Education/Schools | Flashback : Dallas

March 20, 2014

Garrett Park Aburst in Spring Flowers

by Paula Bosse

Garrett Park (at Munger and Bryan) was established in 1915. The postcard above shows it filled with leafy trees and bursting with brightly colored flowers. There is playground equipment at the left and, in the background, St. Mary’s College. The park is still there — just south of Ross Ave., past the lowest bit of Lowest Greenville — but the George Kessler-designed charm is almost entirely gone. The trees are sparser, and those flower beds? Below, a modern-day aerial view (click pictures to see larger images). Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

Google Earth

But back to more luxuriantly landscaped times. Before it became a city park, the land was once part of the sprawling campus of St. Mary’s College, a prestigious boarding school that prepared girls for college, run by the Episcopal Church since the 1880s. The school was on the far, far, FAR eastern edge of Dallas, and in the early days, the isolated area was so dominated by the school that it was referred to by everyone as “College Hill.” Below, a photo of St. Mary’s taken around 1908 — the land which later became Garrett Park was behind the school. (Note the tower of the school below which is seen in the postcard above. Also, note the tower of the next-door St. Matthew’s Cathedral — it is still standing at the corner of Ross and Henderson.)

St. Mary’s College, circa 1908

In September, 1914, St. Mary’s sold the adjoining five-and-a-half-acre parcel of land to the City of Dallas for $30,000 for use as a park.

Dallas Morning News, Sept. 17, 1914

The park was officially named in honor of Bishop Alexander C. Garrett in February of 1915.

Below, a “before” photo showing “Garrett Park at Time of Purchase” (1914):

And descriptions of the new park from a 1914-1915 Park Board publication:

1915

***

Sources & Notes

Top postcard is from the wilds of the internet.

Source of circa-1908 photo of St. Mary’s College is unknown.

Text and “before” photo of Garrett Park is from the Report for the Year 1914-15 of the Park Board of the City of Dallas; a scanned copy is available at the Portal to Texas History, here.

Map of Kessler’s plan of the park is from Jay Firsching’s article in the Spring, 2003 issue of Legacies; the Garrett Park passage begins on p. 12, here.

To get an idea of the size of the St. Mary campus and Garrett Park in 1922, the Sanborn map from that year is here.

See the location of Garrett Park on a current Google map, here.

Click pictures for larger images.

(This post was updated with additional text and new images on March 23, 2018.)

March 18, 2014

George Dahl’s Sleek Downtown Library — 1955

1DPL_cover-sm

by Paula Bosse

This little 31-page booklet was issued to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the Dallas Public Library. The library was built on the site of the old (beautiful!) Carnegie Library and was vacated when the current library (the J. Erik Jonssen Central Library) opened on Young St. in 1982. Unbelievably, the building has remained empty for over 30 years.

This is the only downtown building I have very distinct memories of from childhood. My mother took us to the library often, and I LOVED that place. I loved the building, the space, the books, the adventure of being downtown — I loved everything but that creepy sculpture of the kid standing in the hands that hung on the outside of the building!

This great library was designed by the legendary (and prolific!) Dallas architect, George Dahl. He moved easily from the streamlined grandeur of the Art Deco buildings of Fair Park to the sleek mid-century-modern-cool of this wonderful downtown library.

I know there are fans of this sculpture (“Youth in the Hands of God” by Marshall Fredericks), but I’m afraid I am not one of them. I loved art as a child (in fact, I can remember checking out framed art reproductions from this very library), but, as I said, even as a kid, I strongly disliked that creepy sculpture. The kid was fine, it was those giant disembodied hands. When the library moved to its current location in 1982, this sculpture was left behind to languish for years inside the empty building. It was eventually sold, and the boy and the hands are now resting comfortably in retirement, somewhere in Michigan.

There was a huge controversy about the Harry Bertoia sculptural screen seen above, hanging over the circulation desk. (I LOVED this piece as a kid!) The mayor — R. L. Thornton — HATED it, and the brouhaha-loving newspapers launched themselves into the fray by running apoplectic editorials which, of course, only fanned the flames of outrage. After the “scandal” died down, the art was eventually given the okay to stay, but not before a lot of people made a lot of noise about how the city of Dallas had wasted the $8,500 it had spent on the commission. Unlike the discarded hands sculpture, the screen was moved to the new library, where it remains today.

This is how I remember the library. Lots of space, cool furniture, and flooded with light.

I LOVE this photo!

A detail of the front cover artwork, by Texas artist E. M. “Buck” Schiwetz. I love the driver in the cowboy hat (he must have been awfully small or that car must have been awfully big to accommodate that hat). The energetic frisson of downtown Dallas in the Mad Men era is dampened a bit by those damn hands on the building that seemed to follow you everywhere you went!

***

Sources & Notes

All images from the booklet Five Years Forward: The Dallas Public Library, 1955-1960, compiled and written by Lillian Moore Bradshaw and Marvin Stone. Drawings by E. M. (Buck) Schiwetz. Photographs by C. D. Bayne. (Dallas: Carl Hertzog for Friends of the Dallas Public Library, 1961). (Photos from the archives of the Dallas Public Library.)

More on the history and construction of the Old Dallas Central Library (as well as tidbits about the ridiculous controversy regarding the commissioned art) is here.

Even MORE on the artwork scandals (the hands, the hands, the HANDS!) as well as photos of the beautiful Carnegie Library that was razed to build the 1955 library can be found here.

And just because it’s weird, here’s a postcard showing an early, possibly even creepier depiction of the “hands” sculpture (if those are the “hands of God”…). I guess they wanted to get a postcard out before the sculpture was finished and installed.

I’ve posted one further image from this booklet — a drawing of the 1961 Dallas skyline by E. M. “Buck” Schiwetz — here.

UPDATE — Dec., 2017: The Dallas Morning News has moved its operations to the long-vacant library, insuring this wonderful building’s continued existence for many more years! More here.

Click pictures for larger images (some are MUCH larger — click twice!).

18 Comments

March 13, 2014

Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church: Germans on Swiss — ca. 1900

by Paula Bosse

The Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church was established in 1879 by German immigrants. In 1899 the congregation moved its church and school to the location seen in the photograph above, at 207 Swiss Avenue (street numbers have changed, but it was in the block between what is now Good-Latimer and Cantegral). The building remained in that location until at least 1921.

***

Photograph from the University of Texas at San Antonio, UTSA Libraries, Digital Collections.

For more on the history of the Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church in Dallas, see here.

March 7, 2014

Booker T. Washington Marching Band — 1937

by Paula Bosse

Marching band. Everyone’s favorite class in high school. Band director A. S. Jackson is at the right.

***

Sources & Notes

From the J. L. Patton Collection, Dallas Historical Society.

February 12, 2014

Start Your Brilliant Career at Dallas Telegraph College — c. 1900

by Paula Bosse

The Dallas Telegraph College opened in 1889 and admitted both men and women as students (if not from the beginning, certainly by the early years of the new century).

1889 ad (click to see larger image)

In the 1904 photo below, you’ll see one lone woman in the group.

1904

Below, the text of a 1908 ad — published in a San Antonio newspaper in hopes of drawing students to Dallas from around the state — rather optimistically promised hard-working students the possibility of earning an “enormous” salary and maybe even becoming the head of a railroad!

The Dallas Telegraph College is a school of more than state reputation. Prof. L. C. Robinson is president, with J. E. Hyle as superintendent. As is well known, telegraphy is not only one of the pleasantest of studies, but offers a brilliant career to the man who ‘makes good.’ A great many railroad presidents started as operators. The men who have made good now head railroad systems at enormous salaries. What one man has done, another may do. The Dallas Telegraph College has been a chartered institution for fifty [sic — this should be “twenty”] years. Why not send for one of their beautiful catalogues?

dallas_telegraph_college 1908 ad

1908, via DeGolyer Library, SMU

According to a 1912 article by Lewis N. Hale on Texas schools and colleges in Texas Magazine, the students learned to ply their trade by tapping (…as it were) into the actual railroad telegraph lines which, rather conveniently, ran right through their classrooms. A very murky photo from that Texas Magazine article is below.

dallas-telegraph-college_tx-mag_1912_photo

The goal of students was to secure employment in a nice, well-appointed office, such as Dallas’ Western Union headquarters, shown below in 1914.

via Dallas Public Library

Next stop: an enormous salary!

***

Sources & Notes

Top ad (“Learn Telegraphy”) from 1904. Second ad from 1889 (from the pages of the Dallas city directory). Third ad (with Guild Building address) from 1894.

Photo showing 1904 class from eBay.

1908 photo showing students standing in front of the building from the George W. Cook Dallas/Texas Image Collection, DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University; more info on this card is here.

Western Union office photograph — “[Western Union Telegraph Company interior main office – Trust building at 801 Main Street]” (1914) — is from the DPL Van Orden Western Union Telegraph collection of the Dallas Public Library Dallas History and Archives Division (Call Number PA2007-2/2).

An entertaining read on the history of telegraph service in Texas by Mike Cox can be found here.

The Handbook of Texas entry on telegraph service in Texas can be found here.

Absolutely EVERYTHING that you (and Ed McMahon) would ever want to know about the telegraph and telegraphy is here.

3 Comments

Category: Education/Schools

Sources & Notes

Share this:

Sources & Notes

Share this:

Share this:

Sources & Notes

Share this:

Sources & Notes

Share this: