Neighborhoods | Flashback : Dallas

The SMU “Drag” — 1965

Hillcrest, looking south, just north of McFarlin (click for larger image)

by Paula Bosse

Hillcrest, north of Mockingbird, up to Snider Plaza, and maybe all the way up to Lovers Lane. The Drag. Might as well be an unofficial SMU annex. Over the past several decades, some students may have spent more time in the businesses across the street from the western edge of the campus than they did in some of their classes. The look of the area has changed quite a bit recently, but views from the 1965 SMU yearbook are not drastically different from what it looked like up until just a few years ago — and in some stretches, some of the same buildings seen in these photos still stand. Unless something has gone terribly wrong, businesses along the SMU drag that cater primarily to an ever-replenishing SMU student body should never have a lack of customers.

The yearbook caption for the photo above: “Give me your tired, your poor … just give me your money.” (See this view from recent months, with traffic cones, here.)

Below, a few more photos from the 1965 Rotunda tribute to The Drag.

drag_smu-rotunda_1965 *

Looking north.

At Binkley, current site of Hotel Lumen.

Smoking welcomed. Preppy look, circa 1965.

drag2_smu-rotunda_1965

***

All photos from the 1965 Southern Methodist University Rotunda yearbook.

To take a look at a map of the SMU campus from 1964, click here (DeGolyer Library collection, Southern Methodist University).

Click pictures for larger images.

12 Comments

September 17, 2015

Crossing Main Street

Life in the Big City…

by Paula Bosse

Turn-of-the-century traffic: buggies, bicycles, wagons, and people.

I first came across the image below in — of all places — a 1931 SMU yearbook and backtracked to finding the “color” postcard, above. The very grainy image (below) may just have been a black and white photo of this postcard rather than the original photograph, but it’s interesting to see them together. The yearbook identifies this as being Main and Akard, looking west on Main; it also dates it about 1906, but I think it’s earlier than that — there probably would have been evidence of automobiles on Main Street by then. Whenever it was, it seems like a pleasantly nostalgic frozen-in-time moment.

***

Postcard at top from the Watermelon Kid’s great site, here.

Weird, blurry black and white image from the 1931 Southern Methodist University Rotunda yearbook.

Click pictures for larger images.

3 Comments

September 15, 2015

Dealey Plaza, From Above — 1960s

Photo by David Lifton (Baylor University)

by Paula Bosse

Photo showing a mid-to-late-’60s Dealey Plaza and downtown Dallas, with the block just east of the Old Red Courthouse cleared for the eventual construction of the John F. Kennedy Memorial.

And today

Google Earth

***

Photo is by David Lifton, from the collection of Penn Jones, W. R. Poage Legislative Library, Baylor University, Waco, TX; it is accessible here. Lifton is an assassinationologist best known for his 1981 book Best Evidence: Disguise and Deception in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Click pictures for larger images.

2 Comments

September 11, 2015

Brown Cracker Co. Cracker Wrappers

The saltine-wrapping room

by Paula Bosse

I will stop and look at great length at any photograph containing a conveyor belt. The conveyor belt in this photo belonged to the Brown Cracker and Candy Company, a large and important Dallas manufacturer and employer. The cracker, cake, and candy factory opened in 1903 in a brand new building in the industrial area just south of McKinney Avenue (the part of town that borders downtown, now known as the West End). Best known these days as the West End Marketplace building, the structure still stands and, in fact, has just been purchased and is about to undergo renovation.

DeGolyer Library, SMU

As the new building was nearing completion, the company charter was filed in April 1903, and just a few short weeks later, the factory opened itself up for inspection by the community.

brown-charter_dmn_040303 Dallas Morning News, April 3, 1903

DMN, May 29, 1903 (click for larger image)

The open house was packed — several thousand people (mostly women) showed up to tour the plant, fascinated by the inner workings of the city’s newest business, a manufacturer of crackers and sweet treats. Of particular interest must have been the two giant brick ovens on the the second floor, which used more than one ton of coal daily, and the huge copper kettles used in candy making on the top floor. There were also things like chocolate dipping machines, starch machines (?), and marshmallow heaters (I don’t know what that is, but I want to see one in action — could it have been a “marshmallow beater,” like the one seen here?).

DMN, May 31, 1903

The main reason to open the factory to the public for inspection — other than as a PR-managed meet-and-greet — was to let the people see for themselves just how CLEAN the place was. This was at a time when unsanitary food handling and manufacturing practices were much in the news (see here) — concerns which ultimately led to the enactment of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 — and the above article stresses that visitors were impressed by the factory’s “spotless cleanliness” (“The floors they said could be eaten from without discomfort…”). In regard to the “cracker wrappers” pictured at the top, the company wanted to make sure everyone knew that their products were wrapped and boxed — gone were the days of shoppers dipping their (probably unclean) hands into the old “cracker barrel” full of loose, stale crackers.

crackers_dmn_040603 DMN, April 6, 1903

Let’s take a closer look at the top photo, probably taken around 1920 (click pictures for larger images).

ad-brown_dmn_122003 DMN, Dec. 20, 1903

(click to read text)

brown-cracker_1922-directory 1922 city directory

ca. 1905

ca. 1908

1919 (eBay)

***

Sources & Notes

Top photo, titled “Wrapping Saltines at Brown Cracker and Candy Co.,” is from the George W. Cook Dallas/Texas image collection, DeGolyer Library, Central University Libraries, Southern Methodist University; it can be accessed here.

Written on the back of the photo: “Miss Bessie Manning, 2724 Roadwood [sic] avenue, Dallas, Texas.” Bessie Manning (born Bena Manina in 1899 to Italian immigrants), began working at the Brown Cracker Co. (with a brother and a sister) around 1917 but wasn’t living on Rosewood (later North Harwood) until 1919; she left Brown in 1921 or 1922. She isn’t identified in the photo, but she is, presumably, one of the women on the left; she would have been about 20.

bessie-manning_1920-census Bessie Manning’s occupation, 1920 census

The color postcard showing the Brown Cracker Co. is also from the Cook collection at SMU; it is here.

The Sodaette ad is from Library of Advertising by A. P. Johnson (Chicago: Cree Publishing Co., 1911).

The photo from about 1905 is from the promotional brochure titled “Come To Dallas” (Dallas: Dorsey Printing Co., about 1905), in the collection of the DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University; more info is here.

The photo at the bottom is from Greater Dallas Illustrated, The Most Progressive Metropolis in the Southwest (Dallas: The American Illustrating Company, 1908; reprinted by Friends of the Dallas Public Library, 1992). The informative company profile that accompanied the photo can be read in a PDF, here.

All other ads and clippings as noted.

Another very informative article which details the specifics of the building and its machinery — “New Dallas Industry, Brown Cracker and Candy Company About to Begin Operations” (DMN, Apr. 6, 1903) — can be read in a PDF, here.

To see the Brown Cracker Company’s specs on a Sanborn map from 1905, see here; to see where it is on a modern map, see here.

For current info on what’s about to happen to the building (much expanded over the years), see Steve Brown’s Dallas Morning News article, here.

And, yes, a teenaged Clyde Barrow apparently worked there briefly, for a dollar a day.

13 Comments

September 6, 2015

“Male Fixings” and Horse Manure — Akard Street, ca. 1906

George W. Cook Collection, SMU

by Paula Bosse

This great photograph shows Akard Street looking north from just south of Main. I especially like the sign for “Male Fixings” (a store selling men’s clothing accessories). Let’s zoom in to see that sign better (click photo to see a much larger image).

I also like the guy with the bicycle, next to the barber pole at the lower right, and the lone woman crossing the street. (There is a little girl in a white dress on the sidewalk on the right — about to cross Main — but everyone else in this photo is of the gender that might well patronize a business called “Male Fixings.”)

As indelicate as it may be to bring up the subject … I assume there were people employed to walk around the streets with shovels to clean up after all those horses? I’ve actually thought of this fairly often. It had to have been a major, major problem back then. I’ve just looked it up. The average horse pulling wagons and carriages produced, on average, 30+ pounds of manure and several gallons of urine daily, deposited willy-nilly whenever the need arose (which was often). Multiply that by hundreds. This article isn’t about Dallas, but I highly recommend “The Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894” — you’ll learn way more about the subject than you may want to — read it here. That lady crossing the street? I bet she spent a good part of every day hiking her skirts and dodging dung.

UPDATE: I’ve updated the title to this post several times (you’ll notice that the URL of this post shows a different location and year). After spending time to pin down the date, it appears this photo was taken between 1906 and 1909, when the Draughon Practical Business College was located at the southeast corner of Main and Akard — and the Oliver Typewriter Agency was located at 114 South Akard. The original annotation of this photo says the view is Main Street, with Akard in the midground, but it appears this photo was taken just south of Main Street looking north on Akard. The photo is confusing because the Draughon’s sign is seen here on the Akard Street side, not the Main Street side. The main tip-off is the cupola seen atop the building standing at the northwest corner of Main and Akard — it is the Rowan Building, which housed the Marvin Drug Store, which I wrote about here.

Draughon’s Practical Business College opened its first Dallas campus (but its 27th location across the major cities of the south) at the southeast corner of Main and Akard in March, 1906. By the time the 1910 city directory was printed, they had moved to another location (in fact, in their first ten years in Dallas they had moved five times!). I’m not sure how long the business college lasted in Dallas — at least through the 1970s, possibly longer — but the institution seems to still be in business after something like 130 years. (Click ads below to see larger images.)

1906

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This is another wonderful photo from the George W. Cook Dallas/Texas Image Collection, DeGolyer Library, Central University Libraries, Southern Methodist University; it can be accessed (and zoomed in on) here.

Another interesting article on the “manure problem” is “When Horses Posed a Public Health Hazard” — a blog post from The New York Times (which tantalizingly mentions herds of pigs roaming the streets of NYC) — read it here.

11 Comments

September 5, 2015

The Stoneleigh Court Apartment Hotel — 1923/1924

Still standing, still beautiful…

by Paula Bosse

Above, the Stoneleigh Hotel (originally known as the Stoneleigh Court Apartment Hotel) in 1923, in its final weeks of construction. When the Stoneleigh opened in October, 1923 at the corner of Maple Avenue and Wolf Street, it was a swanky apartment house, with hotel amenities (a few rooms were set aside for “transient” travelers). Thankfully, the Frank J. Woerner-designed building still stands and remains a lovely hotel.

Originally there were 125 apartments (which ranged from 1-5 rooms each), all of which were fully furnished (linens, silver, kitchen utensils, dishes, telephones, etc.), and maid service was provided. There were also radios in every room (a pretty new-fangled thing at the time). Each apartment had a kitchenette and a private bath, and ice water was piped to all apartments. Another innovative feature was the Servidor delivery service which allowed residents and hotel staff to conduct transactions without ever having to look one another in the eye or exchange stilted chit-chat. There was a grocery store, a pharmacy, a beauty shop, and a barber shop on the premises. There were smoking rooms, billiards rooms, and lounges on the ground floor and a grand ballroom on the top floor. And apartments were “handsomely furnished, [with] a color scheme of taupe, blue and mulberry being observed alternately on the various floors.” Sign me up!

Below, an early ad (click to see a much larger image of the illustration on its own).

And, of course, the obligatory postcard in which the building looks familiar, but which its surroundings seem somewhat … romanticized.

stoneleigh_court_apartments

A grainy photo from the construction and its caption:

Dallas Morning News, April 22, 1923

***

Sources & Notes

Photo of the building nearing the end of its construction is from the application to the National Register of Historic Places, which can be found in a PDF, here. (Dallas Historical Society photo.)

Ad is from the 1924 Terrill School yearbook.

To read a lengthy article published a few days before the Stoneleigh officially opened — “Stoneleigh Court Most Pretentious Apartment Hotel in the Southwest” (Dallas Morning News, Oct. 14, 1923) (with “pretentious” used here in a good way!) — click here.

Not sure what an “apartment hotel” is? See Wikipedia, here.

The Stoneleigh is currently called “Le Méridien Dallas, The Stoneleigh,” and the official website is here.

5 Comments

September 4, 2015

Fly United to Chicago in Only Eight Hours!

How many buildings can you identify? (click for larger image)

by Paula Bosse

Dallas, Texas as seen from United Air Lines passenger transport. The airplane has brought Dallas and Forth Worth within eight hours travel to Chicago and only one business day’s travel from New York.

Back when it took all day to fly to New York from Dallas.

This is another great aerial photo by the Fairchild Aerial Survey company, probably taken by Lloyd M. Long. Date-wise? Late-1920s? Before the Trinity was straightened (beginning in 1928), with land being cleared in the area that would become Dealey Plaza? 1928-ish? Or could it have been the very early 1930s? The United Air Lines promotional postcard was issued around 1932 or 1933.

It wasn’t until 1933 that United introduced its new Boeing “twin motor airline transports” and boasted that they would finally “bring the city within eleven and a half hours of New York City” (Dallas Morning News, Aug, 16, 1933).

Below is a photo from a Dallas newspaper ad showing one of United’s planes from the earlier, more carefree days of 1932, when passengers were still trudging through the skies at a more leisurely pace.

United Air Lines ad, detail, 1932

And an even earlier ad, from 1931, when a flight from Love Field to Chicago was nine hours long (today a direct flight from Love Field to Chicago takes about two hours and fifteen minutes). And if you wanted to continue to NYC, you had to board another plane and fly from Chicago to New York, adding another six and a half hours!

1931 ad

FLY

De Luxe Tri-Motored Ford Planes Manned by 2 Licensed Transport Pilots

NAT provides the most luxurious and modern plane service out of Dallas … every ship on the line is a Ford … tri-motored with the famous Wasp engines … two (instead of one) pilots … both licensed transport flyers. Meals aloft included in fare … magazines, maps, stationery … lavatories.

Air Transportation is More Than a Plane in the Sky!

When you fly with the pioneer, dependable National Air Transport division of United Air Lines, you ride with the largest air transportation corporation in the world. NAT and other divisions of United Air Lines have had 5 years’ experience … 25,000,000 miles of flying! … and employ only skilled ground crews and gov’t licensed mechanics. Fly NAT and enjoy the finest transportation equipment … U.S. lighted airway … radio … U.S. weather reports.

In an interesting side-note, the first pilot to fly a mail plane between Kansas City and Dallas (on May 12, 1926) was Richard Dobie, brother of Texas literary legend, J. Frank Dobie. In 1926 he flew a Curtiss Carrier Pigeon; in 1933, he’d worked his way up to the speedy and powerful Boeing. He flew for United for several years.

***

Sources & Notes

Top image is a promotional postcard, found on eBay.

Read more about the tri-motor airplane (manufactured by the Ford Motor Company and affectionately known as the “Tin Goose”) in the article “Ford’s Tri-Motor” by Edward J. Vinarcik (Advanced Materials and Processes, Oct. 2003) here.

All images larger when clicked.

3 Comments

September 2, 2015

The Giant Cash Register at the Texas Centennial — 1936

Before Big Tex we had Big Till (click for larger image)

by Paula Bosse

What’s not to love about a 65-foot-tall cash register? And how appropriate that this larger-than-life attraction was featured at the bigger-than-big Texas Centennial Exposition at Fair Park in 1936. This building, shaped like a very large National Cash Register (made under the auspices of noted designer Walter Dorwin Teague), served two purposes: its interior was an exhibit space to show off the company’s line of cash registers, and its exterior served as a giant tally board which was updated hourly to display the number of Centennial visitors. A similar giant cash register had been a popular feature at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933/34, and it was decided to commission one for the Texas Centennial (another one would show up at the New York World’s Fair in 1939).

At the risk of turning into a blog-realized Monty Python sketch (“This is Uncle Ted at the front of the house. This is Uncle Ted at the back of the house. And this is Uncle Ted at the side of the house….”), let’s take a look at this great big cash register from several slightly different angles.

Here it is under construction.

Here it is glowing in an ad with a tantalizingly dynamic illustration (click to see the illustration larger).

June, 1936

That text?

Towering in the air the height of a six-story building, this is the largest National Cash Register the world has ever seen.

In giant figures at the top of the register Centennial attendance is recorded.

Look for this outstanding feature of the Texas Centennial. See the electrical recording device accumulating the total of all attendance as the turn-stiles click, at each gate.

The huge figures at the top of the giant register tell the whole story of the Centennial attendance. A modern National Cash Register in your store will give you the whole story of what is happening in your business.

Here it is in a photo that, admittedly, looks a lot like the top photo — but take a closer look — those shrubs have gotten shrubbier.

And here it is towering over Mr. Fred S. Benge of Norman, Oklahoma, the Centennial’s millionth visitor. According to the report below, when Mr. Benge passed through the gates into Fair Park on June 25, 1936 (less than three weeks after the opening of the Exposition), the giant cash register numbers flipped over to “1,000,000” and the poor man was “pounced upon” by Centennial officials eager to make a spectacle of the momentous occasion. (In this photo, and two others I’ve seen, Mr. Benge does not look particularly amused at the situation.)

ncr_greenfield-indiana-daily-reporter_080636 The Greenfield (Indiana) Daily Reporter, Aug. 6,, 1936

UPDATE: Another photo of a somewhat stoic-looking Benge is here. An entertaining article about Mr. Benge’s big day is here. I sure hope Fred didn’t mind being described as a short and bald-headed jobless mechanic.

And here’s the “official photo,” which is a little bland and dowdy, but at least you can see what it looked like head-on.

And here it is, as seen from the other side of the lagoon.

Where exactly was this “six-story cash register” located? I believe it was at San Jacinto/1st Avenue & Forest Avenue (now MLK). I think it might have been one of the two unnamed attractions I’ve circled on the “Key Map of the Grounds.” (See the full unmarked map, from the University of Texas at Arlington, via the Portal to Texas History, here.)

You can see it in a detail from a photo of the Centennial fairgrounds I posted previously (see that post here) — the cash register is circled at the top right.

(click for larger image)

I’ll just keep adding new photos as I come across them. Below are two photos from the George W. Cook Dallas/Texas Image Collection, DeGolyer Library, SMU (info is here and here). One of them shows a family standing in front of it — since Big Tex hadn’t arrived on the scene yet, this was as good a giant “thing” to stand in front of as anything!

***

Sources & Notes

Top photo is from The Year America Discovered Texas: Centennial ’36 by Kenneth B. Ragsdale (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1987); the photograph is from the collection of Texas author Elithe Hamilton Kirkland (Love Is a Wild Assault) who worked as the director of school publicity for the Centennial.

The State Fair of Texas Archives photo of the cash register under construction is from Fair Park by Willis Cecil Winters (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2010). Another photo of the NCR register can be seen in Winters’ book here — in the bottom photo, it is the dark square in the background, left of center — you can see how it towered over everything around it.

The “shrubbier” photo is in the collection of the Dallas Historical Society, but I found it here, not identified as being the one at the Texas Centennial (if you click the picture in this interesting article, it will be super-super-gigantic).

Walter Dorwin Teague (1883-1960) was the man who not only designed the National Cash Register exhibit building, he also designed other Centennial-related attractions, including the Ford Building and the nearby cool-looking new-concept moderne Texaco station (at Commerce & Exposition). Read about him here.

1936

There were hopes that the Texas Centennial Exposition would attract in excess of ten million visitors over its six-month run, but the final numbers were just under six-and-a-half million. Pity. We had that great big tally machine sitting there and everything. Waiting.

Most pictures larger when clicked.

17 Comments

August 31, 2015

Akard Street Looking South, 1887-2015

Akard Street from Pacific, ca. 1898, via Cook Collection, SMU

by Paula Bosse

I realized the other day that I have an inordinate number of photographs and postcards showing Akard Street looking south — usually taken from Pacific or Elm, so I thought I’d collect them all together. Some of these aren’t dated, so they’re not in strict chronological order, but I’ve made a half-hearted attempt to make sure horse-and-buggy photos are before the men-in-straw-hat-boaters, which are before the women-in-Miss-Crabtree-dresses, which are before the cars-with-rounded-bodies. It might be easiest to just assume they are not in chronological order. (All photos are larger when clicked — a couple are really big.)

The oldest is from 1887, when North Akard was still called Sycamore Street, and before the Oriental Hotel was built at Commerce and Akard in 1895.

Next up, an incredible photo, taken around 1898, a detail of which appears at the top of this post. The Oriental Hotel can now be seen at the end of Akard, at Commerce, where Akard used to make a dog-leg turn before continuing south, giving the appearance of a dead-end street.

via George W. Cook Collection, DeGolyer Library, SMU

Another, with the Adolphus Hotel (built in 1912) now on the right, across Commerce from the Oriental. The tall building across Akard from the Adolphus is the Southwestern Life Building. The Gentry photography studio was at the southeast corner of Elm and Akard from 1912, which is probably the date of this postcard image. Construction of the Busch Building (now known as the Kirby Building) began in December, 1912.

via eBay

From 1925, with the new Baker Hotel having replaced the Oriental Hotel. This area was now being called “the canyon district” or “the canyon.”

In this great Frank Rogers photo, the canyon walls are getting higher, with the Adolphus Hotel firmly anchoring the Commerce corner across from the Baker.

via eBay

By the time this photo was taken in about 1936, Pegasus had become a part of the skyline, perched atop the Magnolia Petroleum Building. (Note the Queen Theater at the northeast corner of Elm and Akard.)

via Legacies History Journal

This photo is from the early- or mid-1930s — LOOK AT ALL THOSE PEOPLE.

via the DMA’s Uncrated blog

As opposed to this one, which has NO people in it.

via eBay

More canyon, this view showing the super-cool art-deco-y building at Elm and Akard with Ellan’s hat shop on the ground floor, late-1930s.

This candid photograph, a little deeper into the canyon, is one of my favorites. (Click to see a gigantic image.)

via eBay

From 1951 — a bit grainy, but a slightly closer view of the side of the Queen Theater at the left and the Mayfair department store, built in 1946, at the right:

akard_dpl_1951 via Dallas Public Library

And, finally, today. Pegasus and the Adolphus are still there, but the Baker Hotel was demolished in 1980, replaced by the One AT&T Plaza/Whitacre Tower.

via Google Street View, 2014

***

Sources & Notes

The photo dated by SMU as “circa 1898” is titled “Akard Street from Akard and Pacific Avenue Intersection”; it is from the George W. Cook Dallas/Texas Image Collection, DeGolyer Library, Central University Libraries, Southern Methodist University, and it can be viewed here.

The circa 1936 photo showing Pegasus is from the Spring, 1989 issue of Legacies — here; it is from the Hayes Collection, Texas/Dallas Archives Division, Dallas Public Library, and is attributed to Denny Hayes.

The photo showing “ALL THOSE PEOPLE” is from the Dallas Museum of Art’s Uncrated blog — here — is from the Dallas Municipal Archives. They have the date as “1940,” but Liggett’s Drug Store was gone from Elm and Akard by 1936.

Other sources as noted.

Click pictures for larger images — sometimes MUCH larger images.

15 Comments

August 30, 2015

The Caveteria: “Marvelous Food at Moderate Prices”

The finest in downtown basement dining (click for larger image)

by Paula Bosse

How could you NOT want to dine in a restaurant called a “Caveteria”? It was a cafeteria in the basement — the cave — of the swanky Baker Hotel, and it looks like it was a nice cheap place to grab a quick lunch downtown in the 1920s and 1930s.

The Baker Hotel had “3 ways to eat”: one could eat cheap in the basement Caveteria (where, according to the Inflation Calculator, a 30-cent lunch in 1927 was the equivalent of about four bucks today), eat sort of cheap in the probably street-level coffee shop (lunch was about $6.75 there), and eat not cheap in the main hotel dining room (where lunch was over $10.00). (There was also the Peacock Terrace night club, well beyond reach of basement-dwelling diners.)

caveteria_dmn_120427

1927

The price actually went down to a quarter by 1931 and had a “State-wide reputation for excellence.”

caveteria_dmn_020131 DMN, Feb. 1, 1931

A year later the price was holding at 25 cents and it seems like a pretty good deal.

caveteria_dmn_021532 DMN, Feb. 15, 1932

“The Original ‘Caveteria'” — accept no imitations! At least one other hotel in the Baker chain — the Gunter, in San Antonio — had a “Caveteria,” but apparently Dallas’ was first. In fact, the word and the hotel made their way into H. L. Mencken’s The American Language, Supplement One (see here).

caveteria_corsicana-daily-sun_031632 Corsicana Daily Sun, Mar. 16, 1932

Oh yeah — live bands played while you ate your hearty meal of minced beef tenderloin. Even Lawrence Welk settled in for a stint as the “musical entree” in 1934.

Feb., 1934

In 1942, the space once occupied by the Caveteria was turned over to the USO:

The Baker Hotel has provided the USO with what used to be the Caveteria in the basement of the hotel. It will be known as USO Club in the Cave. The entrance will be through the Akard Street entrance of the hotel. (Dallas Morning News, Jan. 27, 1942)

And there it is — another place I wish I’d been able to visit.

“Fine food. Splendid Service. Moderate prices.”

ad-baker-hotel-caveteria

***

Sources & Notes

Color postcards found on eBay.

The Baker Hotel opened in 1925 at Commerce & Akard on the site where the Oriental Hotel had previously stood, catty-corner from the Adolphus.

3 Comments

Flashback : Dallas

Category: Neighborhoods

September 18, 2015

The SMU “Drag” — 1965

September 17, 2015

Crossing Main Street

September 15, 2015

Dealey Plaza, From Above — 1960s

September 11, 2015

Brown Cracker Co. Cracker Wrappers

Sources & Notes

September 6, 2015

“Male Fixings” and Horse Manure — Akard Street, ca. 1906

September 5, 2015

The Stoneleigh Court Apartment Hotel — 1923/1924

Sources & Notes

September 4, 2015

Fly United to Chicago in Only Eight Hours!

Sources & Notes

September 2, 2015

The Giant Cash Register at the Texas Centennial — 1936

Sources & Notes

August 31, 2015

Akard Street Looking South, 1887-2015

Sources & Notes

August 30, 2015

The Caveteria: “Marvelous Food at Moderate Prices”

Sources & Notes

Category: Neighborhoods

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