Most of Lake Cliff lies within the original township of Oak Cliff, officially established in1887. At this time, a steam-powered streetcar service from downtown Dallas ran acrossthe Trinity and branched south to an area that became Oak Cliff’s commercial center,and west along Colorado Blvd., and extended to Spring Lake (later known as Lake Cliff),a large man-made pond.
A social club, known as the Llewellyn Club, excavated the lake and built a clubhouse in 1888. The lake became a focal point of development, and the old clubhouse was converted into a sanitarium that was open for several years. In 1906, Oak Cliff businessman Charles A. Mangold and John F. Zang acquired the land around Lake Cliff and transformed the area into an amusement park in order to encourage surrounding development and increase the value of land they had purchased. Despite its popularity, the Lake Cliff Amusement Park proved too expensive to operate and the land was sold to the city in 1913.
Marketed as “Your Castle in Italy”, the initial development of what is now known as Lake Cliff Tower began in 1928 as a 10-story apartment complex designed by architects Thompson and Swaine. Due to the Depression, the project was halted during construction and it was subsequently sold to E.W. Morten and Charles Mangold in 1929. Once After the building changed hands, it was redesigned by Albert S. Hecht and Robert C. Williams as a 13-story structure and completed by the original contractor, Bellows Maclay, in 1932.
Opened as Cliff Towers Hotel & Apartments, the building was hailed as one of the most exclusive properties in Dallas and around the country.
In 1947, radio legend Gordon McClendon started KLIF-AM in the basement of the Cliff Towers in Oak Cliff – hence the call letters. Later, the building housed other radio stations and in the 1960s it was converted into a nursing home. After several years of being empty, Evergreen Realty Partners stepped forward to convert this architecturally significant landmark into condominium homes, in addition to redeveloping the surrounding area.
