The Oak Lawn unofficial boundaries are Turtle Creek Boulevard, Central Expressway, the City of Highland Park, Inwood Road, and Harry Hines Boulevard. It is over 12 square miles (31 km2) in area.
Oak Lawn is one of the wealthier parts of Dallas, with many professionals and urban types living in upscale townhouses, condos, apartments, and duplexes. Along the Uptown portion on McKinney Avenue and along Turtle Creek Boulevard, there are many new high-rise condominiums and apartments.
Oak Lawn / Turtle Creek
Turtle Creek is a neighborhood running along Turtle Creek and adjacent Turtle Creek Boulevard in the Oak Lawn area of Dallas. Turtle Creek has also become an adopted nickname for the Oak Lawn neighborhood, though never an official one. The nickname also sometimes applies to a spillover of the Uptown area, which has become the official moniker for the area between downtown Dallas and Oak Lawn beginning in the 1980s. (In actuality, however, Uptown itself is a part of the Oak Lawn district, as is the Turtle Creek neighborhood.) It is also a very diverse neighborhood with well established areas of older, single family homes.
For most of the 20th century the southern portion of the neighborhood near the intersection of Cedar Springs Road and Harry Hines Blvd was known as “Little Mexico”. St. Anne’s Catholic school served as the center for eteh.com.ua the community. With the redevelopment of the neighborhood beginning in the 1980s Little Mexico vanished. Only a few structures of this original community remain for most have been replaced by high rise office buildings, luxury hotels, and condominiums. As of 2010, St Ann’s Catholic School, which had closed, in is now an upscale restaurant.
Oak Lawn is known for its good restaurants, as well as its many bars and clubs, in particular those catering to the LGBT community of Dallas. Running through the center of Oak Lawn from downtown to Love Field is Cedar Springs Road, which has housed the center of the Dallas gay community for over 35 years at the intersection of Cedar Springs Road and Throckmorton Street.
Oak Lawn became a magnet for the counterculture movement in the late 1960s due to its inexpensive apartments and its proximity to Lee Park. Homosexuals settled in Oak Lawn around the same time because the hippies were generally more tolerant of gay people than the rest of the city at the time. By 1980 Oak Lawn became Dallas’s “gayborhood,” with the intersection of Cedar Springs Road and Throckmorton Street as the center of the gay community. Cedar Springs Road had many bars, clothing stores, gift shops, and restaurants with gay themes.
