An Evening Stroll Through Bishop Arts

Where Oak Cliff Gets Dressed Up and Stays Out Late

I drove across the Houston Street Viaduct into Oak Cliff on a Friday evening in October, when the sun was setting behind the Trinity River bottoms and the Dallas skyline in my rearview mirror was doing that thing where it turns gold and then pink and then purple in about fifteen minutes, like a time-lapse of a bruise healing in reverse. The Bishop Arts District sits in the heart of North Oak Cliff, centered on the intersection of Bishop Avenue and Davis Street, and it is the most walkable neighborhood in a city that was not designed with walking in mind.

Bishop Arts is small - six blocks, maybe eight, depending on how generously you draw the boundaries - but it is dense with intention. The buildings are one- and two-story brick commercial structures from the 1920s, the kind of modest storefronts that once housed five-and-dimes and barber shops and have now been filled with restaurants, galleries, and boutiques that manage to be interesting without being precious. I started at Oddfellows, a restaurant and bar in a former Odd Fellows lodge, where the ceiling is pressed tin and the cocktail menu changes weekly and the patio out back was already full of people doing the specific Dallas thing of being very well-dressed in a place that is trying very hard to seem casual.

Walking north on Bishop Avenue, I passed Spinster Records - a vinyl shop with a listening station and a staff whose recommendations I trust more than any algorithm - and Top Ten Records next door, because Bishop Arts apparently believes two record shops within shouting distance is not redundant but necessary. They are both right. I flipped through the jazz section at Spinster and bought a Thelonious Monk pressing I did not need but the cover art demanded.

Davis Street runs east-west through the district and has the feel of a small-town main street - wide sidewalks, benches, string lights crossing overhead like the street is permanently celebrating something. I stopped at Emporium Pies, where the line out the door confirmed what I already knew from previous visits: the Drunken Nut pie - bourbon, chocolate, pecans - is a legitimate reason to cross a state line. I ate a slice on the sidewalk, watching the evening settle over the district, the neon signs in the shop windows flickering on one by one like the neighborhood was slowly opening its eyes.

What Bishop Arts has that most Dallas neighborhoods lack is friction - the productive kind, where a gallery showing contemporary Chicano art sits next to a Southern comfort food restaurant sits next to a vintage clothing store run by a woman who can date any garment by its zipper. The district is a correction to the Dallas stereotype of big, new, and corporate. Everything here is small, old, and stubborn, and it works because the people who built it decided that a few square blocks of Oak Cliff were worth fighting for. They were right. The Monk record is still in rotation. The pie was transcendent. I will be back.