Tuesday afternoon I gave park-maker Dan Biederman a lift from our downtown digs to Fair Park, where he's tasked with making a park, because, well, that is what he does for a living. My short ride with him turned into a brief tour turned into a full-fledged hostage situation.

Biederman, bespectacled and blunt, is the gent who resurrected Manhattan's beloved Bryant Park and developed Dallas' own Klyde Warren Park. So I wasn't about to let the visitor from New York City out of the car until he told me where he's going to plant that park in Fair Park that everyone wants now, immediately, day before yesterday. And how big it's going to be. And what goodies it will come with. And a thousand other questions to which Biederman is only now beginning to think about thinking about the answers.

He does already have thoughts about Fair Park's current state. The boulevard in front of the Texas Discovery Gardens is "spectacular." The slab of concrete between between the Cotton Bowl and the lagoon is "ugly." He shook his head every time we saw someone in the park. "Because they all work for the park."

He allowed himself to gaze, briefly, toward the future. One day, in 20 years, maybe 30, Fair Park, he said, will be "a Garden of Eden."

In less than two weeks Dallas will officially hand over Fair Park's keys to the outside operators City Hall hopes will finally transform Fair Park — a seldom-visited collection of aging Art Deco buildings that occasionally hosts stuff — into an all-day-every-day destination.

Biederman calls it "the most important park privatization project in the world." Dallas Park Board President Bobby Abtahi said the Jan. 1 turnover to nonprofit Fair Park First and its for-profit partner Spectra is "the beginning of a new era that we've been talking about for 20 years." Mayor Mike Rawlings says it's "the next act of this play I've been working on since I was Park Board president, going on 10 years."

This wait — for Fair Park's savior and South Dallas' salvation — has been longer than 10 years. Try decades. Lifetimes.

First on the to-do list is the obvious and inevitable: The mayor and City Council and Park Board and residents around Fair Park have made their feelings very, very clear. They all want a park in Fair Park. A patch of green amid the concrete that has, over the years, swallowed up the 277 acres.

This will inevitably be done by cracking open and ripping up a parking lot somewhere on the property. Where remains to be determined. But there are copious spots from which to choose — Fair Parking Lot, amiright? No one, least of all Biederman, the visitor from Up North, is going to say they want it here and not there, especially not before the community has had its say. But they do have ideas, and reasons behind them.

Rawlings, for instance, said this week he thinks the parking lot along Robert B. Cullum Boulevard is probably the best fit — between the museums and the row of gas stations and fast-food eateries that pass for economic development in South Dallas. The mayor said the park should be a catalyst "where we get more mixed-income housing and the retail around it [so it can do] what Klyde Warren Park did for that little strip of land downtown."

Cullum, Rawlings said, is Fair Park's front door, rife with opportunity. "But if someone can show me another idea I haven't thought about, this is the time to do it."

Abtahi said this week he'd like to see the park closer to Parry and Washington avenues near Exposition Park and, maybe one day, a sunken Interstate 30 covered with deck parks knitting together torn-apart neighborhoods. It's not a bad or crazy idea: The Texas Department of Transportation told me this week its about to begin discussions with City Hall about the I-30 makeover, which I'm sure will become a recurring talking point in the coming mayoral election.

"We need to make I-30 one of our priorities, so we can create a synergy between Deep Ellum and East Dallas and bring those amenities to Fair Park," Abtahi said. "That is my big picture on all this."

Community meetings will begin early in the new year, after which, likely by spring, we will see a rough draft. For now, Biederman will make no promises. He did say he thinks the Cullum lot is too narrow for a proper park, which would be 8 to 10 acres big. And he does foresee a future where the Esplanade, with its Vegas fountain and surrounding buildings, is the park's centerpiece.

But he began our meeting by cautioning, "Work hasn't really started ..."

And so I, too, would like to make a suggestion about that park. Just a thought.

This used to be a neighborhood. Now it's the symbol for all that's wrong with Fair Park. (Andy Jacobsohn / Staff Photographer)

Perhaps we can simply do what is most logical and just and plant that park in the giant sprawl of parking lots that gobble up the far-southeast side of Fair Park near whatever we now call Starplex.

A neighborhood used to be there, contained inside the 50 acres of concrete bordered by Fitzhugh Avenue, Gaisford Street, Pennsylvania Avenue and Second Avenue. There were movie theaters, like the Dal-Sec, so named for Second and Dallas Street, the latter vanished from all maps. Lowe's Barbecue was here; so, too, gathering spots like Friendship Hall. And Fred and Dorothy Joiner, who sued the city just to keep their home.

From THe Dallas Morning News, Dec. 14, 1930

And all of those places were eminent-domained for parking by Dallas City Hall and the State Fair of Texas, armed with a consultants' report that said people didn't like coming to the fair because they had to look at "the poor Negroes in their shacks" and that "all that is required is to eliminate the problem from sight." What was once a neighborhood has been, since the 1970s, a fenced-off, locked-up sprawl of nothingness most days and most nights.

I drove Biederman across that lot this week so he could see what remains outside the fence — the South Dallas Cultural Center and the neighborhood that survived on the other side of Fitzhugh. I told him there's also a school back there, Paul Dunbar, and the Juanita Craft rec center. And a lot of people, homeowners and renters, who still feel cut off from — and forgotten by — the rest of this city.

He said nothing, other than he saw "possibilities" on this giant patch of nothing. Work hasn't really started. But that's a start.