El Paso’s Ascarate Park Was The Largest CCC Project In Texas History

You've probably been to Ascarate Park. You've probably eaten a carne asada taco by the lake, watched your kid lose their mind at the aquatic center, or played a round at the golf course. But how much do you actually know about the place? Probably a lot. You're pretty smart.

The Ground You're Picnicking On Used to Be the Rio Grande

Before Ascarate was a park, it wasn't land at all. The area was a banco, which is what the International Boundary Commission calls a river loop of the Rio Grande. When the IBC straightened the river in the early 1930s, the old loop became dry land, and the federal government deeded it to El Paso County. So the next time you're tossing a frisbee at Ascarate, just know you're doing it on what used to be the bottom of the Rio Grande. That's kind of poetic.

El Pasoans Once Voted to Tax Themselves for This Park and Were Happy About It

In 1937, El Paso County residents voted on a proposed three-cent tax levy to help fund a new park. They didn't just pass it. They crushed it, approving it by 372 votes over the required two-thirds majority. Combined with a $400,000 federal grant, that money built what would become Ascarate Park.

Now, for anyone who has spent five minutes on local El Paso social media watching residents fight against basically every new city project being proposed today, this fact might hit different. To be fair, three cents in 1937 is roughly $0.65 today, and everything is astronomically more expensive in 2026, so I get it. But still. El Paso voted yes, overwhelmingly, and got a 400-acre park out of it. Not a bad deal.

The Lake Was The Biggest Civilian Conservation Corps Project In Texas

The Civilian Conservation Corps, better known as the CCC, was a New Deal program created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 to put unemployed young men to work during the Great Depression. At its peak, the CCC employed around 300,000 men nationwide, and their fingerprints are all over America's parks, trails, bridges, and public buildings. They were essentially the country's construction crew during one of its darkest economic periods, and the work they did still stands today.

Their work at Ascarate was no small task. More than 200 CCC laborers built the baseball fields, tennis courts, a recreation center, and the golf course. Then they removed more than one million cubic yards (2-3 billion pounds) of sand to create the 45-acre lake, which opened in December 1940. The whole project was the largest CCC undertaking in the entire state of Texas. The next time you're fishing at Ascarate Lake, you're casting a line into a hole that hundreds of men dug by hand almost 90 years ago. That is monumental.

There Used to Be a Full National Championship Car Racing Circuit Inside Ascarate

At some point between the baseball fields and the paddle boats, Ascarate Park was home to a legitimate, nationally sanctioned sports car racing circuit. A two-mile road course that Road and Track magazine once described as one of the toughest in the country. The Sports Car Club of America held national championship races there, including a 1959 event that drew competitors from across the country, running at average speeds around 65 mph along the park's macadam roads and along the edge of the lake.

The races were sponsored by the El Paso 20-30 Club, a local car enthusiast group, and the course had real pit lanes, real competition, and the kind of racing drama you would not expect from a public park in the middle of El Paso.

Here's the part that makes this even better: the old circuit never went away. The road layout still exists today, quietly repurposed as the access roads winding through the park's fairgrounds, ball parks, and go-kart track. You have almost certainly driven on it without knowing. The next time you loop through Ascarate to find parking, congratulations. You are technically completing a lap of a former national championship race course. How does victory lane feel?

Steve Aoki Caked People Here and El Paso Keeps Inviting Him Back

From 2011 to 2017, Ascarate Park hosted the Sun City Music Festival, an annual electronic music event that brought some of the biggest names in the genre to El Paso. David Guetta, Tiesto, Martin Garrix, and yes, Steve Aoki all performed at the festival, which drew around 20,000 people in its very first year. It was once dubbed "The Southwest's Largest Eclectic Festival."

For the uninitiated, Steve Aoki is famous not just for his music but for his tradition of throwing sheet cakes directly into the faces of his front-row audience members. El Paso attended. El Paso got caked. El Paso loved it. And because this city has a specific kind of loyalty to the artists who show up for it, Aoki has continued to perform here even after the festival ended. Cake and all.

The Park Is Also Home to El Paso's Healing Garden

On a more solemn note, Ascarate Park holds something that matters deeply to this city. The El Paso County Healing Garden, located inside the park, is a peaceful space dedicated to the 23 victims of the August 3, 2019 shooting. It is a reminder that Ascarate has always been more than a place to fish or golf or race cars. It has always been a place that belongs to El Paso, in every sense of that word.

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Gallery Credit: Grizz

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