Crossing Main Street

by Paula Bosse

Life in the Big City…

by Paula Bosse

Turn-of-the-century traffic: buggies, bicycles, wagons, and people.

I first came across the image below in — of all places — a 1931 SMU yearbook and backtracked to finding the “color” postcard, above. The very grainy image (below) may just have been a black and white photo of this postcard rather than the original photograph, but it’s interesting to see them together. The yearbook identifies this as being Main and Akard, looking west on Main; it also dates it about 1906, but I think it’s earlier than that — there probably would have been evidence of automobiles on Main Street by then. Whenever it was, it seems like a pleasantly nostalgic frozen-in-time moment.

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Postcard at top from the Watermelon Kid’s great site, here.

Weird, blurry black and white image from the 1931 Southern Methodist University Rotunda yearbook.

Click pictures for larger images.

3 Comments to “Crossing Main Street”

Not Bob says:

September 17, 2015 at 6:03 PM

I believe the building on the right is the Imperial Hotel which was the McLeod Hotel until 1904: https://goo.gl/87XVAW So 1906 may not be far off.

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- Paula Bosse says:
  
  September 17, 2015 at 9:05 PM
  
  I think you’re right, Not Bob (it’s “Robert,” right?). I’m really surprised by the lack of automobiles on the street — there were several in Dallas before 1904. After closer inspection, it looks like the big wheels behind the boys at the bottom left belong to an early automobile (I thought it was a buggy at first).
  
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  - Not Bob says:
    
    September 17, 2015 at 11:19 PM
    
    Robert is my name but online I usually use Not Bob because Robert is so common.
    
    I don’t see a horse in front of the vehicle on the bottom left. So it probably was an automobile with wagon type wheels like this 1904 Holsman: http://i.imgur.com/C2G3rIt.jpg According to this 1/1/1905 DMN article there were 80 automobiles in the city at the time: http://i.imgur.com/e5p4TEi.jpg With a population of about 70,000 I am guessing that most people still used a horse drawn carriage. Also you have two posts with downtown photos from 1905 that I don’t see any autos in. Here: https://flashbackdallas.com/2014/11/08/main-street-1905/ and here: https://flashbackdallas.com/2015/02/19/everyday-life-on-elm-street/
    
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