Flashback : Dallas

You don’t see this much anymore (click for larger image)

by Paula Bosse

I’m sure there were people in the past who thought that advertising painted directly onto buildings was as tacky as billboards are today, but I love it, and, sadly this type of sign-painting has become something of a lost art. Here we see men painting a sign for the successful apparel manufacturer Nardis Sportswear (later, Nardis of Dallas). The company’s corporate headquarters appears to have been on Browder street, with manufacturing factories on N. Austin and S. Poydras streets. The sign in the photo would seem to have been painted on the side of one of the factory buildings.

1948 city directory

1952 Mapsco

I think all these Nardis buildings are gone, so we don’t even get any faded ghost signs to remind us that Dallas was once a large-ish garment manufacturing center.

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Sources & Notes

Photo — dated 1948 on reverse, with stamp of the Hank Tenny Studio at 1420 Wood Street — found on eBay.

My previous post on the Nardis company — “Nardis of Dallas: The Fashion Connection Between ‘The Dick Van Dyke Show’ and the Kennedy Assassination” — can be found here.

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Copyright © 2015 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.