Dallas’ First Two Drive-In Theaters — 1941
by Paula Bosse
Northwest Hi-Way Drive-In, July 1941
by Paula Bosse
The drive-in theater arrived in Dallas on June 20, 1941, the night that “Give Us Wings,” starring the Dead End Kids, played as the first feature of the Northwest Hi-Way Drive-In, located at the northwest corner of Northwest Highway and Hillcrest. It stood on twelve-and-a-half acres and had a 450-car capacity. The drive-in was opened by W. G. Underwood and Claude Ezell, who had opened similar outdoor movie theaters in San Antonio and Houston.
The Hi-Way (which appears to have usually been spelled “Highway”) featured something I had never seen in drive-in design: cars parked on terraced ramps, where the car behind was always slightly higher than the one in front of it so as to offer an unobstructed view, and speakers were on stands embedded in cement and were placed between cars (no in-car speakers).
Rain was apparently not a problem in this brave new world of outdoor entertainment — if it rained the show would go on (even though the opening was delayed by a few days because of rainy weather) — but fog was a problem, and in case of such weather, movie-goers would be issued a “fog-check” to come back another (fog-free) night.
A newspaper article appeared a few days before the theater’s opening, explaining what a drive-in was and how it worked. Here is the last paragraph:
According to Mr. Underwood 80 per cent of the people who attend drive-in theaters are non-theatergoers. These include people with children and no one to leave them with, semi-invalids, cripples and corpulent individuals who find it embarrassing to attend the regulation theaters. At the Drive-In there is no necessity for getting out of the car, an attendant meets you at the gate, takes your money and buys your tickets, while another wipes your windshield. A third pilots the car to a space on one of the ramps. These are widely spaced enough that any car may leave at any time. (Dallas Morning News, “Northwest Highway Drive-In To Open Tuesday, Rain Or Stars,” by Fairfax Nisbet, June 14, 1941)
Okay then.
The the weather eventually behaved, and the opening on June 20, 1941 was a success, with an almost-capacity audience. The drive-in had arrived in Big D.
Two weeks later — on July 4, 1941 — Underwood and Ezell opened the Chalk Hill Drive-In in Oak Cliff, at about West Davis and Cockrell Hill Road. It looked almost exactly like the Northwest Highway drive-in, down to the great big star on the outside of it (to be replaced with a clown mural years later). The very first feature was “The Invisible Woman” with Virginia Bruce and John Barrymore.
1942, out on the Fort Worth pike (Library of Congress)
Both theaters had successful and relatively long lives. The Northwest Highway drive-in closed in 1963 when the land was purchased for development (the most notable occupant of the new businesses that occupied that corner was probably the fondly remembered Kip’s restaurant).
The Chalk Hill Drive-In closed in the late 1970s, and from what I can tell, it spent a couple of decades abandoned and decaying.
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A few random tidbits.
Here’s a 1945 aerial shot over SMU looking north — the drive-in is in the middle of all that wide-open Caruth farmland, seen just left of Hillcrest (the Hillcrest Mausoleum, built in 1936, can be seen to the right of Hillcrest; the Caruth Homestead is at the far right edge of the photo).
Here’s a detail, showing it up-close:
Two aerial shots by the United States Army Air Forces, taken for a USDA survey in 1945. First, the Northwest Highway Drive-In, with Northwest Highway running horizontally in the photo and Hillcrest running vertically.
SMU
This aerial photo from 1947 shows a view to the northwest, with Hillcrest running from lower left corner to top right — it appears the photo was taken to show the new apartment complex just north of the parking area of the drive-in.
Dallas Public Library
And Chalk Hill, with Highway 80 running horizontally:
SMU
Chalk Hill again, this photo from 1973, with the clown face and circus theme that many remember:
Photo by Steve Fitch, Smithsonian American Art Museum
A couple of amusing livestock-oriented drive-in-related human-interest blurbs appeared in the pages of The Dallas Morning News:
Some cattle going from Waco to Wisconsin stampeded through University Park when their truck caught fire on Greenville. Police herded most of the steers into a Northwest Highway drive-in theater. Five were found nuzzling zinnias at a home on Southwestern. (Lorrie Brooks, DMN, Sept. 18, 1952)
Cattle in 1952, donkeys in 1955:
University Park police early Wednesday captured two pet donkeys who escaped their pen at the Northwest Highway Drive-In Theater during the night. A startled passerby spotted the two donkeys grazing contentedly on a lawn at Centenary and Hillcrest, about four blocks from the theater…. Bill Duckett, manager of the theater, reported the loss of the two pets, which he keeps for the entertainment of the theater’s small-fry patrons. (DMN, May 26, 1955)
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Sources & Notes
I’m not sure of the source of the top photo, but I’m pretty sure of when it was taken: the marquee shows that the movie “Tall, Dark and Handsome,” starring Cesar Romero, was playing; that movie ran at the Northwest Hi-Way Drive-In July 12-14, 1941.
The aerial photo (by Capt. Lloyd N. Young) showing SMU and the land that lay north of it is from the Highland Park United Methodist Church Archives; I found it in Diane Galloway’s fantastic book The Park Cities, A Photohistory.
The two aerial photos are details of larger photographs from the collection of Dallas Aerial Photographs, 1945 USDA Survey, Edwin J. Foscue Map Library, Central University Libraries, Southern Methodist University. The full (labeled) Northwest Highway photo is here; the Chalk Hill photo is here.
Two other aerial photos (from 1958) are interesting because they are a bit closer and because you can see the terraced ramps — they can be seen here (apologies for the watermarks — photos from HistoricAerials.com).
The Wikipedia entry for the Drive-In Theater is here.
The patent (with illustrations) for the drive-in theater, filed by Richard M. Hollingshead, Jr. in 1932 is here (it’s a very interesting read). I had no idea a drive-in movie theater could be patented. This cool drawing is part of it (click it to see it larger):
A great history of drive-ins in the Dallas-Fort Worth area can be found in the article “Starlit Skies and Memories” by Susan and Don Sanders; it appeared in the Spring, 1999 issue of Legacies, and can be read here. Great photos! (Who knew there was a drive-in on South Lamar — the Starlite — which catered exclusively to the black community?)
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Copyright © 2015 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
Flashback : Dallas 
And the cost of seeing a movie in 1941 at one of the first two drive-ins in Dallas: 30¢ for adults and 10¢ for children. Which would be about $5 and $2 today.
Source: http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/25270/photos/84996
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Very interesting piece. I lived on Del Norte Lane, just behind the Northwest Highway Drive-in but by the early 60s it had gotten a bit shabby. In the summer we used to climb up and hang on the back side of the fence to see movies. Of course there was no sound and you could only do it until your hands got tired so it was of limited appeal, but still it seemed exciting to get even a glimpse of a “free” movie. One in particular I recall was Bergman’s “Virgin Spring” which was adult rated and for that reason alone, seemed so incredibly nasty to my 12 year old mind that I remember hanging on the fence until my fingers were numb awaiting the revelation of adult mysteries. All I recall were medieval Scandinavian horsemen. Disappointing.
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Ha! I’ve always thought it was weird that arthouse films like that would ever have been shown at a drive-in. It’s hard to imagine what Ingmar Bergman must have thought about the fact that his films were being shown to audiences of Americans sitting in their cars.
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Another super post, Paula! FYI, most drive-in theatres had ramped parking, usually paved, at least as the concept had developed by the time these theatres were built. Some rural locations (and both these could, in 1941, have qualified as rural) were not paved, but grassed. A very few I have seen were not ramped. These were usually very small, well under 200 car capacity.
In the early ’50s, when CinemaScope appeared, most theatres rushed to make the conversion to try to lure people away from their TVs. But not all did; I believe the NW Hwy. didn’t because I have a memory of being taken there sometime in 1962 or 1963 and seeing the credits of what was obviously a wide-screen movie lopped off at the sides so that you could not read the words. Also, it contained some dialogue scenes in which the actors must’ve been placed at extreme opposite ends of the picture because you could not see them, just the dialog. I remember my mother looking around at some of the other cars and remarking that it really didn’t matter what was on the screen because we were the only ones trying to watch the picture. We left early. I got a lot more mileage out of the Kips that replaced it than I ever got out of the NW Hwy!
I was never at the Chalk Hill, though I remember seeing it on occasions when I would accompany my dad, a dentist, on his charity rounds to the Catholic orphans’ home that was directly across Davis from the drive-in; by then, it had gotten its clown mural which made it look similar to the Buckner Blvd. Drive-In, which was our venue of choice then.
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Wow, Steve, thanks for all of this. I think that these first two drive-ins in Dallas must have been big news in the drive-in world, because they were so large, with a capacity of 450 cars. Also, in reading the news reports, they were nicely paved, had the latest in projection lens technology, and they were working with RCA on their speakers (which I read somewhere was quite an elaborate underground system).
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BTW, my dad was a school friend of Don Richter’s son in Corpus Christi when the family built the Texas (first drive-in in the state, 1939) on Leopard St., just down from my dad’s family’s house on Omaha Drive (just around the corner from the first permanent Whataburger). He remembered going to the Texas many times. It was constructed entirely of wood, and rotted away quickly in the South Texas humidity. The family tore it down and replaced it with the much more lavish, architect-designed Corpus Christi Drive-In, later renamed the Thunderbird, about a block away from the old Texas.
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both of these locations were gone by the mid 1960’s….The kips big boy was located at the tip of this intersection as Preston was down the road…..The Location was out in the country…..and there we a central Freeway by 1949….now the chalk hill was in back also as you drove to the front….and there was also the Cockrell hill drive in and the harry hines by what is the parkland and southwest today…car culture was in its 3rd decade at this point….again we are seeing how the Dallas culture on wheels came to exist…..
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Actually, Chalk Hill was still going into the ’70s.
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Some wonderful books and articles about the Drive-In Theatres and glad to see this post.
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Thank you, Jeanette.
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Great post. Thanks. A barely-related observation: The name of the reporter in the first article sounds like he’s a minor character from The Great Gatsby: “Fairfax Nisbet.”
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Thanks, Jim. I think Fairfax was a woman. The first time I came across that unlikely name was several years ago when I came across a scrapbook containing nothing but her DMN reviews and articles over the years. I’m not sure I could’ve come up with a better name had I tried!
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And the uncredited artist who did the bovines in the 1952 piece was Jack Patton, of Texas History Movies fame.
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It appears that the Chalk Hill Drive in on the Ft Worth Pike was actually more at the NW Intersection of Cockrell Hill Rd – the old photo shows it directly across from the entrance to the Catholic School
As to “adult” drive-ins there used to be one off of I-30 and Lawnview called the Lone Star. This was the late 70’s and early 80’s – it was kind of a right of passage for teenage boys to try to sneak in to see the “art-house” films, lol
When my mother passed away and was buried next door at Grovehill Cemetery, I joked at the grave side service that I could come visit her and see a movie for free – my family was NOT am mused !
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Over the years both the FW Pike and the Cockrell Hill Rd. addresses were used — so I included both. I’m not very familiar with that area, so I don’t know if some roadways changed course a bit or whether they changed names, but it seems as if Cockrell Hill Rd. was being used as the cross-street in ads around 1970,
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How I can view this story is that the Drive Inn did not even make it too landmarks status to survive…..while the images did for today, the many movies were very good at that time……it was an out door event…..there is one left today down in the Waco area today…..cant recall the intell for now…..I had to go and load the camera for Don and Susan’s book when they had the movie….
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[…] word on the results of the suit, but Paula Bosse at Flashback : Dallas has more on the theater’s history. (Apparently it was the first of it’s kind in our […]
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