Dallas ISD is donating the former Adamson High School to a partner who can preserve it and return it to public use. We believe it can become a home for all of Dallas: a place where people from every walk of life come to learn, make, work, and become neighbors.
The Moment
The district is accepting proposals until October 15, 2026, and whoever steps forward will shape what Adamson becomes. We are stepping forward with an idea fourteen years in the making.
The Idea
Adamson Commons began as an idea about people, not a building. The old high school fits that idea better than any building we have found, with the room, the location, and the civic bones to hold it.
Everyone needs a place where they are known, needed, and missed when they are not there.
About the Founder
Elizabeth has lived in Dallas her whole life, and she has spent much of it connecting people to the parts of the city that need them.
Through Watermark Community Church, she has led classes on racial reconciliation, and she teaches and writes about the value of every human being. She believes that in a world that seems divided, getting to know our neighbors is an antidote.
Since 2012 she has carried a picture of a building where that happens every day: full of people who would otherwise never meet, with someone whose role is to introduce them.
She has worked on city and cultural engagement at Watermark since 2018, and before that she spent nearly six years at Hilton. She has the relationships to convene the people this will take, and she has run operations at scale.
When Adamson became available, she knew the idea had found its home.
A Day Inside
The doors open before the workday does.
The gym fills first, with people coming in before a shift or after one, and by seven the coffee counter is busy too. For many neighbors, the gym is the way in. It brings in people who would never walk through the door for a program.
Making becomes mentoring.
Every craft here is taught hand to hand. The workshop fills, and retirees run their guilds and teach whoever shows up. Students deciding what to do next take a shift in the barber shop, the salon, or the music studio. Some start with coffee and a mentor, then stand at a bench beside someone who has done the work for forty years.
Lunch lasts longer because nobody has quite finished talking.
The long tables are built for lingering, so people eat, then work, then stay. A business two blocks away books a room for the afternoon. The teaching kitchen runs a class, and a dozen strangers leave having cooked a meal together.
School lets out, and the building gets louder.
Tutors take the back rooms. A teenager who came for the gym stays for help with homework, and before heading home meets a nurse who is glad to explain how to get into the field.
The building comes alive again.
A film night or an open mic fills the auditorium. Pottery runs late in the workshop, an artist works in a rented studio, a standing game night meets down the hall, and thirty people sit down to dinner together.
How It Works
Every member begins by sitting down with a host, a volunteer who takes time to see the whole person: their story, what they are working toward, what they need, and what they have to give. Then the host makes the introductions.
Connection rarely happens by accident, so Adamson Commons plans for it.
The Building
The school opened in 1915 as Oak Cliff High School, on a hill that looks north across the river to downtown Dallas.
Those words are still carved in the stone above the front door. In 1935 the district renamed the school for W. H. Adamson, its principal of thirty-one years, and mounted a plaque over the original name. The plaque is still there. So is the stone underneath it.
Its architect, William B. Ittner, designed schools as civic buildings: full of light, built around how people move through a day, and meant to serve the whole neighborhood. Those civic bones are still there. Adamson Commons will put them back to work.
Those uses are mapped onto the district’s own floor plans, across 114,633 square feet on a basement and three floors.
The Challenge
Like most buildings its age, Adamson needs structural work.
The City
A resident of one Dallas ZIP code outlives a resident of another one five miles away by seventeen years.
In 1937, federal maps marked Dallas’s Black and mixed neighborhoods as hazardous for lending. Twenty years later, Interstate 30 opened along much of the same line. Four of the county’s five shortest-lived ZIP codes now sit south of it, and so does Oak Cliff.
Sources: Dallas County Community Health Needs Assessment, 2025 (life expectancy by ZIP code). Home Owners’ Loan Corporation residential security maps, Dallas, 1937.
A city can only heal the parts of itself it is willing to see.
The Neighborhood
Zang Boulevard separates the Bishop Arts District from the rest of North Oak Cliff. A decade of investment landed heavily on one side of it.
Adamson Commons is meant to be a place where both sides meet. It is a bridge to a community that has been under-resourced and underserved, and it is built first for the people who already live here.
Bishop Arts is a short walk away, and it has spent a decade proving that people will come to this part of Oak Cliff for shops, restaurants, and an evening out. Adamson Commons will open into a neighborhood people already love, minutes from Kessler, Winnetka Heights, and the blocks around the school.
The Edge
Ecologists call it the edge effect: where two environments meet, life is often at its most varied. Adamson Commons applies that idea to people.
It is hard to love a neighbor you have never met.
Here, people of different generations, professions, incomes, and backgrounds meet again and again in ordinary life. Every part of the building makes that easy, and a few traditions make it certain.
Early Philanthropy
Early gifts fund the careful work that gets this vision ready to build.
Because the district is donating the building, what we raise goes toward preserving it and bringing it back to life, not toward a purchase price.
We know which questions matter most, and we are assembling the people and resources to answer them well.
The Vision
That is what a founding gift sets in motion.
The Founders’ Table
This first round of support carries the work through the October 15 proposal and the district’s decision. If Adamson is chosen, a capital campaign to restore the building and launch Adamson Commons programming will follow.
If the district chooses another proposal, this work will not be wasted. The organization, the partnerships, and the operating model all carry forward, and Elizabeth will keep searching for the right building for the vision.
Every gift, at every level, goes to the same early work.
Every lasting institution begins with a few people who believed in it first.
Talk with Elizabeth