Original hospital campus location The original hospital opened on May 19, 1894, in a wooden building on a meadow located at
Oak Lawn and Maple avenues. The name Parkland came from the land on which the hospital was built, originally purchased by the city as a park. A brick building (the first hospital brick building erected in Texas, now owned by
Crow Holdings) replaced the wooden facility in 1913. All services from the campus at Maple Avenue were decommissioned in 1974. The new Parkland tower blocks were redeveloped in 1981, and the triangular wing at the hospital's entrance on Harry Hines Boulevard opened in the late 1980s. The former hospital site at 5201 Harry Hines Boulevard was demolished in 2024, after closing on July 11, 2022.
John F. Kennedy assassination and pronounced dead. Parkland Hospital is best known as the hospital where three individuals associated with the
assassination of President John F. Kennedy either died or were pronounced dead: President
Kennedy himself; his assassin
Lee Harvey Oswald; and
Jack Ruby, who later killed Oswald. The 2013 film
Parkland dramatizes the deaths of Kennedy and Oswald in the hospital. After he was shot on
November 22, 1963, President Kennedy was rushed to Parkland, where he was pronounced dead at 1:00 p.m. in Trauma Room 1, thirty minutes after he was shot at
Dealey Plaza. At the same time,
Texas governor John Connally, wounded in the same shooting, was treated in Trauma Room 2, and survived. Two days after the assassination, November 24, Oswald was rushed to Parkland after being shot in the abdomen by Ruby and died in operating room #5 after over ninety minutes of surgery. Ruby died on January 3, 1967, in the same emergency department, from a
pulmonary embolism associated with
lung cancer. Since Ruby's death in 1967, areas in the former Parkland Hospital where Kennedy was pronounced dead and Oswald was operated on had been remodeled. A plaque there marked the location where Trauma Room 1 was previously in the prior Parkland, and then became a corridor in the hospital's
radiology department. The ambulance entry remained in roughly the same location. The site of Trauma Room 1 was renovated several times since 1963. Trauma Room 1 was dismantled for renovation in 1973; all building materials and equipment from the room were retained by the government and remain in archival storage today. Parkland's JFK history is noted on a wall at the new hospital and at the John F. Kennedy Park for Hope, Healing and Heroes memorial on campus.
New third hospital campus location 2015 to present date Parkland's high volume of patients led to the decision by the Dallas
County Commissioners Court to propose replacing the overcrowded, 50+-year-old building with a new , 17-story, 862-bed facility, along with a new outpatient center, a office facility, and parking for 6,000 cars. The total cost would be $1.27 billion, to be paid for through three avenues: 1) a $747 million bond proposition (contingent on voter approval, which was obtained in November 2008), 2) $350 million of cash from current and future operations, and 3) $150 million from private donations. The board approved nearly $100 million in contracts and hired two architectural firms –
HDR, Inc. (based in
Omaha, Nebraska, but operates a large practice in Dallas) and
Corgan (based in Dallas) – to design the new building. (A parking garage was completed as a design/build project by
The Whiting-Turner Contracting Company and the architecture firm of Omniplan in January 2012.) In addition to Dallas County taxpayers funding the public hospital, large private donations were made as well, over the next five years; one major donation of $1 million was made by the
Bank of America Charitable Foundation. Donors have their names permanently etched in glass panels in the two-story, glass atrium main lobby. One major feature of the new facility is that movements of staff and supplies are handled in separate corridors and elevators from those used by patients and visitors. The formal groundbreaking ceremony was held in October 2010; the facility was officially dedicated in March 2015, with all patients and staff officially occupying the facility that August. On August 20, 2015, Parkland opened a new
emergency department and began accepting patients; construction had commenced in 2010. Staff members and patients were transferred throughout the next few days, from 5201 Harry Hines Boulevard to the new hospital located across the street at 5200 Harry Hines Boulevard. The new hospital welcomed its first birth, a boy delivered by
Caesarean section, that same morning. The new facility is immediately across Harry Hines Boulevard from the former hospital complex and is served by the
Trinity Railway Express at
Medical/Market Center Station and the
Southwestern Medical District/Parkland station of
DART light rail, which opened in December 2010. ==Awards and recognition==