Photographs | Flashback : Dallas

4th of July Parade — Sweating in Formation

I’m parched just looking at this…

by Paula Bosse

Fourth of July parade in Dallas, 1870s or 1880s. Bet it was hot in those uniforms.

Picture quality leaves a bit to be desired, but here are a few details (click for larger images).

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Sources & Notes

Stereograph photo by Alfred Freeman, from the Lawrence T. Jones III Collection, DeGolyer Library, SMU Libraries, Southern Methodist University; the uncropped original can be seen here.

3 Comments

Loitering In Front of The Dallas Morning News Building — ca. 1900

Commerce & Lamar

by Paula Bosse

Here is another great photo from the DeGolyer Library at SMU, this one showing the then-new Dallas Morning News building anchoring the northwest corner of Commerce and Lamar. For me, it’s another case of the individual quiet vignettes that comprise the photograph being more interesting than the larger picture taken as a whole. (All pictures are much larger when clicked.)

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Sources & Notes

Photograph from the Belo Records collection at the DeGolyer Library, Central University Libraries, Southern Methodist University, seen here.

For another view of the same building, see these posts:

“The Dallas Morning News Building, Inside and Out — ca. 1900,” here
“Lively Street Life Outside the Dallas Morning News Building — 1900,” here

For other photographs I’ve zoomed in on, see here.

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June 25, 2014

Reading, Writing, Beekeeping — 1905

by Paula Bosse

Beekeeping class at the College of Industrial Arts (later Texas Woman’s University) in Denton, around 1905. Pop quiz!

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Sources & Notes

Photo from The Woman’s Collection of Texas Woman’s University.

Beekeeping was a popular “hobby” for women at the turn of the century, but for a look at larger-scale Texas honey production at this time, check out the article “The Bee Industry of Texas” from the 1904 edition of the Texas Almanac here.

For information on present-day North Texas beekeeping, the website of the Dallas-based Texas Honeybee Guild is here.

June 24, 2014

The Trinity River at the City’s Doorstep

What? You didn’t know the Trinity River was straightened?

by Paula Bosse

Back before Dallas decided to straighten out the Trinity River and move it a mile or two to the west (in an attempt to prevent future flooding), the river ran only about a block from the Old Red Courthouse. It’s so strange looking at this picture and seeing a river in a place where we’ve never seen it. It’s a shame they moved it (who knew you could “move a river”?), but flooding was a major issue, and, in fact, it looks like there was flooding the day this photo was taken. Below, you can see a magnified view — it looks so different from what we’re used to that it takes a second to get your bearings. Imagine how different Dallas would feel today if the Trinity had been allowed to run its natural course.

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Sources & Notes

Photograph by Lloyd M. Long, from the Edwin J. Foscue Map Library, Central University Libraries, Southern Methodist University; it can be seen here (with many of the buildings labeled) and here (without the labeling).

SMU has the photo dated “ca. 1930s or 1940s,” but I think it may be from the late ’20s. I’ve seen non-specific dates of the river’s realignment from the 1920s to the 1930s, but a couple of landmarks in the photo above place it sometime between 1925 (the year the Santa Fe buildings were constructed) and 1933 (the year the Hippodrome Theater — seen here, on Pacific — became the Joy Theater).

UPDATE: The river was straightened in 1928. See fascinating information about the when, where, why, and how of the Trinity River realignment, below in the comments — it was a true feat of modern engineering.

A few Trinity River-related links: the Trinity Commons Foundation site is here; the Trinity River Corridor Project site is here; and an interesting look at plans and proposals for the future of Dallas and the Trinity River can be read on the American Institute of Architects (Dallas) site here.

21 Comments

June 21, 2014

Commerce Street Looking West — 1900

by Paula Bosse

The companion photo from the one I posted yesterday. Both were taken by the same photographer (Jas. Wilkinson) and both appeared in The Bohemian magazine in 1900. It appears that both were probably taken from the top floor or roof of the Oriental Hotel at Commerce & Akard. The building about half-way up in this picture — the one on the right with the conical turret — is the Texas Land & Mortgage Company (seen here), located at Commerce and Field, placing the photographer at Commerce and Akard (the Oriental Hotel).

So it seems likely that the photo from yesterday (seen here) was from the Oriental looking north up Akard.

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Photograph from The Bohemian magazine (1900) in the collection of the Fort Worth Public Library (which perforated the library’s name into the image).

Click photo for larger image.

6 Comments

June 16, 2014

Plow vs Skyscraper

(click for super-gigantic image)

by Paula Bosse

Here’s an unexpected view of the Dallas skyline, by legendary Life magazine photographer Carl Mydans. The photograph — titled “Lucius Washington and Two Mules Plow the Fields Before the Dallas Skyline” — is from the collection of the Smithsonian Institution, with catalog description here. Though the Smithsonian lists this photo as being from 1939, it’s possible that it was taken a year earlier, as The Dallas Morning News reported on April 2, 1938 that Mydans was in town shooting the Dallas skyline. A major article on Texas appeared in Life magazine a year later, in the April 10, 1939 issue, featuring a different, very large photo of the Dallas skyline by Mydans, which can be seen here.

Below, an enlarged detail, lightened a bit.

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More on Mydans from the Duke University collection here, with examples of his FSA, Life magazine, and WWII reportage here.

Wikipedia article on Mydans here.

Click photos for much larger images.

June 13, 2014

Dallas in 1879 — Not a Good Time to Be Mayor

A view from the courthouse, looking north (click for larger image)

by Paula Bosse

Above, a view of Dallas in 1879, looking north from the courthouse (one of many in the city’s past that eventually burned down); the intersection in the right foreground is Main and Jefferson (now Record Street).

This is such a cool photo that, on a whim, I checked to see what exciting things might have happened in Dallas in 1879. I found that the city’s voters had just elected a new mayor, James M. Thurmond, who had run on an “independent reform and morality ticket.” Yawn. On the surface, that hardly seemed very interesting — a historical fact, yes, but not all that exciting. But, wait, there’s more to the story.

Thurmond’s post-election honeymoon was short-lived because, even though he had won a second (one-year) term, he had made some serious enemies in his first term. He was removed from office in 1880 by the city council in a lack-of-confidence vote, the result of a nasty trial and probably slanderous accusations by lawyer Robert E. Cowart.

The feud between Thurmond and Cowart grew more and more bitter as time passed, and on March 14, 1882 — moments after the two men had exchanged angry words in Judge Thurmond’s courtroom — Cowart shot and killed Thurmond. Witnesses described the shooting as an act of self-defense. They said that Cowart shot when the judge reached for his pistol. (For an incredibly gruesome account of this incident, the contemporary newspaper report is linked below.)

The photograph above was taken from the courthouse where this shooting took place. When the photograph was taken in 1879, the animosity between the new mayor and an unhappy lawyer had already begun to percolate. I suppose men with “Esq.” after their names in the 1880s were predisposed to shoot-outs indoors in well-appointed courtrooms rather than out in the dusty streets at high noon. It’s classier.

thurmond_headstone_greenwood-cemetery_findagrave Greenwood Cemetery, Dallas (photo: David N. Lotz)

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Top photo is from Dallas, The Deciding Years — A Historical Portrait by A. C. Greene. (Austin: The Encino Press for Sanger-Harris, 1973); photo is from the collection of the Dallas Public Library.

Photo of J. M. Thurmond’s headstone in Greenwood Cemetery is from Find A Grave, here. Cowart — who died in 1924 — is buried in a nearby plot in the same cemetery. (Incidentally, Cowart’s claim to fame — other than shooting a judge in his own courtroom — appears to be that he was the person who inadvertently came up with Fort Worth’s nickname, “Panther City” when he wrote a tongue-in-cheek newspaper article about Fort Worth in 1875. Read a great history of this amusing kerfuffle in Hometown by Handlebar’s post, here — scroll to the second story.)

For an interesting contemporary report of the shooting — including gruesome eyewitness accounts — check out the article from the March 15, 1882 edition of The Dallas Herald (under the headline “The Deadly Pistol”), here, via the Portal to Texas History.

A short background on the Thurmond-Cowart feud, from the WPA Dallas Guide and History (which includes the verdicts of Cowart’s two trials for murder), can be read here.

Click top photograph for HUGE image.

6 Comments

June 10, 2014

The Old Union Depot in East Dallas: 1897-1935

From the collection of Art Hoffman (click for larger image)

by Paula Bosse

I saw the above rendering of the old East Dallas rail depot posted recently in a Dallas history group. It was bought several years ago by Art Hoffman who was told it had belonged to a former employee of the Houston & Texas Central Railroad (which, along with the Texas & Pacific, served this station). It’s an odd thing for an architect to sketch — a boarded-up railroad depot. I couldn’t find anything on E. L. Watson, the architect who did the rendering (perhaps a member of the Watson family who were prominent Dallas contractors?), and I couldn’t find any connection between the depot and the F. J. Woerner & Co. architectural firm. The drawing might have been done in 1931, with what looks like “31” next to the artist’s signature. Could the drawing have been done merely as a study for E. L. Watson’s portfolio?

But back to the building itself. It was referred to by all sorts of names: Union Station, Union Depot, East Dallas Depot, Old Union Station, etc. With all these permutations, it took considerable digging to determine exactly when it had been built and when it had been demolished.

A couple of stations had previously occupied this site (about where Pacific Avenue and Central Expressway would cross), the first being built in 1872 at the behest of William H. Gaston who was developing the area, well east of the Dallas city limits. Due to the presence of the railroad, the area grew quickly, and in 1882, it was incorporated as the city of East Dallas. It thrived and continued to grow and on January 1, 1890 it was annexed and became part of the city of Dallas.

Location of depot in red — map circa 1890-1900 (click to enlarge)

The depot pictured in the drawing above was built in 1897. The previous station, a woefully inadequate and outdated “shanty,” was, by early 1897, being nudged toward demolition in order to remain competitive with the new Santa Fe depot then under construction. In the Feb. 10, 1897 edition of The Dallas Morning News, it was referred to as “the present eye-sore in East Dallas” which would be better off “abandoned and used for kindling wood.”

On April 4, 1897, it was reported that plans for a new Texas & Pacific passenger depot were nearly completed. By the beginning of June, the shanty had been torn down, and on June 6, 1897, the drawing below appeared in the pages of the Morning News, giving the people of Dallas a first look at what the much grander station would look like when completed. (It’s unfortunate that the actual architectural rendering was not used, but, instead, a more rudimentary staff artist’s version was printed.) The accompanying information revealed that the new depot had been designed by Mr. O. H. Lang, an architect who worked in the engineering department of the Texas & Pacific Railroad. This was an exciting tidbit to find, because I had wondered who had designed the structure but had been unable to find this elusive piece of information. And it was Otto Lang! Eight years after designing this railroad depot, Lang and fellow architect Frank Witchell would form the legendary firm of Lang & Witchell, and they would go on to design some of Dallas’ most impressive buildings.

east-dallas-depot_dmn_060697-TEXT Dallas Morning News, June 6, 1897

The building was completed fairly quickly, and its official opening was announced on Oct. 12, 1897.

east-dallas-depot_GRAND-OPENING_dmn_101297 DMN, Oct. 12, 1897

Here’s what the station looked like soon after it opened for business, from an 1898 Texas & Pacific publication (click for larger images):

Much better than a shanty!

Below in another early photo of the depot:

Can’t pass up an opportunity of zooming in on a detail:

Here it is around 1910, a hotbed of activity, now with the addition of automobiles:

The station served an important role in the growth of (East) Dallas and in the everyday lives of its residents for almost twenty years, but in 1916 the many “independent” passenger and freight depots that had been spread out all over town were shuttered, per the Kessler Plan’s directive to consolidate and run all the rail lines in and out of the new Dallas Union Terminal. (This was when the word “old” began appearing ahead the East Dallas station whenever it was mentioned.)

(circa 1916)

So what became of the East Dallas depot? From “Relic of City of East Dallas Being Demolished,” a Dallas Morning News article from Jan. 20, 1935:

Last use of the depot for railroad purposes came in 1933 when it was abandoned as a freight station in August of that year. After that it was used as a station for interviewing destitute clients for the relief board but for several months has been boarded up.

So that original rendering may not have been done in 1931 after all (unless it was a high-concept architect’s vision of what the depot would look like one day all boarded up…).

At some point it was determined that the station would be torn down. It may have been one of those beautify-the-city projects done in preparation for the Texas Centennial Exposition the next year, but it was probably time for the building to come down. It was January of 1935, at the height of the Great Depression, and not only did the city make it a point to hire laborers on relief to assist in the demolition, but it also approved the use of salvaged materials from the site to be used in building homes for “destitute families.”

Relief Administrator E. J. Stephany received approval Saturday of a project to get men to tear down the old structure and use the materials in building homes for destitute families and work is expected to start immediately. (“East Dallas Station To Be Torn Down and Converted Into Homes,” DMN, Jan. 13, 1935)

Demolition of the depot — which The News called “The Pride of the Gay Nineties” — began on January 18, 1935. The first solemn paragraph of an article reporting on the razing of the landmark is below.

Shorn of all the dignity it possessed for years as the East Dallas Union Depot, the old red structure near the intersection of Central and Pacific avenues began crumbling beneath the blows of wrecking tools wielded by laborers from the Dallas County relief board Friday.” (“Relic of City of East Dallas Being Demolished,” DMN, Jan. 20, 1935)

The red stone slabs bearing the word “Dallas” (3 feet long, 18 inches thick) were offered to the Dallas Historical Society “for safekeeping.”

So did that relief housing get built? Sort of. All I could find was an article from June, 1935, which states that one little building was constructed with some of the brick and stone from the razed depot. It wasn’t a house for the needy but was, instead, headquarters for relief caseworkers in donated park land in Urbandale. Presumably there was housing built somewhere, but all that brick and stone salvaged from the old depot may not have been used for its intended purpose. BUT, there is this tantalizing little tidbit:

As a reminder of the historic antecedent, the new structure [in Urbandale Park] has as a headpiece for its fireplace the large carved stone bearing the name Dallas. (“Relief Structure Made of Materials From Razed Depot,” DMN, June 20, 1935)

Does this mean that the Dallas Historical Society might still have the second slab? If not, what happened to it?

I checked Google Maps and looked at tiny Urbandale Park at Military Parkway and Lomax Drive, just east of S. Buckner, but I didn’t see anything, so I assume the building came down at some point. (UPDATE, 3/20/16: Finally got around to driving to this attractive park. Sadly, the little building is no longer there.)

It would have been nice if that little bit of the old depot had survived — a souvenir of an important hub of activity which sprang to life when memories were still fresh of East Dallas being its own separate entity — the “David” Dallas to its neighboring “Goliath” Dallas. I would love to learn more about what might have happened to that “Dallas” sign which, for a while, hung over the fireplace of an odd little building in an obscure park in southeast Dallas where it lived out its days in retirement.

Since I keep adding photos of the depot to this post, I’m going to just start putting new additions (with captioned and linked sources) here:

DeGolyer Library, SMU

“Your Dallas of Tomorrow” (1943), Portal to Texas History

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Sources & Notes

Original rendering of the old Union Depot at East Dallas by E. L. Watson is from the collection of Art Hoffman, used with his permission.

More on architect Frank J. Woerner (who designed, among other things, the Stoneleigh Hotel), here (see p. 10 of this PDF).

History of Old East Dallas (and the city of East Dallas), here and here.

More on architects Lang & Witchell here, with an incredible list of some of the buildings designed by their firm here.

1898 photos of the depot’s exterior and interior from Texas, Along the Line of the Texas & Pacific Ry. (Dallas: Passenger Department of the Texas & Pacific Railway, [1898]).

Photo immediately following the photos from the T & P book is from a postcard, found on Flickr, here.

Photo (and accompanying detail) immediately following that is from Dallas Rediscovered by William L. McDonald (Dallas: Dallas Historical Society, 1978). (McDonald identifies the photo as being “c. 1890” — well before the station was built in 1897.) From the collection of the Dallas Historical Society.

Photo of the depot with automobiles is a detail of a larger photograph from the collection of George A. McAfee photographs in the DeGolyer Library, Central University Libraries, Southern Methodist University. The original can be seen here.

Photograph dated 1916 from The Museum of the American Railroad, via the Portal to Texas History site, here.

More information in these Dallas Morning News articles:

“East Dallas Station To Be Torn Down and Converted Into Homes” (DMN, Jan. 13, 1935)
“Relic of City of East Dallas Being Demolished” (DMN, Jan. 20, 1935) — very informative
“Historical Society Will Be Given Slabs of Former Station” (DMN, Jan. 31, 1935)
“County Gets Land To Install Relief Depot; Later Park” (DMN, Feb. 27, 1935
“Relief Structure Made of Materials From Razed Depot; Station Occupies Land in Urbandale Donated to County For Park” (DMN, June 20, 1935)
“Salvaged Materials Go Artistic” (DMN, June 20, 1935) — photo of “relief structure” which accompanied above article

More photos of this immediate area can be found in these posts:

“The Union Depot Hotel Building, Deep Ellum — 1898-1968,” here
“The Gypsy Tea Room, Central Avenue, and the Darensbourg Brothers,” here

Many of the pictures and articles can be clicked for larger images.

29 Comments

June 6, 2014

Forget the Ferris Wheel, Take a Ride in a Centennial Rickshaw — 1936

Your rickshaw awaits…

by Paula Bosse

Here’s an odd photo of the Midway at Fair Park, taken in 1936. The whole thing feels a little weird. It’s just so … bright. And empty. It’s kind of bleak-looking for the glamorous Texas Centennial Exposition. And then there’s that rickshaw (?). What this scene needs is a little postcard-colorizing magic. Below, a similar scene, sans rickshaw.

Better … but still kind of odd.

But back to that rickshaw. According to the the Treasury of Texas Trivia, Vol. II:

The Texas Centennial in Dallas had one feature that, considering its uncountable sights and sounds that one had to take in, may very well have been forgotten. College boys, as a means of earning tuition as well as keeping in shape, pulled foot-weary fairgoers from street to street and plaza to plaza in rickshaws during the 1936 celebration of our state’s one hundredth birthday.

rickshaw_tx-centennial-1936

This exotic mode of transportation was even appearing in local advertisements — like this one, from an ad placed by the A. Harris department store:

ad-a-harris_centennial_rickshaw_dmn_052536_det A. Harris ad (det) , 1936

One of the most notable rickshaw-riders of the Dallas Centennial was none other than celebrated fan-dancer, Sally Rand, whose “Nude Ranch” show (check Google for risque film footage) at the competing Frontier Centennial Exposition in Fort Worth was packing them in in Cowtown. Even Sally had to come over and check out the Centennial. The photo below shows her autographing the shorts of one of the “ricksha-toters,” a lucky young man named Guy Johnsen. The caption of the July, 1936 news photo reads:

Sally Rand, who says she never knew success until she thought of taking her pants off, autographs those of Guy Johnson [sic], her ricksha toter, on a visit to the Texas Centennial Exposition at Dallas. With her is Mrs. Voln Taylor, Chairman of the Centennial Advisory Board.

Cook Collection/DeGolyer Library/SMU

And now I know.

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Sources & Notes

Top photo — titled “The Gay Midway of the Texas Centennial Exposition, Dallas” — from the Keystone-Mast Collection, UCR/California Museum of Photography, University of California at Riverside; see here.

Quote from Treasury of Texas Trivia, Vol. II by Bill Cannon (Plano: Republic of Texas Press, 2000).

Sally Rand photo (“Sally Rand Gives an Autograph”) from the George W. Cook Dallas/Texas Image Collection, DeGolyer Library, Central University Libraries, Southern Methodist University; more info on this photo is here. (Arne Miller “Guy” Johnsen — known later as “Swede” Johnsen — was a native South Dakotan who had left home and arrived in Dallas just in time for the Centennial, where he got a job pulling visitors around Fair Park in a rickshaw. This paragraph is from his 2005 obituary: “Raised on a farm in Volin, South Dakota, ‘Guy’ (as he was nicknamed by his mother), left home on a quest for better opportunities. In 1936, his travels found him pulling a rickshaw at the Dallas Centennial Fair. His claim to fame was pulling the famous and beautiful fan-dancer Sally Rand throughout the centennial fair grounds.” I guess a moment like that really stays with a person!)

To see this stretch of the Midway from the other direction — and AT NIGHT (!) — see my companion post here.

I find that — by complete coincidence — I’ve posted this on June 6th, the anniversary of the opening day of the Texas Centennial Exposition.

5 Comments

June 4, 2014

The Texas Land & Mortgage Company — 1912

1912

by Paula Bosse

The Texas Land and Mortgage Company of London, Ltd. was the first mortgage company in the state of Texas. The Dallas branch of the English company opened in 1882 at a time when British investment across Texas was booming; it was one of the few speculation firms in the state that grew and prospered into the 20th century. Much development of the city in this period can be attributed to loans granted by the Texas Land & Mortgage Company.

The building they occupied (built by them in 1896) was located at the northwest corner of Commerce and Field, across Field from where the Adolphus has stood since 1912. The building in the 1912 ad looks a little different from the one in the photo below, taken four years earlier. It’s not a terribly attractive building in either photo, but there is some improvement in the later picture, and it IS vastly superior to the 7-Eleven occupying that corner today.

1908

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Advertisement from the pages of The Cattle Raisers’ Association of Texas, March 1912.

Bottom photograph from Greater Dallas Illustrated (Dallas: Friends of the Dallas Public Library, 1992 — originally published in Dallas in 1908).

For a short biography of A.G. Wood, the Scottish general manager of the Texas Land & Mortgage Co., see the Encyclopedia of Texas (1922) entry here.

Click pictures for larger images.

1 Comment

Flashback : Dallas

Category: Photographs

July 4, 2014

4th of July Parade — Sweating in Formation

Sources & Notes

July 2, 2014

Loitering In Front of The Dallas Morning News Building — ca. 1900

Sources & Notes

June 25, 2014

Reading, Writing, Beekeeping — 1905

Sources & Notes

June 24, 2014

The Trinity River at the City’s Doorstep

Sources & Notes

June 21, 2014

Commerce Street Looking West — 1900

June 16, 2014

Plow vs Skyscraper

June 13, 2014

Dallas in 1879 — Not a Good Time to Be Mayor

June 10, 2014

The Old Union Depot in East Dallas: 1897-1935

Sources & Notes

June 6, 2014

Forget the Ferris Wheel, Take a Ride in a Centennial Rickshaw — 1936

Sources & Notes

June 4, 2014

The Texas Land & Mortgage Company — 1912

Category: Photographs

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