Cream stucco and limestone art deco halls from 1936 line a paved esplanade, and the Cotton Bowl hosted a shootout for Fox's The Good Guys.
What Fair Park looks like
A paved esplanade runs between rows of low exhibition halls, their walls cream stucco and cast stone banded in orange and red geometric borders. Deep arched entries cut through the facades, some still lettered with the hall's original name over the door.
The rises from a pair of curved wing walls at the plaza's center, a gold striped pylon with a stepped gold cap. Painted seal medallions flank its base. A bronze recreation of Lawrence Tenney Stevens' 1936 figure stands at the end of the esplanade in front of the , itself faced in limestone with reeded columns at the entrance.
Smaller halls sit further out under mature live oaks and clipped hedges, brick paving giving way to plain concrete around them. The Aquarium Education Center keeps its original cream stucco front and square multi pane windows, and the Creative Arts building's arched doorway is scaled to match its neighbors along the row.
The stands apart from the rest, a flat roofed white building with a glass block wall and an open second story terrace. South across the grounds, a lit spire rises over the Cotton Bowl's beige stone bowl, green neon lettering over the entrance after dark.
Shot in Fair Park
The Tower Building's art deco exterior and the midway arches were backdrops for State Fair, 1962. Fox's The Good Guys returned in 2010, its episode Dan on the Run ending in a shootout inside the Cotton Bowl.
The Good Guys, 2010
The Cotton Bowl stadium plays itself in Dan on the Run, an episode of the Fox series The Good Guys that aired in October 2010. Dan and his former partner stage a rescue that ends in a shootout inside the stadium bowl. Street View
What Fair Park can double for
Treasure Island in San Francisco, California
The Administration Building's cream Streamline Moderne massing and low banded windows read close to the Esplanade halls, and both went up within a few years of each other for a world's fair. It is one of the only intact structures left from the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition. The building's rounded corner tower and porthole windows are more streamlined than the flatter geometric ornament here, so a tight frontal frame holds the illusion better than a wide one. Try searching streamline moderne exposition hall now.
The Memorial Coliseum's peristyle colonnade, built with the stadium in 1923 and topped with the Olympic cauldron and rings for the 1932 Games, has the same run of round arches and civic scale as the halls along the esplanade. Both were built to host a public event rather than as museums from the start. The Olympic rings and torch over the peristyle's center arch are permanent fixtures and would need to stay out of frame, favoring a side arcade instead. Try searching colonnade of round arches now.
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