(Click for larger image)
by Paula Bosse
The height of comfort!
You know this photo was taken for promotional purposes, because none of the men has a reeking cigar clenched between his teeth.
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Texas Electric Railway Interurban ad reprinted in Texas Historian, Jan. 1981.
Interurbans were great. I wish we still had them. Read about what they were, here.
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Copyright © 2015 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
A fleet of Cadillacs in front of 2533 McKinney Ave.
by Paula Bosse
The photo above shows a truly beautiful, Spanish-style building that was built in 1927 at the northwest corner of McKinney Avenue and Routh Street. The view shows the Routh Street side. The person who took this photograph would have been standing across the street on the property of the dearly-departed McKinney Avenue Baptist Church (most recently transformed into the Hard Rock Cafe). You might be surprised to learn that the building in this photo still stands, and it’s mostly recognizable almost 90 years later.
The Community Chapel Funeral Home (yes, a funeral home!) was designed by noted architect Clarence C. Bulger (whose father, C. W. Bulger, designed, among other things, the Praetorian Building downtown AND the just-mentioned McKinney Avenue Baptist Church which was right across the street).
City directory, 1929
In addition to the funeral home portion (reception area, business office, show rooms, “operating room” (!), chapel with seating for 100, and the euphemistically named “slumber room”), the building also contained a residence for the chief mortician and his embalmer wife, an apartment for the ambulance/hearse drivers, and a “pavilion for recreation of employees.” The building and its beautifully-appointed interior cost in excess of $100,000 (which the Inflation Calculator estimates is the equivalent of more than $13 million today!).
Also, an “oxygen plant” was somewhere on the grounds. I’ve never heard of an oxygen plant, but they seem to be a mortuary thing. Let’s hope recently-bereaved smokers were kept at a safe distance from all that highly flammable oxygen, because the company had a bunch of promotional matchbooks printed up, and I can only imagine they were readily available in tastefully-arranged candy dishes of every room of the establishment. And in those days, one didn’t necessarily step outside to smoke one’s anxiety away.
1937 Dallas directory
The funeral home at 2533 McKinney Avenue lasted almost thirty years. Sometime in the mid-’50s it was renovated into office and retail space (classified ads mentioned 2-, 3-, and 4-office suites). That lovely interior must have been hacked up pretty bad. An early tenant was the Bankers Securities Corporation, shown below in a newspaper ad from 1956 (someone made some poor choices on that renovation of the exterior). (This view shows an entrance from McKinney rather than Routh.)
Ad detail, Jan., 1956
For the next 40-odd years, 2533 McKinney Avenue was home to a variety of insurance agents, a fur salon, several companies that advertised in the classifieds for vague “salesmen” positions (one company did specify that it was looking for encyclopedia salesmen in 1963), art galleries, architect/design businesses, offices of “El Sol de Texas” (“the only Spanish-language newspaper in North Texas”), and antique shops.
It all turned around, though, when the long-suffering building was re-renovated and became a restaurant space. Since at least 1999 when Uptown began to explode, it’s been home to bistros, cafes, and upscale eateries. The photos below show some of the restaurants that have set up shop there, and if you know what you’re looking at, the place really does look very similar to C. C. Bulger’s design from almost 90 years ago.
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Le Paris Bistrot opened in 1999. The owner changed the name to Figaro Cafe in 2004 when the U.S. was going through an anti-French phase.
Urbano Paninoteca opened in 2007. Something called Split Peas Soup Cafe opened in 2009.
Then Sfuzzi opened with a big splash in 2010. (It had been a McKinney Avenue staple in the 1980s and ’90s, closed, and came back in 2010.) The first photo shows the Routh Street entrance, the second photo shows the McKinney entrance.
And now it’s the Fat Rabbit, which opened earlier this year. Let’s hope they get some landscaping in there STAT! (UPDATE: Fat Rabbit is now an ex-rabbit, and after spending some time of his own in the “slumber room,” he has joined the choir invisible. Next!)
And let’s hope that those tiled roofs and stuccoed walls remain a distinctive part of its future. I love the fact that it still looks a lot like it once did. And I actually like the fact that restaurants have been operating out of an old funeral home for over 15 years. Restaurateurs might be hesitant to publicize the building’s past (although I’m pretty sure most of them have been completely unaware of what the place used to be), but modern-day Harolds and Maudes might be giddy at the prospect of an unusual dining option and move this place right to the top of their date-night list.
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Top photo is a detail of the ad that appeared in the 1929 Dallas city directory. It shows four Cadillacs — a hearse, 5- and 7- passenger sedans, and an ambulance (“purchased from the Prather Cadillac Company”).
Matchbook artwork from Flickr, here.
The first Sfuzzi photo is from the food blog Scrumplicious Food, here. A GIGANTIC version of the photo can be seen here — you can look at all the details. Second photo of Sfuzzi from Yelp.
Fat Rabbit image from Google street view.
Sources of all other clippings and photos as noted.
Some images larger when clicked.
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Copyright © 2015 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
View from the penthouse (Huntington Library)
by Paula Bosse
The best view of the Dallas skyline that no longer exists may very well have been the view from atop the Maple Terrace Apartments, located on Maple Avenue, right across Wolf Street from the Stoneleigh Hotel. The photo above was taken in 1952, when there was a straight-shot view of downtown, with no hulking buildings to spoil the vista. This view — completely unobstructed except for the Stoneleigh (out of frame, at left) — must have been spectacular at night. (Although, as can be seen at the far right, the industrial area that surrounded the iconic DP&L smokestacks was also part of the view. Also not included in realtor brochures would have been the fact that the luxury apartment building overlooked the adjacent Little Mexico neighborhood, often described as a “slum area” — the huge economic disparity between the neighboring haves and have-nots would have been starkly apparent to any gimlet-sipping rooftop visitor. And then there was the not-so-distant meat-packing plant…. But I digress.)
The beautiful Maple Terrace Apartments — designed by architect Alfred Bossom (who also designed the Magnolia Building) — was built in 1924-25 and opened with great fanfare as the city’s first luxury apartments.
An early tenant was Morris Feldman, a Polish immigrant whose family owned the successful Parisian Fur Co. (later Parisian-Peyton). Morris’ son, the incredibly wealthy oilman and art collector, D. D. Feldman, must have been quite taken with his parents’ home there, because in the late ’40s or early ’50s, he transformed the entire seventh floor — which had previously contained 20 “hotel-type” units — into his personal penthouse. The patio terrace with the to-die-for view was the cherry on the sundae.
Countless cocktail parties, dinner parties, and fashionable teas were held in the Feldmans’ penthouse. The interior design — the work of Tom Douglas, of Los Angeles — was, apparently, much admired. The decor consisted of a mixture of typically cool Mid-Century Modern pieces as well as a few touches that, from a 21st-century vantage point, look a little … tacky. Somewhere in all of the acreage of furnishings was a fireplace, a white leather-covered piano (!), “a cocoa-striped sofa with pale blue frame,” murals, white brick wallpaper, and several pieces of furniture and cabinetry with a “driftwood finish.” And lots of lacquer. And mirrors, mirrors, mirrors. These “timeless furnishings in beige, marigold, white leather and ash” (DMN, Nov. 19, 1960) are dated relics of another era, but, at the time, they were splashed across the pages of magazines such as Architectural Digest.
As far as I know, the seventh floor of the Maple Terrace is still a single space. A 1978 real estate ad touted its “recently redecorated” 3,000 sq. ft. amenities:
Below, the present-day penthouse floor plan from the Maple Terrace’s website:
And, look, here’s a photo of what that entryway looks like now, (without the mural):
I’m sure the rooftop terrace is still as beautiful as ever, but, sadly, it will never again boast of that once-incredible view:
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Top photo (and all black and white photos from this series) by Maynard L. Parker, for Architectural Digest; from the Maynard L. Parker Collection at the Huntington Library, accessible here. The top photo is a detail, which has been cropped and reversed; the original photo is shown in reverse on the Huntington site (along with some early image “editing” on the outline of the Stoneleigh), which is a bit freaky when you know that what you’re looking at is backwards!
Color photos and floor plan from the website of the Maple Terrace Apartments, here. Biographical info on the architect, Sir Alfred Bossom, is here. Fabulous photos of the building from AIA Dallas, is here; and a wonderful piece on the mystique of living in the famed Maple Terrace from D Magazine, is here.
An intense and thorough description of the Feldmans’ penthouse decor is in the article “Feldman Apartment: Timeless Decorating” by Jeanne Barnes (Dallas Morning News, Nov. 19, 1960).
In addition to his oil holdings, D. D. Feldman was an important collector and patron of Texas art. In reading about Mr. Feldman, my favorite tidbit is this, from the book The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes by Bryan Burrough (Penguin, 2009):
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Copyright © 2015 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
Snow on Ross Avenue…
by Paula Bosse
A beautiful dusting of snow in one of the tonier areas of the city, captured by a postcard photographer in the early years of the 20th century — back when the snowy slush along Ross Avenue would have been caused by horses and the buggies they pulled behind them.
The date of this postcard is unknown, but at the end of 1902 (the same year the construction of the cathedral was completed) it snowed in Dallas — a “weather event” then (as now) so out of the ordinary that it resulted in these rapturous few paragraphs from the December 4, 1902 edition of The Dallas Morning News:
DMN, Dec. 4, 1902
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Postcard from Flickr, here.
The Belo Mansion was built in about 1890; more info here.
Construction of the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart (now the Cathedral Santuario de Guadalupe) was completed in 1902. Except for the bell tower, which, though part of the architect Nicholas J. Clayton’s original design, was not completed until 2005. More on this “sympathetic addition” from Architexas, here.
While most of the buildings and houses that once stood along ritzy Ross Avenue are long gone, both the Cathedral and the Belo Mansion still stand as Ross Avenue landmarks.
Below, the same view today (sans snow), via Google Street View (click for larger image). I really wish that iron fence was still there.
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Copyright © 2015 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
The company’s Dallas warehouse on N. Lamar (click for larger image)
by Paula Bosse
The Underwriters Salvage Company of New York (founded in 1893) was a business that worked with insurance companies and merchants in settling losses due to merchandise damaged by fire, water, etc. In their words:
Underwriters Salvage Co., 1920
There were branch offices in cities around the country, including Dallas, which was the location of the company’s Southwestern offices, or, their “Gulf Department,” located in the American Exchange National Bank Bldg. on Main St. The warehouse pictured above was at 2014-16 North Lamar (in the West End warehouse district, between McKinney Ave. and Munger). Not only would merchandise being readied for processing be stored there, there would probably also be large fans going full-blast to dry out and remove the smell of smoke from items that would soon be sold for bargain prices, either to the public or to wholesalers via “fire sales” or public auctions.
The company’s most famous fire sale (which they were quick to mention in later national advertising) was the huge dispersal of merchandise from the big fire at Neiman-Marcus in 1964. Instead of the usual, somewhat dull, inventories of shoes or boys’ coats or rope (“all sizes”), that sale included Neiman’s eye-poppingly expensive fur coats and other luxury goods (and, I think, every single piece of merchandise in the store that survived), all marked down to bargain basement prices. Now THAT is a fire sale.
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1913
1924
1924
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Top photo and text excerpt from a tiny pocket-sized booklet/calendar issued by the Underwriters Salvage Company of New York in 1920, featuring photos of the company’s branches around the United States.
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Copyright © 2015 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
by Paula Bosse
Today is the anniversary of Texas Independence. Below, you will find the most heart-swellingly patriotic bank ad ever penned. Before you plunge in, you might want to get a hanky. (Transcription below.)
Dallas Morning News, March 1, 1921
Four score and five years ago tomorrow a little band of fervent patriots, defying the tyranny of a foreign yoke, gave enduring form and substance to the underlying principles of a free and independent people.
Unfurling the Lone Star Flag to the Southern breeze, they gave its composite symbolism a lasting signification among the nations of the world. Courage, fidelity and truth — devotion to a single aim — wrought out of the wilderness a new empire, dedicated to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Immortalized in song and story, the signers of the Declaration of Texas Independence stand shoulder to shoulder in Texan annals with the martyrs of Goliad and the Alamo and the victors of San Jacinto.
We, therefore, shall honor them tomorrow, pausing in the excited quest for business triumphs to worship for a moment before the shrine of liberty and thus to renew the exalted sentiments in our own hearts that inspired the lives and melded the destinies of our heroic dead. Hence the Clearing House banks of Dallas, over and above a perfunctory obedience to ancient custom and the provisions of our own by-laws, shall close our doors in reverential memory of the sacrifices of men who placed duty before gold, freedom before prosperity and righteousness before luxurious living — actuated by the hope that in this simple tribute to their illustrious names, to their glorious deeds, we may imbibe more of the patriotic spirit that animated them and thus become, through an advancing excellence of citizenship, more worthy of the heritage which they have left us.
American Exchange National Bank
City National Bank
National Bank of Commerce
Dallas Trust and Savings Bank
Security National Bank
Central State Bank
Dallas National Bank
Composing the Dallas Clearing House Association
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Remember the Alamo! And remember the men who placed “righteousness before luxurious living”! (Even though that last part’s not exactly a sentiment that Dallas is typically known for….)
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Copyright © 2015 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
“Along the Tracks” by Jerry Bywaters, 1947 (Hamon Arts Lib., SMU)
by Paula Bosse
As we’re currently experiencing an extended period of cold, snowy, icy weather, what better time than now to post this atmospheric watercolor by Jerry Bywaters? Titled “Along the Tracks,” it was painted during a very cold and snowy early January of 1947, in the area around Fair Park (where Bywaters worked as the head of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts). Railroad tracks ran on either side of Fair Park — the Texas & New Orleans tracks ran along Trunk on the west side, and the Texas & Pacific tracks ran along Pacific on the east side. The DMFA was on the very western edge of Fair Park, and as it was bitterly cold, Bywaters probably wasn’t traipsing any farther than he had to — the west side of Fair Park near the T&NO tracks would certainly have been more convenient for him. But I came across a photo that looks pretty much the same as the scene Bywaters painted, only from the T&P side to the east, so who knows?
The photo above (taken around 1916) shows the intersection of Pacific and Parry, looking west on Pacific. “Along the tracks.”
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Jerry Bywaters’ painting “Along the Tracks” is from the Bywaters Special Collections in the Hamon Arts Library at Southern Methodist University; it can be accessed here. As far as I can tell, that street sign doesn’t actually say anything, but if you see something in the scribble, let me know!
The 1916-ish photograph of the Pacific and Parry intersection is from Dallas, The Deciding Years by A. C. Greene (Austin: Encino Press, 1973).
Here is a 1919 map detail showing the area around Fair Park (full map is here):
When Bywaters painted “Along the Tracks” it was REALLY cold. A couple of photos from the Jan. 1, 1947 edition of The Dallas Morning News show a snow-dusted Cotton Bowl and two very cute Oak Cliff teenage girls ice skating on West Jefferson Blvd.
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Copyright © 2015 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
“Dallas in Winter” by Guy Carleton Wiggins (Dallas Museum of Art)
by Paula Bosse
A nostalgic look back at a snowy Dallas scene from the 1940s by Guy Wiggins (1893-1962), an artist most remembered for his snow scenes of New York City. Wiggins was apparently quite fond of Dallas and was a frequent visitor, beginning in the 1920s. He had countless gallery shows here over the years, and while in town he’d often present lectures and “master classes” to arts groups and women’s groups. According to articles in local newspapers, Wiggins painted views of the Dallas skyline several times, paintings which no doubt found their way into private collections and are probably still hanging on the walls of local art patrons. In 1952, his daughter and her family moved here, giving Wiggins yet another reason to visit.
The wonderful snow scene above is in the collection of the Dallas Museum of Art; this is the DMA’s description of the painting:
A rare snowstorm in Dallas captured the eye of Guy Carleton Wiggins, who recorded this scene from the downtown vantage point of Live Oak and Pearl streets, showing the skyline’s distinctive historic landmark of the red statue of Pegasus on the Magnolia building.
Although born and raised in the East, where he was affiliated with the artists’ colony in Old Lyme, Connecticut, Wiggins traveled widely throughout the United States during his career. He became known for urban winter scenes such as this one.
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The painting “Dallas in Winter” by Guy Carleton Wiggins is from the Patsy Lacy Griffith Collection, Dallas Museum of Art; it was a bequest of Patsy Lacy Griffith. More information on the painting can be found on the DMA’s website, here.
(Patsy Lacy Griffith was the daughter of oil millionaire Rogers Lacy, who was this close to building the incredible Frank Lloyd Wright-designed hotel downtown. I wrote about it in a previous post, here.)
More on the career of Guy Wiggins, from Wikipedia, here, and from a 2011 New York Times profile of the Wiggins family of painters, here.
Because he visited so often and had many friends here (and because he apparently painted very quickly), Wiggins’ paintings were well represented in private collections in Dallas. (One of his earliest patrons was Miss Ela Hockaday, of the Hockaday School for Girls, who loaned one of her paintings for an exhibit at the Dallas Public Library in 1930.) Among works depicting views of the city were oil studies with the titles “Morning Over Dallas,” “The Akard Canyon,” “Dallas: Morning From Cliff Towers,” and “Dallas Nocturne,” all of which were probably still damp when first shown, as The Dallas Morning News reported that they had been painted “little more than a week ago” before they went on display at the Ed Spillars gallery on Fairmount at the end of December, 1948 (DMN, Dec. 22, 1948). I’d love to see these paintings.
Want “Dallas in Winter” hanging on your walls? Buy the poster from the DMA Shop here. Look at it longingly when it’s 157 degrees in August.
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Copyright © 2015 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
The Paul Laurence Dunbar Branch of the Dallas Public Library
by Paula Bosse
The Paul Laurence Dunbar Branch of the Dallas Public Library was the first library in Dallas to welcome and serve the African-American community. It opened in June, 1931 at the northwest corner of Thomas and Worthington in what was then the predominantly black neighborhood of “North Dallas” (the area is now known as “Uptown”), a thriving business and residential neighborhood which was home to everyone from the city’s black professionals who lived in large, lovely gingerbread-style houses, to middle- and lower-class black families who lived in more modest homes.
This was a time when almost every aspect of life was racially segregated — the grand downtown Carnegie Library was expressly off-limits to non-whites, and few of the black schools had any sort of functioning library. It was a long, hard bureaucratic battle of petitioning the city, the state, the Carnegie corporation … anyone … for a library which the city’s woefully underserved black citizens could call their own. It took years until the powers-that-be gave the go-ahead to finally build one. The building was designed by Dallas architects Ralph Bryan and Walter Sharp.
The charming one-story, brick-and-reinforced-concrete building was very, very popular and was a source of pride in the community. And it was beautiful!
The reference and reading room
Opening-day crowds, June 1931
Children in costumes to celebrate National Book Week, Nov. 1949
Even though the photo featured in the ad below is very grainy, it’s still kind of cool (from 1958, one year before the branch closed).
1958 Lincoln High School yearbook
In the late 1940s, construction began on Central Expressway. Unfortunately, this much-needed highway cut right through the heart of the North Dallas/State-Thomas/Freedman’s Town area. The destruction of many of the area’s buildings and displacement of many of its residents was a devastating blow to the African-American community who lived, worked, and shopped there. That and other economic forces led to the eventual dispersal of the area’s black population to other parts of the city. By the 1950s, the library had lost many of its core patrons, and in 1959 the Dunbar Branch closed. At some point that beautiful building, located just a few blocks south of McKinney Avenue, was demolished. The historic State-Thomas area has now been almost completely obliterated as “Uptown” has taken over. And another part of the city’s history has been lost.
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All photos are from the book Dallas Public Library, Celebrating a Century of Service 1901-2001 by Michael V. Hazel (Denton: University of North Texas Press/Friends of the Dallas Public Library, 2001); photos are presumably from The Texas/Dallas History & Archives Division of the Dallas Public Library.
Hazel’s chapter on the Dunbar Branch is well worth reading. Not only is it interesting (and kind of shocking) to learn the lengths to which the black community had to go simply in order to have access to a library system which their tax dollars were helping to support, but there are also more wonderful photos like the ones above. The Dunbar chapter is accessible here.
Two articles of interest from the archives of The Dallas Morning News:
The library’s (white) architects, Ralph Bryan and Walter Sharp also designed the nearby Moorland YMCA — it was built at almost the same time as the library, and, hallelujah, that building still stands, currently housing the Dallas Black Dance Theatre. A few years later Sharp designed Lincoln High School in South Dallas. All in all, these architects were responsible for three extremely important buildings that served Dallas’ black citizens.
Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) was one of the first nationally prominent African-American writers; more about him, here.
There is another Dunbar branch library in the Dallas Public Library system — the website for the Paul Laurence Dunbar Lancaster-Kiest Branch Library is here.
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Copyright © 2015 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
Old Red doesn’t disappoint (click for larger image)
by Paula Bosse
A quick note to the folks back home on an impressive picture postcard.
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Copyright © 2015 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
Flashback : Dallas 