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Cedar Crest GC

 

Dwaine talks about the redo of Cedar Crest Golf Course

(This is an excerpt from a Dallas Observer article written by Jim Schutze)

March 23, 2006

The western end of Caraway country is poor and rough, similar to the poorer parts of Old South Dallas below Fair Park. By the time you get across Kiest Boulevard things are definitely looking up.

Finally you arrive at the area around the Cedar Crest Municipal Golf Course, and now you're looking at a neighborhood on the verge of better days. The houses here were built from the mid-1950s to the early '80s. They range in size from 1,700 square feet to 4,000 and in value from $100,000 to $300,000.

The more important thing is what you see with your eyes: Up and down these streets are signs of recent renovation, new landscaping and investment--the unmistakable signs of improvement ahead, especially given what's going on in the rest of the city. It's too good a buy.

At the center of this area, like a castle on the hill, is the city's $2.2 million Cedar Crest Clubhouse, opened in 2001--the ruby in the tiara of the Cedar Crest municipal course, which recently benefited from a $3 million makeover. I met Caraway and her husband, Dwaine, at the clubhouse for breakfast, at their suggestion.

It's their castle.

The movement to renovate the golf course and build the new clubhouse began when Barbara Mallory Caraway was on the council and her husband was vice president of the park board. It was very much their baby.

Before we ate, he took me on a tour. "After the people moved out, the old clubhouse mysteriously burned," he told me. "All that was here was a little shabby cinder-block building."

The new clubhouse is an architectural homage to the 1920s golf palace that once stood in its place. It serves as community hall, wedding chapel, ballroom and all-around social center to the surrounding area. And, I noticed, there sure were a lot of prosperous-looking white boys out there on the links on a fine spring day. If this was southern Dallas' secret for a while after the renovation, it ain't a secret anymore.

I think Cedar Crest is emblematic of why Caraway won. The old system in southern Dallas was characterized by gentlemanly placeholders, but the Caraways are people who were able to bring home some real bacon for the neighborhood.

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