Stevens Park Shopping Center

Annie Stevens practiced sensible development.

1939

As president of her family company, she developed Stevens Park Village in the late 1930s.

She and her brother donated 110 acres to the city of Dallas for Stevens Park in memory of their parents. The parkland, now Stevens Park Golf Course, had previously been part of their farm.

On acreage surrounding what is now Colorado and Fort Worth Avenue, Stevens developed homes and a shopping center.

That little shopping center, on the curve of Colorado between Hampton and Fort Worth Avenue, was built on the Mustang/La Reunion trolley line for $250,000 in 1939.

They served the neighborhood with shops and services, and the buildings fit in with the one-story limestone homes of Stevens Park Village.

In 1943, the government built Mustang Village, a complex of one-story apartments for veterans, on the southwest corner of what is now Fort Worth Avenue and Colorado.

Those were demolished in the late 1950s, when the two-story brick Stevens Village apartments — later called Colorado Place — were built.

A development company demolished Colorado Place apartments in 2009 but then ran out of cash, and the land sat vacant until 2016 when Lincoln Property Co. bought it.

Lincoln built a luxury apartment complex that backs up to the golf course. And they recently completed a retail complex fronting Fort Worth Avenue and Colorado.

Across Fort Worth Avenue, Centre Living Homes is building about 60 luxury townhomes.

Original pieces of the Stevens Park shopping center, in the 1100 block of Colorado, are not on the market, and there are not immediate plans for redevelopment.

But as Fort Worth Avenue continues to be built out with new multifamily and retail developments, this understated shopping center could be lost.