University Park Centennial Bricks to Be Installed in 2026

University Park’s centennial brick installation is set for summer 2026, wrapping up a commemoration that began when the city hit its 100th anniversary in 2024.

The city incorporated in 1924, splitting off from Dallas County to run its own police, fire, and public works departments as an independent municipality. It’s stayed that way ever since. The city government handles those services autonomously, which has long been part of the pitch to buyers shopping homes in the $1.5 million to $4 million range along Beverly Drive and Armstrong Parkway.

The brick program was the centerpiece of the centennial celebration. Participants purchased engraved pavers, submitted inscriptions, and the collected bricks will be set into a public space where foot traffic can find them for decades. The installation timeline, confirmed by People Newspapers, puts the finished display in place before school resumes in the fall. That’s not a trivial detail in a neighborhood that structures its civic calendar around the Highland Park ISD school district academic year.

University Park’s population runs about 25,000. The city sits inside Dallas County but doesn’t share much else with its surrounding neighbors. From Lovers Lane to Hillcrest Avenue, residents have spent 100 years building a community with its own character, its own governance, and its own schools. Highland Park ISD draws students from both University Park and Highland Park, and that shared school district has been central to Park Cities identity for generations. A centennial gave residents a formal occasion to reckon with what that century produced.

“It’s a great way for families who have been part of University Park for generations to leave a permanent mark,” said one Park Cities real estate professional familiar with the project.

The sentiment holds up. In a community where tenure gets measured in generations, not years, a physical inscription in a public plaza means something. Several Preston Hollow families whose kids cross the University Park line to attend Highland Park ISD schools have participated in comparable Park Cities civic campaigns over the years. Programs like this one don’t stay strictly local. They pull in cross-neighborhood engagement because the civic culture around the Park Cities runs deeper than municipal boundaries.

What’s different about the centennial brick program is its permanence. The birthday banners came down. The commemorative events wrapped. But the pavers go into the ground and stay there. Families returning from summer travel in August will find them already set.

The $1.5 million floor on homes along Beverly Drive and Armstrong Parkway tells you something about who’s buying into this community and why. They’re not buying a zip code. They’re buying into an arrangement that’s been in place since 1924, and the brick program is the rare civic gesture that makes that explicit. In 2026, with the centennial technically behind it, University Park is finishing the job of marking its own history in concrete.

The city’s 04 square miles have stayed dense with that kind of civic investment since incorporation. That’s the record the bricks are meant to represent.