A Trailer Park Shopping Area? Coming Soon. Local Craftsman Helps "Make It Happen."

Photos by Leslie Minora

Gary Buckner sits on the filing cabinet of the Airstream he refurbished as an office.

​Old trailers fill the lot in front of Gary Buckner's West Dallas workshop. Two are almost completely gutted and ready for refurbishing, and one silver Airstream is nearly ready for the move-in of a fairly unlikely tenant. In less than two months, this trailer will be home to an insurance office, which will be parked on the Fort Worth Ave. side of the Dallas West Mobile Home/RV Park.

Belmont Hotel owner and developer Monte Anderson, who's developing the trailer park shopping center for landowner Cienda Partners, hired Buckner to build the mobile office and is leasing it to a local business owner.

Currently, the trailer park is a purely residential mini-neighborhood, but the plan is to have the street-side of the development lined with small businesses parked next to each other in a commercial row. The insurance agency will be the first commercial tenant in the stretch that Anderson says will include up to 15 businesses possibly including a cupcake shop, fried pie bakery, a tattoo parlor and offices. "It's a portable space for small entrepreneurs," he tells Unfair Park.

If recycling and re-purposing were a religion, Buckner would be our local bishop. He furnished the Belmont with tables and benches made from pallet wood; he created benches for City Hall Plaza out of the same material, and he's furnished a few local restaurants out of materials that would have otherwise ended up in a landfill. Chandeliers made from old bicycle parts and air vents hang in his workshop, while a bike rack made from old bike frames stands at the entrance.

To Buckner, who started his company, Stash Design, with his business partner in February, refurbishing trailers is about the entire movement of supporting small local entrepreneurs, recycling, and improving Dallas from the ground up.

"We've gone away from street space. We've gone the opposite way... the idea is to bring it back to small things," Buckner says. "We're actively changing things and actively making things happen. That's kind of the catch phrase: Make it happen."

Below are some photos of trailers in the works.

Jonathan Sanchez, who works with Buckner, fixes the outside of the nearly complete Airstream office.

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The interior of the Airstream office.

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