The Wide Open Spaces Northeast of Central and Lovers — 1957

by Paula Bosse

central_north-from-mockingbird_060657_squire-haskins_UTASquire Haskins, UTA Special Collections

by Paula Bosse

Here’s another great aerial photo by Squire Haskins, taken on June 6, 1957 — sixty years ago. The view is to the north, from a little south of Mockingbird. Mockingbird runs from left to right at the bottom of the photo; at the far right you can see the still much-missed Dr Pepper plant, which stood at the northwest corner of Mockingbird and Greenville Avenue. The only “tall” structure north of Mockingbird is the Meadows Building, at Greenville and Milton, just south of Lovers Lane. North and east of Lovers and Greenville is … pretty much nothing. The old Vickery community was north on Greenville, around what is now Park Lane. To the east? I don’t know … lots of open land and then … Garland? (See a huge image of this photo on the UTA website, here.)

If you need your bearings, here are a few of the landmarks (red, Mockingbird Lane; green, Greenville Ave.; yellow, Bekins Storage, orange, Dr Pepper plant; blue, Meadows Building):

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Let’s turn it around and look south, toward downtown, from just north of Lovers Lane, with the Meadows Building in the foreground. Greenville is at the left, Central Expressway at the right. This photo, also by Squire Haskins, was taken on June 20, 1956. (See it on the UTA website, here.)

central_south-from-lovers_062056_squire-haskins_UTA_meadows

If, like me, you’ve always wondered where the legendary Louanns nightclub was, it was just out of frame at the bottom left of the photo above — at the southeast corner of Lovers and Greenville, where Central Market sits these days. You can see it below, in a detail of another great Squire Haskins photo (click on the thumbnail of the photo on this page to see the full photo — Louanns is at the bottom left) — it was taken on Dec. 4, 1953 and shows the Meadows Building under construction. In this detail you can see a slightly blurry Louanns, with what looks like an unpaved Lovers Lane at the bottom and Greenville Avenue at the right. I’d always  heard that Louanns was way out in the sticks in its heyday in the ’40s and ’50s. And looking at the top photo, I can see how true that was — especially before the arrival of the Meadows Building, which was, I believe, the largest “suburban” office building in Dallas beyond the downtown Central Business District. And for those who went out “parking” along the isolated Lovers Lane back then, you can see how the street got its name.

louanns_squire-haskins_UTA_det

louanns-postcard

Here is a clipping from the 1957 Dallas city directory showing the businesses along East Mockingbird — between Airline, west of Central, and Greenville Avenue.

mockingbird_central-to-greenville_1957-directory
1957 Dallas directory

See the Greenville Avenue businesses from the same 1957 directory here (the directory is scanned in its entirety on the Portal to Texas website here).

Here’s a map showing what this same area looked like a few years earlier, in 1952, when Mustang Airport was still out there (between Lovers and Northwest Highway, and between about where Skillman would later extend to and Abrams). (On the map below, Central Expressway is red, Greenville Avenue is blue, East Mockingbird Lane is purple, and Lovers Lane is green.)

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1952 Mapsco

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Sources & Notes

Top two photos by Squire Haskins, from the Squire Haskins Photography, Inc. Collection, UTA Libraries, Special Collections. Additional information on the first one (ID No. 10002957), looking north, is here; additional info on the second one (ID No. 10000568), looking south, is here. (To see HUGE images of both photos, click the thumbnails on these linked pages.)

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Copyright © 2017 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.