Around the same period, in the early 1980s, a gay couple opened a restaurant in a corner space of the same old trolley-stop building, a business that later became the Italian restaurant Vitto and today operates as the coffee shop Oddfellows, by the account Dallas Voice published of the district's early revival ^[5]. Bishop Street Market, opened by Paul Kirkpatrick and Mike Harrity in the mid-1990s, was part of the same wave ^[5].

What both accounts agree on is that the district was rebuilt business by business, not by a single master plan, well before the city put money into the streets and sidewalks around it.

Who kept rebuilding it

The names that recur in Dallas Voice's account of the district's revival are worth keeping, because they show the rebuilding was not a single wave but a rolling one. Rick Barton, who opened the restaurant Hunky's, later served as president of the Bishop Arts Merchants Association ^[5]. Michael Amonett, who owns the salon Alchemy, also led the Old Oak Cliff Conservation League, the neighborhood group that has pushed to keep the surrounding blocks' historic scale intact as investment picked up ^[5]. Chad West, an attorney, opened his firm in a restored house on Bishop Avenue rather than a standard office tower ^[5].

The restaurant Gloria's relocated into the renovated Firehouse No. 15, reopening a location that had first operated a quarter-century earlier, and Café Brazil joined the same stretch as one of the district's early anchor restaurants ^[5]. None of these were chain expansions. Each one was an individual owner betting on a specific building the district's own merchants association could point to as evidence the neighborhood was coming back, which is a slower and less certain way to rebuild a commercial strip than a single developer's master plan, and also the way Bishop Arts actually did it.

The trolley, again

The most literal return came in 2016. DART's Dallas Streetcar, a modern battery-powered line unrelated to the 1904 system except in the route it retraces, was extended from downtown's Union Station through Oak Cliff to a stop named Bishop Arts on August 29, 2016, on a 2.45-mile route with six stops ^{[6] [7]}. It runs down streets the historic streetcar once used, connecting the same district back to the same downtown by a different vehicle, sixty years after the first one stopped running.

The retail mix that met the streetcar's return in 2016 wasn't clothing and hardware, the businesses a trolley stop would have carried in 1904; it leans heavily on restaurants now, several of them built around the tacos this neighborhood has become known for, a shift covered elsewhere on the front page.

What's notable about Bishop Arts, set against Deep Ellum a few miles away, is how little time the district actually spent empty relative to how long it spent declining. The buildings never lost their basic function, storefront retail on a walkable street, even during the years nobody wanted to lease them. What came back in the 1980s and 1990s was not a reinvention of the district's purpose the way Deep Ellum's warehouses were repurposed into music venues; it was the same purpose the streetcar built in 1904, running again under different ownership, on a route the city eventually decided was worth putting a train back on.

Read the two districts side by side and the difference in what came back explains a lot about how each one is used now. Deep Ellum's warehouses became venues because the buildings were large and cheap enough to absorb a stage and a crowd. Bishop Arts's storefronts stayed storefronts because they were never anything else, sized from the start for one shop or one restaurant at a time, which is exactly the scale the district still runs at today.