When Klyde Warren Park opened in 2012 it was a revelation, a 5.2-acre declaration of progressive urban design. Dallas, a divided city that had choked its downtown with highways, was now working to repair that damage and to heal itself, both physically and figuratively. In decking over the Woodall Rodgers Freeway, it sutured neighborhoods together and gave itself a new front lawn.

More than any other space in the city, Klyde Warren Park draws the Dallas public together in all of its diversity. It is a remarkable achievement.

But a misguided new expansion plan would throw away all the lessons of Klyde Warren Park, and at enormous cost to the public. The centerpiece of the $76 million plan, which received $10 million in city bond funding, is a bizarre cylindrical structure that would sit on an additional 1.2 acre deck erected over the freeway between North Akard and North St. Paul, extending the park one block to the west.

The building would occupy almost all of the new park space, so to call it a park expansion is itself something of a misnomer. At its heart is a multi-story spiralling structure that would house a garage, a Dallas promotional center, a commercial event space, and a terrace overlook.

Renderings show the planned expansion of Klyde Warren Park in Dallas. The expansion will include a 20,000-square foot pavilion -- containing a visitors center and a 75-space parking garage. (M2 Studio/Klyde Warren Park)

The lead tenant and occupant of the first floor would be VisitDallas, a civic marketing organization. Just think about that. Instead of expanding the park in a way that would be a genuine attraction to visitors (and residents!), the city would instead turn that space over to pure boosterism.

There's a Texas aphorism that describes this perfectly: All hat and no cattle.

Klyde Warren Park demonstrated that Dallasites want more places to come together and an urban core that enhances walkability. But this new expansion proposes the opposite: It is a garage with a private event space, and public amenities are the afterthoughts. More to the point, there's almost no park in this park — the additional space there would be is cut off from the rest of the park by the new structure.

This is not to say Klyde Warren is sacrosanct and should not be expanded and altered. Although it is inarguably an enormous success, after more than five years, we can now see how it has responded to its popularity, and how it might be improved. The truth is that it was not a perfect design in the first place.

Part of the initial problem stemmed from the understandable concern that a park over a highway would not draw visitors. This prompted a kind of something-for-everyone over-programming by landscape architect James Burnett, a design dog's breakfast with popular attractions cut and pasted from parks in other cities: the café seating from New York's Bryant Park; the performance stage from Chicago's Millennium Park; arches cribbed from St. Louis.

Klyde Warren Park in downtown Dallas, Thursday, Oct. 18, 2018. (Tom Fox / Staff Photographer)

This grab-bag nature masks what we can now see as fundamental flaws: a paucity of shade; lawns that are expensive to maintain and environmentally unsustainable; awkward interruption by through streets and poor connection with neighboring areas, especially in the direction of the Perot Museum.

These issues might easily be addressed in an expanded and edited park design. Instead of adding a new building with an upper-level terrace for views, the park would be better served by the introduction of varied topography, hills and paths that would provide opportunity for views and the planting of shade-giving species and other native vegetation.

To improve connectivity, the St. Paul exit off the westbound Woodall Rodgers should be closed, as it encroaches on the park and cuts off access toward the Perot. This exit is entirely redundant, as there is another just a few blocks to the east at Pearl. This closure is long overdue: when the initial park plan was developed, the Texas Department of Transportation refused to take this common-sense action. It's time for that authority to start putting the needs of the park (and the citizens of Dallas) ahead of its own prerogatives.

Renderings show the planned expansion of Klyde Warren Park in Dallas. The expansion will include a 20,000-square-foot pavilion — containing a visitors center and a 75-space parking garage. (M2 Studio/Klyde Warren Park)

The failure to close that exit is an example of the broader lack of cohesive thinking that plagues the entire Arts District of which Klyde Warren is a part. Over the last several years, the area has developed at a frenetic pace, with new skyscrapers flanking the park on both of its sides, along with additional development along Flora Street and Ross Avenue. All of this has come about while a master plan for the Arts District has sat in bureaucratic limbo in City Hall.

That plan, commissioned way back in 2015, was drafted more than two years ago under the direction of Harvard urban planner Alex Krieger. But Dallas, in cart-before-horse fashion, has allowed all of the development in the area to proceed before approving that plan. So yes, we build the neighborhood, and then make the plan for it. This is how you end up with spaces that don't work.

The proposed Arts District plan has a broad array of good ideas, and many of them would dramatically improve the experience of and access to Klyde Warren Park. Traffic calming and a lane reduction on Pearl Street, which would become an "Avenue to the Arts," would dramatically improve matters. So too would a unified and improved street design (lighting, trees, furniture, paving) across the entire district, to conjure a sense of unity and promote walkability. This would be accompanied by a cohesive system of wayfinding and information graphics.

The plan wisely suggests the renaming of the Woodall Rodgers service roads fronting the park, to both avoid confusion with the highway and to suggest a more urban-friendly atmosphere.

Neighboring institutions might also make better efforts to address the park. The Nasher Sculpture Center would do well to place an entrance facing Klyde Warren, instead of turning its back with a series of blank walls. And if the park is to do more to funnel pedestrians to the Perot, that museum should likewise figure out a more friendly way to welcome them than with a long, blank staircase.

It is fair to say that Klyde Warren's impact on the city has extended well beyond even the Arts District. Recent progress on design plans for both the Trinity and Fair Park owe something to the success demonstrated by Klyde Warren, by illustrating that Dallasites would indeed embrace a park in the heart of the city.

It should learn its own lessons.

Mark Lamster is the architecture critic of The Dallas Morning News, a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a professor at the University of Texas at Arlington School of Architecture.

CORRECTION, 2:35 p.m., December 20: This story has been modified to clarify that only $10 million of the $76 million expansion plan will come from city bonds.