Lower Dexter Park

Lower Dexter Park stands on part of the former Montgomery Fair Department Store site in Montgomery, where Rosa Parks worked as an assistant to the tailor between 1954 and 1956. On December 1, 1955, after leaving her seamstress work there, Parks boarded a city bus and helped set in motion events that would undo segregation in the South and uplift human rights around the world. Montgomery Fair began in 1868 as Pollack's Dollar Store at Perry Street and Dexter Avenue, opened a new four-story flagship store in 1907, and became a regional shopping destination with entrances on Court Street, Monroe Street, and Dexter Avenue. Its Dexter Avenue arcade offered a wide range of goods, its holiday decorations and parades became festive local traditions, and its façade was updated in the 1940s with white and blue vitrolite and large glass blocks in the art deco style. The store closed its downtown operations in the late 1960s as shopping shifted to suburban malls, and after the Court Street section burned in 1984, the remaining structure at 29 Dexter Avenue was later deemed structurally unsound. The site then became an opportunity for a new city park using carefully salvaged materials from the distinctive façade. Parks's commitment to resist the injustice of segregation was galvanized while working there under rigidly enforced segregation, sewing in the basement level while the Alterations Department was on the upper floors, and notes she wrote on Montgomery Fair stationery documented those indignities. She also recorded details supporting the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the lawsuits that ultimately ended segregated public transit. Opened in 2018, Lower Dexter Park preserves part of this history through salvaged vitrolite tile and glass block, creating a public space intended to enhance civic life, dialogue, and reflection on Montgomery and Dexter Avenue.

Montgomery, Alabama · United States