Transportation | Flashback : Dallas

February 11, 2014

Delta Air Lines’ First Passenger Flight — 1929

by Paula Bosse

Delta Air Lines has had a longer — and more important — association with Dallas than you might think. On June 17, 1929, Delta made its first-ever passenger flight, from Dallas to Jackson, Mississippi via Shreveport and Monroe, Louisiana. According to the Love Field website, “Early flights operated from a passenger terminal near Bachman Lake, which later served as Southwest Airlines’ first headquarters building.” On that first flight, the five passengers sat in wicker chairs and could roll down windows (!) for needed ventilation. The flight took five hours. One of the first ads, from the Delta Flight Museum page, looked like this:

Delta passenger service ad ca. September 1929.

Forty-some-odd years later, the ads — and Dallas — got a bit more sophisticated.

delta_dallas_fur

delta_dallas_fredric-sweney_playing-cards Artist: Fredric Sweney

And we can’t leave out Cowtown!

delta_fort-worth

UPDATE, June 20, 2017: This almost-three-year-old post got a TON of hits yesterday, and I couldn’t figure out why. Eventually, though, I tracked it down: it had to do with yesterday’s Final Jeopardy question (or is it “answer”?):

delta_jeopardy_061917

Nice to see that Jeopardy is incorporating Dallas history into the show!

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Top travel poster — showing Fort Worth in the distance, I guess? — by Jack Laycox.

For a really well-researched article by Timothy Harper describing that first flight, click here (the Dallas bit is contained in the last seven paragraphs).

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February 7, 2014

The Triple Underpass — Elm, Main, and Commerce Never Looked Better

triple_underpass_1936

by Paula Bosse

Sometimes a noisy, bustling metropolis really hits the spot, but there are times I long to have completely empty streets all to myself. Which is one reason I love this serene and peaceful (or perhaps “post-apocalyptic,” depending on your half-full/half-empty world-view) scene of Dallas, totally deserted save for a partial view of a single car in the distance. The brand new “triple underpass” was unveiled in 1936, the year Dallas was obsessed with showing off what a fantastically modern city it was to the throngs of visitors flooding in for the Texas Centennial celebrations. G.B. Dealey himself rode the first car through the underpass. Perhaps that’s his little car heading up Main Street.

Above, the “Business District, from the West.” Note the absence of Dealey Plaza, which wouldn’t be completed until 1941 and not officially named “Dealey Plaza” until 1946. …After that, the place wasn’t thought about in any especially significant way until 1963.

triple-underpass_gateway-to-dallas_1940s

“The Gateway to Dallas, Texas,” with beautiful Dealey Plaza now set in place, one day to become the most-visited historic site in the city. Despite its grim connection to the assassination, every time I drive through that underpass I always get a little thrill. Almost 80 years after it became a landmark, the triple underpass is still a remarkably cool piece of Dallas architecture and engineering.

February 4, 2014

Beware the Narrow Oak Cliff Viaduct!

by Paula Bosse

“Sometimes the Oak Cliff Viaduct seems a trifle too narrow. From a snapshot made just after it happened.”

I came across this photograph while flipping through the book Our City — Dallas, A Community Civics by Justin F. Kimball (1927). I love that viaduct, but … yikes. Look at all those calm and/or petrified passengers. (We were always warned about going across the river…)

Here are a few contemporaneous images of the not-actually-so-narrow viaduct.

oak-cliff-viaduct_old_postcard

February 4, 2014

M-K-T Railroad’s “Katy Flyer Route” — 1902

by Paula Bosse

Ah, Texas rail travel in the corset-and-carpet-bag days, from a 1902 issue of Dallas’ Southern Mercury newspaper. Sign me up.

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Sources & Notes

Color images from a 1900 MKT timetable, offered a while back on eBay, here.

An entertaining history of the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad (with lots of wonderful photos) can be found here.

A history of the railroads in Dallas can be found here.

And the Handbook of Texas entry for the M-K-T (known familiarly as the “Katy” railroad) can be found here.

See another post featuring the Katy Flyer — “Leaving Dallas on the Katy Flyer — ca. 1914” — here.

Click pictures to see larger images.

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Category: Transportation

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