Flashback : Dallas

Highland Park Cafeteria (and Delicatessen!)

by Paula Bosse

A quick post today! Above, the much-loved, much-missed Highland Park Cafeteria (3212 Knox), a proud member of the Knox Street Merchants’ Association, the latter of which has drawn up a not-terribly-helpful, pre-Central Expressway map, as seen below, with handy arrows pointing to town.

1932

From a couple of decades later, a matchbook graphic (with a more helpful map), reminding you that the HPC has been “serving particular people since 1925”:

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1939 (North Dallas High School yearbook)

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See other photos of this block in the Flashback Dallas post “Knox Street, Between Cole and Travis.”

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I’m just going to add these things here, because, so far, this is my only post on the HPC, and I might as well keep everything together.

I saw the 1956 ad below, and, even though the photo in the ad is pretty poor quality, it looked like there was a mural there. I’m always interested in murals — most of the time a photo like this is the only chance to see them because they are inevitably painted over or demolished. Anyway… was there a story behind the mural? What did it show?

Dec. 1956

Here it is larger, but the resolution is still low, and the hanging light fixtures directly in front of the mural don’t help:

I found only one mention of a mural at the Highland Park Cafeteria — in this 1950 ad, which mentions “the Williamsburg mural,” as if it were a well-known feature of the restaurant:

April 1950

Then I asked about it on the Flashback Dallas Facebook page — and that led to this muddy screenshot glimpse of the mural from unknown news footage from 1953. Yep, Colonial Williamsburg, above a long planter. I’m not sure why that was immortalized on a wall of the Highland Park Cafeteria, but if anyone was wondering about any sort of HPC mural, these few paragraphs are for you!

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Sources & Notes

Photo from Pinterest.

Knox Street Merchants’ Association ad from the 1932 SMU Rotunda. (That whole area has gotten cramped and is certainly more claustrophobic than when I was a kid, but I’m sure the present-day business owners would probably still echo the 1932 sentiment “Knox Street Business District has them coming from blocks … to shop on Knox.”) (Also, it isn’t often that I see ads mentioning Greenland Hills, the general M Steets area, adjacent to the neighborhood I grew up in.)

Matchbook (detail) from the George W. Cook Dallas/Texas Image Collection, DeGolyer Library, SMU Libraries — the full image and more information can be found here.

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