White Rock to Oak Cliff
Dallas Neighborhood Guide
A starting map of how the city's named neighborhoods group together, built from public reference sources rather than a single official boundary map.
How Dallas's neighborhoods are organized
Reference sources group Dallas's many named neighborhoods into a handful of larger geographic macroneighborhoods, among them Downtown, Oak Lawn, Uptown, Old East Dallas, Oak Cliff, and East Dallas, perWikipedia's neighborhood list. This guide is a starting map. We cover Oak Lawn in the most depth of any neighborhood so far; see our full Oak Lawn guide for that.
Oak Lawn
Oak Lawn is officially defined byDallas City Ordinance No. 21859as Planned Development District No. 193, the Oak Lawn Special Purpose District, which the ordinance itself describes as an area "of cultural and architectural importance and significance to the citizens of the city."D Magazine's neighborhood guideplaces it between Highland Park to the north and Uptown to the south, and describes it as having long been the center of Dallas's gay community. See our full Oak Lawn guidefor its history, landmarks, and library collection.
Old East Dallas and Deep Ellum
Deep Ellum sits within the Old East Dallas area and is characterized in Wikipedia's neighborhood list as an entertainment district.
Oak Cliff and Bishop Arts
The Bishop Arts District is located within Oak Cliff and is likewise characterized as an entertainment district.
East Dallas and Lakewood
D Magazine'sguide to Lakewooddescribes the neighborhood as running along the west side of White Rock Lake, with a mix of large estates and smaller cottages.
Where sources disagree
Reference sources don't fully agree on Dallas's neighborhood boundaries. Wikipedia's neighborhood list classifies Uptown, Turtle Creek, and Victory Park as sub-areas within the Oak Lawn macroneighborhood, while D Magazine's guide treats Uptown as a separate neighborhood adjacent to Oak Lawn's south. We're noting the disagreement rather than picking a winner. Separately, D Magazine's Oak Lawn guide describes the annual Dallas Pride parade as running down Cedar Springs Road, but the parade itself relocated to Fair Park in 2019, so that description appears to predate the move; see our Oak Lawn guidefor the sourced timeline.