Cedar Springs Road — Dallas Gay Strip

Cedar Springs Road runs 1.5 miles north through Dallas's Oak Lawn neighbourhood, from Oak Lawn Avenue at the south to the Cathedral of Hope at the north. Since the mid-1970s it has been Dallas's dedicated gay commercial strip — the densest queer commercial concentration in the American South and the anchor of Oak Lawn's emergence as one of the country's most-cited Sun-Belt gay neighbourhoods. The strip's emergence traces to the 1974 opening of the Round-Up Saloon at 3912 Cedar Springs Road (see separate entry) as one of the first openly-marketed gay bars in the American South. Through the late 1970s and 1980s Cedar Springs added JR's Bar & Grill, TMC (The Mining Company), the Village Station and roughly a dozen other queer venues. The strip's peak commercial density was reached in the late 1990s; today the corridor holds approximately 20 dedicated LGBTQ+ venues. Cedar Springs Road's significance to Sun-Belt queer heritage is that it demonstrated the viability of large-scale queer commercial infrastructure in a Southern US city that had criminalised homosexual acts under state law until 2003. Dallas's emergence as a Sun-Belt gay commercial capital through the 1980s and 1990s — comparable in scale to Atlanta's Midtown but smaller than Houston's Montrose — largely happened on this strip. Free, open 24/7 as public street. Cityplace/Uptown DART station is a 10-minute walk. Peak crowd Friday and Saturday nights 22:00-02:00. On the standard Dallas queer heritage day this is the anchor — start at the Legacy of Love Monument at the southern gateway and walk north to the Cathedral of Hope, stopping at the strip's major venues along the way.