Nine houses and two businesses across Oak Cliff will open their doors on October 24 and 25, from noon to five each afternoon, for this year's Heritage Oak Cliff Fall Home Tour. Two of those stops sit inside Stevens Park. Only one of them is inside the Stevens Park that has been protected by city zoning for years. The other joined the list this past June.
That distinction helps explain how Kessler Park and Stevens Park look and feel today, beyond any single house on the route.
Nine Homes, Two Businesses, One Weekend
This year's tour skews toward the older end of Oak Cliff's housing stock, with a few surprises worked in. As Candy's Dirt reported, the lineup includes:
- 1109 Lausanne Avenue – a 1928 English Tudor on a landscaped half acre near Stevens Park Golf Course, with original magnolia millwork, a Batchelder tile fireplace, and leaded glass windows still doing the job they were built for. Former Dallas Mayor Laura Miller and her husband once lived here. Its current owners are planning an expansion for 2027.
- 2016 W. Colorado Boulevard – a 1933 brick residence in Stevens Park Estates, with arched windows, plaster walls, and French doors, on a street whose look was locked in by deed restrictions the neighborhood wrote into its earliest plats.
- 523 Hoel Drive – recognizable to longtime Oak Cliff garden-watchers as the Wicker-Wolf garden, previously featured on the Garden Conservancy's Dallas Open Days tour back in 2015.
- 1611 S. Hollywood Avenue – turning 100 this year alongside its Hampton Hills neighborhood, first owned by Virgil O. Stamps, co-founder of the Stamps-Baxter Music Company. The stained glass, butler's pantry, and unusually tall front steps, built for the running-board height of a Model T, are all original.
- 800 W. Eighth Street – Good Space's adaptive reuse of a Tudor-style fourplex and brick duplex on land that traces back to Ira Lee Allen Sr., whose family lost their original house in the 1909 fire that destroyed nearly 70 homes in the area.
- A gated cluster of 12 townhomes beside Stevens Park Golf Course, built in 1980 on land that once belonged to one of Oak Cliff's earliest settlers and picked up a reputation locally as the "Middlebrook Sisters' haunted house" somewhere along the way.
Proceeds fund Heritage Oak Cliff's grant program, which returned more than $33,000 to member neighborhoods this year for the kind of work that rarely gets its own headline: street sign toppers, tree plantings, sidewalks.
A Streetscape Built By Private Agreement
The 1933 house on Colorado Boulevard is the clearest window into how Stevens Park Estates got its look. The neighborhood's early deed restrictions, written when the lots were first platted, dictated enough about setbacks and scale that the streetscape along Colorado still reads the way it did nearly a century ago. That kind of private agreement predates city conservation zoning by decades, and it is why walking that stretch feels curated even though no modern ordinance created it.
By the time a city spokesperson listed Oak Cliff's conservation districts in 2024, Stevens Park and Kessler Park were already both on that list, their protections established well before their newer neighbor down the road started circulating petitions.
Stevens Park Village's Path to Protection
That newer neighbor is Stevens Park Village, off Hampton Road. As the Oak Cliff Advocate reported, its path to protection took four years. A committee of eleven neighbors began the push in May 2022. The signed petitions reached the city in March 2025, but it took another year before the City Plan Commission approved the request on May 21, 2026. The Dallas City Council made it official with a unanimous vote the following month, naming it the city's ninth conservation district in Oak Cliff.
The neighborhood contains 139 homes, most built in the 1940s, and roughly 130 of them share a Minimal Traditional style that residents specifically wanted to protect. Getting there required 15 public meetings and 71 brochures, emails, and handouts distributed to keep neighbors informed along the way. Stevens Park Village resident David Preziosi, who served on the neighborhood committee, described the resulting ordinance as one that lets the neighborhood expand its houses or build new construction as long as it stays compatible with what already exists.
Kidd Springs, Wynnewood North, and Hampton Hills are next in line for the same process, all within District 1 of Oak Cliff.
So two neighborhoods that both carry the Stevens Park name sit blocks apart with almost a century of difference in how long the city has formally protected them. One got there through private deed restrictions written before World War II. The other spent four years assembling petitions before the council voted this June. Anyone comparing the two by name alone would miss that gap entirely.
How Tour Proceeds Support Neighborhood Projects
Heritage Oak Cliff's tour ticket revenue supports the grant program that funded more than $33,000 in neighborhood-level projects this year, the kind of work that shows up as a new tree, a repaired sidewalk panel, or a street sign topper rather than a ribbon cutting.
That same stretch of Oak Cliff has other money moving through it right now, from different directions. Annie L. Stevens Park, the 1924 green space at the center of the neighborhood that residents still call "the toddler park," has secured funding for a playground replacement, with new planning already underway. It is a separate funding stream from the tour's grant program, but it lands in the same handful of blocks in the same year, part of a broader pattern of neighbors investing in small, visible improvements around houses that are, in some cases, older than the park itself.
What This Means If You're Walking It
Tickets and the full route are available through Heritage Oak Cliff. The tour runs both days from noon to five, and the two Stevens Park stops sit close enough together that the century between their protections is easy to miss unless you already know to look for it. The Kessler Park Tudor at 1109 Lausanne and the Hampton Hills centennial on South Hollywood are worth the walk on their own. Knowing which conservation district each house sits in, and how differently each neighborhood arrived there, is the kind of detail that makes the tour more than a list of pretty doors.
If you've got a Stevens Park Estates or Kessler Park house with its own story, whether it involves a mayor, a music publisher, or a name locals gave it long before the city caught up, Hewitt+Saucedo would like to hear it.
This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.
