What Happened To The Idea of T-Anchor Lake Becoming A Park?

Amarillo is well known for the number of parks it has in the city. It's something that we all have a tendency to get out and enjoy during the warmer parts of the year, and these parks aren't just small areas with a playground.

Three parks come to mind for their sheer size and the number of things you can do at them. John Stiff is expansive with a TON of open room, has the softball/baseball complex there, as well as the skate park. Medi Park comes complete with a splash pad and lake to fish in. Then there's Thompson Park which has everything you could possibly want in a park.

Did you know however that a while back, there was talk of another potential expansive park in Amarillo?

There had been a lot of chatter about turning T-Anchor Lake into an expansive park, and it would've been a great spot for another epic Amarillo park. So what happened to that idea?

A user on Reddit broke down the history of that land beautifully for us to help us understand why the park concept never came to fruition.

I'd say that's a pretty expansive breakdown of that land. I had no idea the city initially had planned to put the zoo there. I think that could've been a perfect spot for it.

It appears that once the zoo idea went by the wayside, there WAS talk in 2006 to make it a park, but the conversation seemed to have died out and it just became a bunch of land that was owned by the city.

In 2016, the Amarillo Dive Team recovered the body of a child from the lake there behind the La Kiva Hotel.

Since then, the area has been pretty much unmaintained and from what I know, has become an area where some of Amarillo's homeless population congregates and stays.

Is it too late to take that land and turn it into something? Or is the T-Anchor Lake area destined to just be a random area of land that ends up serving no purpose? Only time will tell.