Architecture/Significant Bldgs. | Flashback : Dallas

April 25, 2014

The Republic National Bank Building: Miles of Aluminum, Gold Leaf, and a Rocket

republic-national-bank_beacon_front

by Paula Bosse

THIS is another great idealized image of a great building, The Republic National Bank Building, built in 1954. The blurb on the back of this postcard reads:

40 stories, cost 25 million dollars, the world’s tallest building faced in aluminum and glass.The mighty half-billion candle-power beacon atop the 150-foot spire is visible up to 120 miles.

This building was built to be the tallest building in Dallas — to dwarf the rival Mercantile (by a whole 53 feet!). Which it did for a while — it boasted of being the tallest building west of the Mississippi. Until … the Southland Life building came along a few short years later and knocked it off its pedestal (although, dammit, it was the “WORLD’S TALLEST BUILDING FACED IN ALUMINUM AND GLASS”!). For years, the powers-that-be seemed overly concerned with the “tallest” building thing and engaged in architectural pissing contests for years.

But forget the exterior. INSIDE. Lordy. Legendary bank president Fred Florence went all out, with Life magazine saying the lavish interior reflected Florence’s belief that a bank’s design and appointments should be “an outward showing of solvency.” This included generous helpings of gold leaf, inlaid teak, and endless marble imported from Italy and Peru (“nearly as long as a football field”). One wonders if Florence muttered something about “Rosebud” on his deathbed. Of its forty-one teller’s cages, two were — for some reason — reserved exclusively for women. There was a full-time gardener on staff. And, of course, there were “gold curtains in the executive washrooms.” There was “all-season air-conditioning.” There was a motor bank in the basement. And, if they couldn’t have the tallest building in town, they were damn sure going to have the fastest elevators in the elevator-using world. And they did.

And then there was that rocket. I love that rocket. Sixty years later, it’s still one of the most recognizable buildings on the skyline.

The missed-by-my-mother’s-generation Pulley Bone diner is in the foreground (click for larger image).

***

An absolutely fantastic collection of photographs apparently shot by Life magazine to accompany the article from their Feb. 28, 1955 article (linked below) but not used (and, seriously, check them out) are on an unassuming message board. Scroll down a little ways and you’ll see 13 large images of the interior and exterior — see them here. (UPDATE: These photos seem to have disappeared. I’ll keep the link in hopes that user “Dallas boi” will repost!)

Scroll through the 4-page spread “Dazzler for Dallas: Its New Bank is Huge, Handsome and Full of Gold” in Life magazine (Feb. 28, 1955) here.

And here are a couple of readers’ responses to the story, which appeared in a later issue (Mrs. Ward Derhammer is not amused):

republic-national-bank_life_032155

Republic National Bank Building info from the Republic Center website can be found here, from Wikipedia here, and from the Dallas Public Library here.

All postcard images (except the first one) are larger when clicked.

10 Comments

April 24, 2014

One of the Earliest Homes Belonging to Original La Reunion Settlers Is Razed — 1925

Bryan & Harwood

by Paula Bosse

ONE OF EARLIEST DALLAS HOMES WILL BE RAZED TO MAKE WAY FOR NEW HOME OF KNIGHTS OF PYTHIAS
(Dallas Morning News, March 5, 1925)

An ancient Dallas landmark that obviously is entitled to the name, a modest little plaster cottage that serves as the sole surviving relic of the old French colony that figured in the early history of Dallas, is to be torn away in a few weeks to make room for a new home of the Knights of Pythias. The house now is numbered 2012 on Bryan street, near the corner of Harwood, but when it was built in 1874 by A. Frichot there was no need of street numbers to distinguish it from its neighbors. “About a mile and a half east of the courthouse” was the official designation of the house in those post-bellum days.

John Priot on May 4, 1874, sold the lot for $200 to A. Frichot and described it in the deed as beginning at “the west corner of a piece of land sold on Dec. 8, 1860, by P. P. Frichot to Mrs. Barbar[a] Frick, being a part of the original John Grigsby League.” This deed was recorded by A. Harwood, then County Clerk. There is a legend that the two Frichot brothers built homes near each other of the same type, one of which was torn down years ago to make room for a brick building on the southwest corner of Harwood and Bryan streets. The other is the modest dwelling that is to be razed to make room for the new Pythian building.

In 1876, after the house was built, A. Frichot deeded it to Mary L Frichot, his daughter, in consideration of the sum of $1,000, the records show. The next change made in the ownership of the place, according to the records, was in 1908 when deeds were signed conveying the property from “Mary L. J. Prine and J. A. Prine” to Colonel John M. McCoy for the sum of $4,600.

The Knights of Pythias bought the property from the estate of Colonel McCoy recently. This deal was made for the estate by Judge Wendel Spence, executor for the McCoy estate. For the last seventeen years the house has been occupied by Mrs. Pearl Miller as a residence.

A week or two ago a Dallas woman approached the agent of the Knights of Pythias with an offer to lease the place and transform it into an antique tea room. The offer was refused, as the building must come down shortly to make way for the new structure.

THE STORY OF OLD FRENCHTOWN (excerpt)
(Dallas Morning News, Nov. 23, 1919)

Jean Priot was a tailor. He was born in Nevers, Oct. 26, 1832, came to La Reunion in 1855, died in Dallas in 1908. He came to New Orleans with a tailor who held out false inducements, and from New Orleans joined this colony. M. Priot married Leontine Frichot, who came with her father, Philip Pierre Frichot, and his brother, Christophe Desire Frichot. From this union were born three daughters – now Mesdames, Beilharz and Petermann.

Philip Frichot was a contractor, and, upon disintegration of the colony, established a brickyard, from which he, with his son Achilles and M. Emil Remond built all the brick houses and concrete structures of that day in Dallas.

***

Sources & Notes

As cited in the articles above, the Frichot family was one of the original settlers of the French La Reunion utopian colony of Dallas in 1855, and the land — and later the house — stayed in the family from before 1860 until 1908, when the property was sold to John M. McCoy (who was, perhaps, appropriately, the son of one of the very first settlers of Dallas who arrived in the 1840s). Info about La Reunion is here and here.

The Knights of Pythias building referenced above is not to be confused with the substantially more “famous” one — the then-already standing and now-historic structure in Deep Ellum at 2551 Elm Street — less than a half a mile away. The building going in at Bryan and Harwood was, for want of more delicate language, the “white” one, and the one on Elm Street was the “black” one. Both were fraternal organizations dedicated to philanthropy and civic involvement, but apparently “fraternity” went only so far as race was concerned.

More Flashback Dallas posts on La Reunion can be found here.

Click photo for larger image.

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April 20, 2014

The Lighthouse Church That Warned of Sin’s Penalty with a Beam of Blue Mercury Vapor Shot Into the Skies Above Oak Cliff — 1941

Still standing in Oak Cliff… (click for larger image)

by Paula Bosse

Sometimes an image just grips you. That’s what happened when I saw this postcard featuring The Gospel Lighthouse Church. The building was so odd-looking and cool. Who designed it? Where had it been? And what was that thing on top of it? I did a bit of research on the church and found out that it was organized in Dallas in 1940 by Pentecostal preacher J.C. Hibbard and his wife Nell, who was also a preacher. The two had been preaching at the Oak Cliff Assembly of God Church until J.C.’s divorce from his first wife (and subsequent second marriage to Nell) became such a point of controversy that the two felt compelled to leave (or were asked to leave) the Assemblies of God, and they formed their own church.

And that was the Gospel Lighthouse Church, located in the 1900 block of S. Ewing (at Georgia) in Oak Cliff. While their first church was being built, they held services in a large circus tent in the parking lot. The congregation helped with the physical labor of the construction, and progress on the building continued non-stop, 24 hours a day. In January of 1941, the church was completed, and an article appeared in The Dallas Morning News soon after with the grabber of a headline, “Lighthouse Church Warns Oak Cliff of Sin’s Penalty.” Sadly, the article has no byline, which is a shame, because I’d love to know who wrote the piece, because he or she pulled out all the purple-prose stops. The introduction is fantastically over-the-top:

A towering forty-foot lighthouse 300 miles from the sea was blinking out its warning signals across the dry land of South Ewing Sunday. At the front of a neat new white stone church house at 1914 South Ewing, near Louisiana, the white stone lighthouse reared far above the other buildings. Eventually, its big circular light tower will shoot a bluish mercury-vapor beam through the night to guide shaken mariners adrift on the sea of sin. Its semi-fog horns will broadcast a soft carillon of sacred music. This is the Gospel Lighthouse, built by a preacher with a new idea of church architecture and a dream of a denomination all his own. (DMN, Feb. 10, 1949)

gospel-lighthouse_first

Wow. A “bluish mercury-vapor beam” shooting through the Oak Cliff skies! (The full article is linked below.)

By 1948, J.C. Hibbard had become so popular (largely as a result of his daily radio sermons) that ground was broken on a larger church, designed by J.C. himself. It was right next to the first church. And it was pretty elaborate.

gospel_lighthouse_bw

Yeah, the lighthouse part of it looks a little cheesy, but with a name like “Gospel Lighthouse Church” you kind of have to have it.

The auditorium and its mezzanine.

The nursery, with elaborate murals.

The lounge. Like the first church, this one had a nursery with a lounge — a “crying room” for mothers to tend to crying children without having to miss a single moment of the service. The crying was contained behind sound-proof glass while the sermon was piped in through speakers. The church had a lot of other amenities, but these were the only ones I’ve found deemed worthy enough to put on postcards.

I wondered if the church still stood, so I drove over to Oak Cliff yesterday and, amazingly, both churches are still there, and they are beautiful! (The original caretaker’s house is still there, too.) I’m not sure what religious group has possession of the buildings at the moment, but they are to be commended for maintaining the structures and the grounds — the 1900 block of S. Ewing really stands out from its fairly ragged surrounding neighborhood. Below are photos I took on April 19, 2014. (Click pictures for larger images.)

Above, the first church — “a modern concrete and steel building, overlaid with white Austin stone” — which was built with help from the congregation in 1941. The beam of “bluish mercury-vapor” emanated (somehow) from the squat lighthouse above the foyer.

And, below, the later church, next door. I think the “mercury-vapor” was replaced by neon. But I could be wrong. Does either beacon light up anymore?

Aside from the “lighthouse,” the most distinctive feature of this building is those rounded walls. So beautiful!

The building is actually pretty impressive to see up close. Next time you’re in the neighborhood, check it out!

***

Sources & Notes

Postcards from the Boston Public Library Tichnor Brothers Postcard Collection on Flickr, here.

Period black-and-white photos are from a page detailing the history of the Gospel Lighthouse Church, here. A biography of Rev. Hibbard from the same site can be found here.

Wander around the block on Google Street View, here.

Stumbled across this ad in the 1957 Dallas directory:

And I found this ad in, of all places, the 1967 Carter High School yearbook:

I also found this rather hair-raising ad for a 1967 Christmas-season production — an ad which somehow contains no exclamation marks:

Dec. 8, 1967

47 Comments

April 17, 2014

George Dahl’s Titche-Goettinger Building

by Paula Bosse

Such a beautiful building! Such a beautiful font!

George Dahl designed the original building (on the left) in the late-1920s, and Thomas, Jameson & Merrill designed the expansion (on the right) in the early ’50s.

Ad from the 1929 yearbook of Sunset High School

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Read about the building here.

Everything you could want to know about Titche-Goettinger/Titche’s is here.

UNT owns the building at 1900 Elm now, and it’s installed windows in that cool solid wall where the store’s name used to be. Check out photos of key renovations and read why they were made here.

More on the Titche’s building (including news on its expansion in 1952 and an architect’s drawing) can be found in the Flashback Dallas post “Main Street — ca. 1942,” here. See the expanded building here.

Click for larger image!

4 Comments

April 15, 2014

The Hyperbolic Paraboloids of the Prairie

The future is NOW! (click for larger image)

by Paula Bosse

In amongst things the things I’ve haphazardly collected (and I use the term loosely) over the years is this postcard. The image looks familiar to me, as if I remember actually seeing it — but I think that might just be because I’ve looked at this postcard so long. The first thing that popped into my head when I saw it was “turnpike,” but until I read up on the history of local highways (my days are fun-filled!), I wasn’t entirely sure where the turnpike had been other than “the other side of downtown, toward Fort Worth.” Did I ever see this sign and attendant weird looming structures when I was a child? Unless it was still up in the ’70s, I probably didn’t. So what is it?

Here’s the text from the back:

Concrete wings
THREE HYPERBOLIC PARABOLOIDS
GREAT SOUTHWEST INDUSTRIAL DISTRICT
Midway between Dallas and Fort Worth
“Located on U.S. 80, these hyperbolic paraboloids stand as insignia of the vast Great Southwest Industrial District in the center of the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area. This thin shell ‘concrete umbrella’ construction form was pioneered in the Untied States by Great Southwest Corporation, developer of a 5500-acre planned industrial district.”

It was somewhere around Arlington and Grand Prairie, back when it was still a vast, undeveloped area being planned in the mid-1950s by Angus Wynne who would, a few years later, bring us Six Flags Over Texas. (US Hwy 80 no longer runs west of Dallas — that stretch is now, I think, Hwy 180 — it was shoved off its Great American Interstate Highway pedestal by the DFW Turnpike and the arrival of what is now Interstate 30.)

1961 (Texas Highways photo by Willis Albarado)

But … “hyperbolic paraboloids”? Those things are so cool. The “hyperbolic paraboloid” was developed by Mexico-based Spanish engineer-architect Felix Candela who worked in the Dallas area with the great architect O’Neil Ford (on, specifically, the Great Southwest Industrial District and the Texas Instruments Semiconductor Building). Candela is pretty interesting — look him up. Without Candela’s paraboloids and his contributions to engineering and architecture, Santiago Calatrava probably wouldn’t be doing the sort of thing that he’s doing.

Here’s another view of (other) paraboloids out on the Texas prairie. They’re like elegant, curved, inverted parasols. Kind of. Made from thin shells of concrete. (One source identified these paraboloids as being part of the Great Southwestern Industrial District and another source as being from the Texas Instruments campus. (See 1958 TI ad below.) Either way, it’s Felix Candela, all the way.)

paraboloid_texas-instruments

I’m still trying to figure out if I ever saw that fantastic sign and those three silent, looming paraboloids. It’s all pretty cool-looking, and it must have been an unexpected sight in the middle of what was, then, basically nothing.

Speaking of Candela and Calatrava, here’s a photo of the two together:

calatrava-candela

And here’s another paraboloid-y structure that stands out in the DFW area — you might have seen it:

***

Sources & Notes

Photo of Calatrava and Candela from the blog An Engineer’s Aspect, here.

Photo of the Calatrava bridge from Pinterest, here.

A good overview of Felix Candela’s work, with photos and a video, is on the Columbia University website, here.

The Great Southwest Industrial District (Arlington and Grand Prairie) still exists, and their website has a history page which explains its creation and development by Angus Wynne, here.

Lastly, who could resist reading up on just what the heck a “hyperbolic paraboloid” is (warning: math) — Wikipedia’s on it, here.

A 1958 Texas Instruments ad wants you to know that “hyperbolic paraboloids form roof-ceiling” (click to see larger image):

1958

UPDATE: Thanks to comments below, I’m happy to present another photo of the paraboloids, this one from the cover of the 1960 Arlington High School yearbook, complete with Shetland pony! Click the image below to see a larger image of the photo inset. (Thanks to Brad McCorkle for alerting me to the photo — it was taken by his father, Lynn McCorkle, intrepid student photographer!)

ANOTHER UPDATE, from the comments: this still-standing building at 10830 Preston Road (Preston Royal Shopping Center) was one of many that utilized hyperbolic paraboloids in its design. The American Savings Association building (designed by Brock & Mabrey of Corpus Christi, with Braden & Jones of Dallas as associated architects) opened in March, 1966.

15 Comments

April 4, 2014

The Sexton Foods Building and the Former Life of the School Book Depository

Look familiar? (click for larger images)

by Paula Bosse

Look familiar? The building above would later become the Texas School Book Depository. But prior to that, the building housed Sexton Foods, a Chicago-based wholesale grocer which occupied the building for twenty years (1941-1961). The building was known commonly in town as “the Sexton building,” even after it was leased to the Texas School Book Depository in 1963, which explains why some people — citizens and police officers alike — were still referring to it by that name on the day of the Kennedy assassination (and this has apparently caused confusion amongst those wading deep into the “assassination literature”). The photo above is cropped from an ad I came across in The Dude Wrangler, a dude ranch quarterly (!), published in Bandera. The ad (which is reproduced in full down the page a bit) is from 1953, but the photo of the building appears to have been taken earlier.

The leasing of the building by D. Harold Byrd to the John Sexton Wholesale Grocery Company of Chicago (initially for only five years) was announced in The Dallas Morning News on Nov. 28, 1940 (“Wholesale Grocery Leases Building at Houston and Elm”). The Sexton Co. was scheduled to move in on Dec. 8 “following a general remodeling which will include installation of elevators, rearranging of partitions and painting.” They remained in the building until 1961.

sexton_1951 1951

sexton_foods_dallas_1953 1953

In 1953 (before anyone from Hertz was planning on putting a billboard up there), the Ford people erected a giant neon sign on top of the building to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Ford Motor Company. In fact, it was so big that it had half a mile of neon tubing in it and was touted as being the largest animated neon sign in the Southwest. Now there’s a sign that probably caused a few car accidents!

sexton-bldg_ford-sign_1953
1953

Before the Sexton company moved in, the building housed the Perfection-Aire air-conditioning company. Newspaper articles announced the renovation of the building for the A/C people — the company went into receivership a couple of years later.

perfection-aire_dmn_031437 1937

Before that, it was the site of the Southern Rock Island Plow Co., which was the original owner of the property (1894) and which built the building in 1903 after the first building was destroyed in a fire after it was hit by lightning on May 4, 1901.

rock-island-plow_DMN-c1910 circa 1910

Above, the Southern Rock Island Plow Co. Building which still stands, famous as the “Texas School Book Depository”; below, the building originally built by the plow company which was destroyed by fire in May, 1901.

1901, Dallas city directory

***

Sources & Notes

Sexton Co. ad from a 1953 issue of The Dude Wrangler ; the top image is a detail from that ad.

More on the history of the building as it pertains to the Rock Island Plow Co. is here.

March 31, 2014

Lincoln High School — 1939

The cool deco design of Lincoln High School… (click for larger image)

by Paula Bosse

When it opened on eleven acres in South Dallas in January, 1939, Lincoln High School was one of the largest high schools in Dallas, and one of the largest African-American high schools in the entire South. Shockingly, in 1939 it was one of only TWO (!) high school for black students in Dallas. As one would expect, its opening was greeted with great enthusiasm, and students rushed to enroll, pushing its capacity to a maximum. At its height, it had over 3,000 students. The building was designed by architect Walter C. Sharp, who designed many schools in and around Dallas, and with those clean lines and glass bricks, it’s pretty cool.

***

Photo from the J. L. Patton Collection, Dallas Historical Society.

For more on the background of Lincoln High School, see the info from the “Open Plaques” project here.

Click photo for larger image.

1 Comment

March 30, 2014

The Pasadena Perfect Home — 1925

by Paula Bosse

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the “Blandings Dream House” promotion in which the marketing department of the studio behind the Cary Grant movie “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House” built several houses around the country. The houses were built and furnished locally, with the contractors sharing in the (massive) advertising blitz. Once the home was completed, people toured the house, with a small admission going to charity. One of those houses was built in Dallas (in Preston Hollow). That was in 1948. Twenty-three years BEFORE that, the Dallas Times Herald sponsored something called “The Pasadena Perfect Home,” built and marketed in a similar manner.

In the early 1920s, land in the general area we now know as Lakewood was pretty much undeveloped. There was a lot of open space — some farmland, the occasional cotton patch. White Rock Lake was becoming a popular recreational destination, but it was still WAAAAY out beyond the center of Dallas. But by the mid-’20s, developers started developing. A few of the neighborhoods that sprang to life at this time were Lakewood, Hollywood Heights, and Santa Monica. In 1925 — in the part of town then being referred to as “New East Dallas” — a 40-acre parcel of land near the Hollywood/Santa Monica subdivisions began to be planned. The small tract of 130 lots was to be known as Pasadena, located just north of Gaston, comprised of Pasadena, Wildgrove, and Shook avenues, bordered by Auburn Ave. and White Rock Rd.

The developer came up with the brilliant idea of marketing his investment by building two “perfect homes” and, while they were under construction, to promote the bejabbers out of them in the pages of the Dallas Times Herald, the project’s sponsor (and namesake). Just like the Blandings builders did a couple of decades later, local construction crews, plumbers, electricians, stone masons, etc. were contracted to build the “Dallas Times Herald Pasadena Perfect Homes” in exchange for their businesses appearing in a veritable onslaught of advertising-slash-publicity (which soon became publicity-slash-advertising). Each step of progress in the months-long construction of the houses was breathlessly reported in the Times Herald in regular reports, and looky-loos (i.e. potential buyers) were heartily encouraged to drive out to watch the goings-on. Make a day of it! This pleasant hard-sell to “own a bit of paradise in the heart of New East Dallas” was covered more as a community event than as the clever marketing gimmick it was.

When the two homes were completed, there was an official opening on February 21, 1926. This boggles the mind, but apparently 20,000 people (TWENTY-THOUSAND PEOPLE!) showed up for this event. All that promotion worked. Lots in the little neighborhood sold quickly.

The original “perfect home” pictured above is still there, on Wildgrove. In fact, the house, designed by architect Arthur E. Thomas, was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2006 (listed as “The Dallas Times Herald Pasadena Perfect Home”). It’s well worth a nice Sunday drive to check out this home and the other homes in this lovely historic area. The Pasadena neighborhood remains unsullied by the McMansion-ization that has destroyed the charm of much of Dallas’ older neighborhoods, and driving down Pasadena’s tree-lined streets is an absolute joy.

Above, the house from a 2011 Google maps photo.

A photo I took at the end of February, 2014, Instagramized.

***

Sources & Notes

For more on the Dallas Times Herald Perfect Home(s) (and a couple of other photos, on pages 2 and 38), see the article by Sam Childers in the Fall, 2002 issue of Legacies, here. There is also some info here.

A little more info on this home (building materials, etc.) is here.

The architect of this house is Arthur E. Thomas, and he designed some pretty impressive buildings in Dallas, such as the Dr Pepper headquarters and Baylor Hospital, and, most impressively, he was one of the Centennial Architects who worked on the Centennial buildings in Fair Park in 1936. But I have found very little about him online. A brief bio is here. The following list of his projects is from a 1956 AIA directory.

Click pictures for larger images.

6 Comments

March 22, 2014

Nicholas J. Clayton’s Neo-Gothic Ursuline Academy

by Paula Bosse

Over the years, Dallas has been the site of dozens and dozens of beautiful educational campuses, almost none of which still stand — such as the long-gone Victorian-era Ursuline Academy, at St. Joseph and Live Oak streets (near the current site of the Dallas Theological Seminary). The buildings, which began construction in 1882, were designed by the Catholic church’s favorite architect in Texas, Nicholas J. Clayton of Galveston. Such a beautiful building in Dallas? It must be demolished!

Six Ursuline Sisters, sent to Dallas from Galveston, established their academy in 1874 in this poorly insulated four-room building (which remained on the Ursuline grounds until its demolition in 1949). When they opened the school, under tremendous hardship, they had only seven students. But the school grew in size and reputation, and they were an academic fixture in East Dallas for 76 years. In 1950 the Sisters moved to their sprawling North Dallas location in Preston Hollow where it continues to be one of the state’s top girls’ prep schools. After 140 years of educating young women, Ursuline Academy is the oldest continuously operating school in the city of Dallas.

Construction took a long time. (ca. 1894)

When Latin cost extra. (1894) (Click for larger image.)

It even had a white picket fence. (ca. 1906)

1908-ish

1909 city directory

1912 (click for large image)

After a year and a half on the market, the land was sold in 1949 for approximately $500,000 to Beard & Stone Electric Company (a company that sold and serviced automotive electric equipment). The property was bounded by Live Oak, Haskell, Bryan, and St. Joseph — acreage that would certainly go for a lot more these days (according to the handy Inflation Calculator, half a million dollars in 1949 would be the equivalent in today’s money of about five million dollars). A small cemetery was on the grounds, in which the academy’s first chaplain and “more than 40 members of the Ursuline order” had been buried. I’m not sure how these things are done, but the cemetery was moved.

From a November, 1949 Dallas Morning News article on the vacated buildings’ demolition:

A workman applied a crowbar to a high window casing of the old convent and remarked: “I sure hate to wreck this one. It’s like disposing of an old friend. My father was just a kid when this building was built in 1883.” (DMN, Nov. 13, 1949)

And one of East Dallas’ oldest and most spectacular landmarks was gone forever. Looking at these photographs, it’s hard to believe it ever existed at all.

Where was it? In Old East Dallas, bounded by Live Oak, Haskell, Bryan, and St. Joseph. See the scale of the property in the 1922 Sanborn map, here (once there, click for full-size map). Want to know what the same view as above looks like today? If you must, click here.

Bing Maps

***

Sources & Notes

Photo of the school’s first building is from the Ursuline Academy of Dallas website here. A short description of the early days of hardship faced by the Sisters upon their arrival in Dallas is here.

The photograph, mid-construction, is by Clifton Church, from his book Dallas, Texas Through a Camera (Dallas, 1894).

1894 ad is from The Souvenir Guide of Dallas (Dallas, 1894).

1912 text is from an article by Lewis N. Hale on Texas schools which appeared in Texas Magazine (Houston, 1912).

Aerial photograph from the George W. Cook Dallas/Texas Image Collection, DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University, here. Bottom image also from the Cook Collection, here.

Examples of buildings designed by Nicholas J. Clayton can be seen here (be still my heart!).

DMN quote from the article “Crews Begin Wrecking Old Ursuline Academy” by William H. Smith (DMN, Nov. 13, 1949).

Another great photo of the building is in another Flashback Dallas post — “On the Grounds of the Ursuline Academy and Convent” — here.

Many of the images are larger when clicked.

6 Comments

March 19, 2014

Sheraton Dallas, Original Version — 1959

Sheraton Hotel front

sheraton_hotel_back

by Paula Bosse

I love this somewhat fauvist depiction of Dallas in 1959 — it’s exactly what I wish the city actually looked like, yellow sky and all. All those clean, sharp lines and wide-open sidewalks! The foreshortening is completely out of whack here, with enormous cars and ant-size people — perhaps it’s a metaphor for the dismissive Texan view on pedestrian transport. (What are the two flags to right of the Texas flag?)

***

My knowledge of certain aspects of Dallas can be surprisingly spotty sometimes. I’ve seen the Sheraton building all my life, but I knew nothing of its history, or its connection to the Southland Life company (both were part of a complex of buildings, which, during construction, was being compared to Rockefeller Center). The inevitable Wikipedia page is here.

What the heck — here’s another angle: the mighty Southland Life building taking center stage this time, with the Sheraton standing in the wings, spear in hand, waiting to go back on.

southland-life_night

3 Comments

Category: Architecture/Significant Bldgs.

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