Paving Matilda — 1971
by Paula Bosse
“Matilda gets a concrete face”… (click for larger image)
by Paula Bosse
A couple of days ago I wrote about the history of Matilda Street in regard to its role as a railway for the Sherman-Denison interurban and the Belmont streetcar line. I noted that I had childhood memories from the 1970s of Matilda being a dirt street — which seems hard to believe these days since it carries a fair amount of traffic and is generally a quicker drive than Greenville Avenue, one block west.
In response, one of the many Milazzo siblings (whom I remember not as individuals but as one large flock of children who regularly accompanied their parents to visit my father’s bookstore in the 1970s and ’80s) sent me some photos from a family album showing, yes, Matilda Street being paved! They lived in the 5700 block of Goodwin, and the photos were taken in 1971, from their yard, looking east across Matilda.
The streetcar tracks were abandoned in 1955 but were not removed — it took a full sixteen years for them to be paved over! Before that? Dirt street. If you look closely at the Google Street View capture from Oct. 2017, you can see the old rails peeking through.
Below are three photos from the Milazzo’s family album showing the Matilda “street improvements.” The construction vehicle seen in the first two photos is pretty weird-looking — like a cross between a locomotive and a tank. In fact, at first I thought the thing was actually running on the rails it was working to pave over, until I saw that what I had thought were train wheels look more like tank treads. Whatever it is, it doesn’t look like something you’d expect to see on a residential street in the 1970s. In the third photo, you can see part of Robert E. Lee Elementary School at the left. (All photos are larger when clicked.)
Thank you, Milazzo family!
***
Sources & Notes
Photos from the collection of the Milazzo family, used with permission. The third photo shows a date-stamp of April, 1971.
The related Flashback Dallas post “Ghost Rails of the Belmont Streetcar Line” is here.
All photos are larger when clicked.
*
Copyright © 2018 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
Flashback : Dallas 
[…] mounds were pretty memorable. (UPDATE: See photos of Matilda being paved at Goodwin in 1971 here.) I wish I’d known what an interurban was when I was a child. That would have made my […]
LikeLike
My grandfather was C.E.Dishman. He supposedly built some of the homes in the M streets. If anyone knows that their home was built by him, please forward any info or pics.
LikeLiked by 1 person
[…] I wrote about the old interurban and streetcar rails which once ran up and down Matilda in the Lower Greenville neighborhood I grew up in. I feel like I read about this rail line for days and days and days, and I enjoyed all of it. I wish I had known what the interurban was as a child so I could have appreciated how close I lived to an important historical thoroughfare. This post resulted in the arrival of photos sent in by a family friend, showing city crews working on the paving of Matilda; I loved those photos and put them in what I consider the “part 2” of the post linked above: “PAVING MATILDA — 1971.” […]
LikeLike
[…] but didn’t know what they had been used for — I wrote about those tracks here and here). The land had been part of the vast Caruth land […]
LikeLike