After sitting vacant for 15 years, Dallas’ historic Forest Theater is undergoing a major renovation.
The venue that once featured notable acts like Tina Turner, B.B. King and Dallas’ own Erykah Badu will be transformed into a community and education hub, complete with mixed-income housing nearby.
The nonprofit Forest Forward, which acquired the theater in 2017, is breaking ground Thursday on the more than $75 million expansion.
“The Forest Theater once served as a cultural landmark for our entire city,” Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson said at the ceremony. “And this renovation is going to usher in a new era for this theater and for this community.”
This is the first time in its history the theater, which opened in 1949 and for years served an exclusively white audience, is owned by a Black-led organization.
“South Dallas is in a transition of change,” Forest Forward president Elizabeth Wattley said. “The MLK Boulevard is changing.”
She said the rehabilitation and expansion of the theater will “certainly draw additional business and development to the neighborhood.”
As part of the theater’s partnership with Dallas ISD, students of MLK Arts Academy will have access to the 13,000-square-foot arts education hub that will be in front of the theater, where old retail spaces were formerly located.
They will have a seated concert hall and a “black box” studio that also converts to a “white box” studio, giving them the opportunity for CGI projection mapping.
“We really want to bring those technologies to our students’ hands,” Wattley said, “to share their talents in a number of varieties of ways.”
The expansion involved several of zoning requirements. The highway the theater sits on will be transformed into a boulevard with traffic lights and a 35- mph speed limit to increase walkability.
“Our students who would walk to school would have to go all the way up here and then cross over on the boulevard,” Wattley said. “Now they'll just be up across the street.”
The housing portion is centered around community development, said Forest Forward board member Matthew Ruffner. The mixed-income housing will help densify the neighborhood, so it increases school and community event attendance without pushing out longtime residents, he said.
“The thing that we're trying to hit is as this neighborhood grows, how can families grow in this neighborhood without having to move away?” he said. “We're going to be able to offer a diversity in housing that will allow families to call this neighborhood home not just for now but for life.”
Wattley says the theater’s expansion will preserve the character and history of the South Dallas community, whose input on the project was taken into consideration.
The theater is not a new concept: Spaces like the South Dallas Cultural Center offers free access to a wide variety of visual and performing arts programming. Forest Forward made a commitment to provide complementary access that is not competitive.
“It indicates and implies that there’s an oversaturation of arts in south Dallas, and there’s really no such thing as that,” said Wattley said.
Speaking at Thursday’s groundbreaking ceremony, U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett said she’s happy to see someone still committed to the city of Dallas, specifically South Dallas.
“A lot of people for a long time have given up on South Dallas,” she said. “But let me tell you, Elizabeth would not accept no from anybody.”
The renovation is expected to take about 18 months, with the theater set to reopen December 2025.
Zara Amaechi is KERA’s Marjorie Welch Fitts Louis fellow covering race and social justice. Got a tip? Email Zara at zamaechi@kera.org. You can follow her on X @amaechizara.
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