The city’s oldest home tour includes 10 homes, four of them built right into the cliff
THIS GAY HOUSE | Homes on the Old Oak Cliff Conservation League Tour of Homes spotlight the area’s terrain and incorporate steep dropoffs into dramatic settings. (Photos courtesy Shoot2Sell Photography)
DAVID TAFFET | Staff Writer
taffet@dallasvoice.com
The Old Oak Cliff Conservation League tour of homes includes three homes south of Kiest Park this year, the most in those neighborhoods in the tour’s history.
Former OOCCL President Michael Amonett is excited about the variety of homes and neighborhoods highlighted in this year’s tour, but especially in the work going into homes in new areas of Oak Cliff. One of the things that makes some Oak Cliff homes so interesting is how builders set some homes into the cliff to create yards and views unlike anything else in the city, he said.
“Four of the homes [on this year’s home tour] are built into the cliff,” Amonett said.
He also said only four of the 10 houses on this year’s tour are gay-owned. That’s down from the usual number, but shows the commitment of the entire community to maintain and restore their homes and yards.
One of the homes built into the cliff belongs to Judy Pollack.
“There used to be a tattoo parlor downstairs,” Pollack said, describing her house’s colorful history. “I turned it into an exercise studio.”
Her screened porch, which she called the treehouse, stands 20 feet above her backyard and overlooks Five Mile Creek that flows through a small canyon in that part of Oak Cliff.
A bridge connects two parts of Pollack’s home, which was built in the 1970s. She updated the house by gutting the kitchen and bath and using Patagonian rosewood for the floors.
Bill Robertson’s home is in Kiestwood, also south of Kiest Park. He purchased his house from the original owner, an elderly woman who had let it fall into disrepair. By the time he acquired the house, vines were growing through the walls and six raccoons had taken up residence.
“We sit on top of a hill,” Robertson said of his home, which is situated on 2.5 acres with a steep drop off to the creek. Robertson said there are 40 steps down to the lower patio in the back.
While he left the original floor plan, Robertson is doubling the size of his sunroom, the only add-on since the house was built in 1961. The floors and cabinets are also original but have been resurfaced.
Robertson said the stonework inside is another interesting architectural element that originally attracted him to the house.
As a bonus stop, this year’s OOOCL home tour includes a visit to the Oak Cliff Bank Building, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. AIDS Services of Dallas and former Councilman Domingo Garcia have offices in this building.
The building’s oddest feature is its elevator bank. There are no buttons to push inside the elevators. Punch in the floor to call the elevator and when the car arrives, it indicates which floors it will stop on.
Last year’s tour brought in $30,000, which was returned to the neighborhoods for a variety of projects, including street sign toppers to designate streets included in Oak Cliff’s strong neighborhood associations, along with other projects sidewalk improvements to median beautification projects.
The OOCCL tour is the largest in the city as well as the oldest. The tour was started in 1975 by neighborhood preservationists at a time when Oak Cliff was seen as one of the city’s declining slums rather than the collection of strong neighborhoods with skyrocketing property values that it is today.
Old Oak Cliff Tour of Homes, Oct. 18–19 at noon–6 p.m. Tickets may be purchased at Ticket Central at Simply Austin, 8th and Bishop or at any of the homes for $25 and $15 for seniors. Tour is rain or shine.
This article appeared in the Dallas Voice print edition October 17, 2014.