Neighborhoods

Beckley Club Estates

This small, wooded neighborhood backs up to the Dallas Zoo and is bordered by South Beckley Avenue on the west and Beckley Avenue to the east. Entrances to the neighborhood welcome visitors with natural stone gateways. Inside, narrow winding streets carry travelers over one land bridges, offering views of Cedar Creek on one side and a steep limestone bluff escarpment on the other. The rolling terrain alone is worth a visit.

Developed in the 1920s by S. A. Temple, known for his work in Kessler Square in Oak Cliff, University Park, and East Dallas’s Munger Place and Country Club Estates in Lakewood, Beckley Club Estates enticed buyers with its quaint cottages set in shaded lots along dramatic topography. An exotic sales office, which was built to look like a Japanese pagoda and only reached by boat or footbridge, also lured potential buyers. The three man-made lakes- Lake Helen, Lake Junior, and Lake Placid- dotted the neighborhood. These lakes eventually flooded and the city was forced to dynamite a hole in the dam.

Beckley Club Estates also offers a range of architectural styles from Tudor Revival to Spanish Eclectic to Ranch. Check out the cottages on Seevers Avenue, whose gables exhibit stonework in sunburst and flower patterns. Beckley Club Estates’ most famous resident may be the late Lynn Landrum, newspaper columnist for The Dallas Morning News, who often wrote about his homestead Billygoat Hill and his wife’s extensive gardens.

Beckley Club Estates neighborhood association was established in the early 1980s and was recently invigorated with beautification and crime watch programs.

Information provided by:
City of Dallas Archivist John Slate
Author: Katherine D. Seale
Editor: Michael Hazel
Photographs by: Lucinda Simmons