A lonely stretch of Central Expressway…
by Paula Bosse
Above, we see a new section of US 75/Central Expressway, north of Loop 12/Northwest Highway, 1955.
Just let that sink in a moment.
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From an incredibly informative blog on Dallas-area freeways. The photographs documenting the construction of Central are great — check ’em out here.
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Copyright © 2014 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
(click for larger image)
by Paula Bosse
A word from a secretary:
I’m a secretary, and I prefer The Dallas Morning News.
My boss refers to me as his “Girl Friday” because I am more than an ordinary secretary. I make more money than an ordinary secretary makes, too.
Questions come up from time to time and I am able to supply the answers … simply because I start my day the happy way … with The Dallas Morning News.
I read it all … the news, editorials, even glance through the business and sports sections. I pay particular attention to current affairs, both foreign and domestic.
For myself, I browse the women’s pages … the fashion news, club activities, and all the special features. The advertising is very helpful. I do most of my shopping during the lunch hour. I always know where to go for what I want without having to shop around.
If you are a secretary and would like for your job to be more interesting … and valuable, too … here’s a tip. Start your day the happy way with The Dallas Morning News.
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Copyright © 2014 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
by Paula Bosse
It’s tax day. Here’s a photo of men drinking illegally and gambling. Cheers!
“Dallas voted for Prohibition October 1917 — but it didn’t go dry, as this workingman’s speakeasy (a word not developed then) shows. One sign assures drinkers ‘No Neer Beer Served.’ This is a basement of some downtown building, address unknown.”
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Photo and caption from Dallas, The Deciding Years by A. C. Greene (Austin: Encino Press, 1973).
Click picture for larger image.
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Copyright © 2014 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
The future is NOW! (click for larger image)
by Paula Bosse
In amongst things the things I’ve haphazardly collected (and I use the term loosely) over the years is this postcard. The image looks familiar to me, as if I remember actually seeing it — but I think that might just be because I’ve looked at this postcard so long. The first thing that popped into my head when I saw it was “turnpike,” but until I read up on the history of local highways (my days are fun-filled!), I wasn’t entirely sure where the turnpike had been other than “the other side of downtown, toward Fort Worth.” Did I ever see this sign and attendant weird looming structures when I was a child? Unless it was still up in the ’70s, I probably didn’t. So what is it?
Here’s the text from the back:
It was somewhere around Arlington and Grand Prairie, back when it was still a vast, undeveloped area being planned in the mid-1950s by Angus Wynne who would, a few years later, bring us Six Flags Over Texas. (US Hwy 80 no longer runs west of Dallas — that stretch is now, I think, Hwy 180 — it was shoved off its Great American Interstate Highway pedestal by the DFW Turnpike and the arrival of what is now Interstate 30.)
1961 (Texas Highways photo by Willis Albarado)
But … “hyperbolic paraboloids”? Those things are so cool. The “hyperbolic paraboloid” was developed by Mexico-based Spanish engineer-architect Felix Candela who worked in the Dallas area with the great architect O’Neil Ford (on, specifically, the Great Southwest Industrial District and the Texas Instruments Semiconductor Building). Candela is pretty interesting — look him up. Without Candela’s paraboloids and his contributions to engineering and architecture, Santiago Calatrava probably wouldn’t be doing the sort of thing that he’s doing.
Here’s another view of (other) paraboloids out on the Texas prairie. They’re like elegant, curved, inverted parasols. Kind of. Made from thin shells of concrete. (One source identified these paraboloids as being part of the Great Southwestern Industrial District and another source as being from the Texas Instruments campus. (See 1958 TI ad below.) Either way, it’s Felix Candela, all the way.)
I’m still trying to figure out if I ever saw that fantastic sign and those three silent, looming paraboloids. It’s all pretty cool-looking, and it must have been an unexpected sight in the middle of what was, then, basically nothing.
Speaking of Candela and Calatrava, here’s a photo of the two together:
And here’s another paraboloid-y structure that stands out in the DFW area — you might have seen it:
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Photo of Calatrava and Candela from the blog An Engineer’s Aspect, here.
Photo of the Calatrava bridge from Pinterest, here.
A good overview of Felix Candela’s work, with photos and a video, is on the Columbia University website, here.
The Great Southwest Industrial District (Arlington and Grand Prairie) still exists, and their website has a history page which explains its creation and development by Angus Wynne, here.
Lastly, who could resist reading up on just what the heck a “hyperbolic paraboloid” is (warning: math) — Wikipedia’s on it, here.
A 1958 Texas Instruments ad wants you to know that “hyperbolic paraboloids form roof-ceiling” (click to see larger image):
1958
UPDATE: Thanks to comments below, I’m happy to present another photo of the paraboloids, this one from the cover of the 1960 Arlington High School yearbook, complete with Shetland pony! Click the image below to see a larger image of the photo inset. (Thanks to Brad McCorkle for alerting me to the photo — it was taken by his father, Lynn McCorkle, intrepid student photographer!)
ANOTHER UPDATE, from the comments: this still-standing building at 10830 Preston Road (Preston Royal Shopping Center) was one of many that utilized hyperbolic paraboloids in its design. The American Savings Association building (designed by Brock & Mabrey of Corpus Christi, with Braden & Jones of Dallas as associated architects) opened in March, 1966.
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Copyright © 2014 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
by Paula Bosse
A bustling Elm St. — looking west from Akard — in “color,” in the early ’20s. I love this. You can practically walk down the street and window-shop.
Click for very large image.
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Copyright © 2014 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
by Paula Bosse
Abraham Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth on April 14, 1865; he died the next morning. I wondered how the news had been reported in Dallas. I couldn’t find the first mention of the assassination in The Dallas Herald, but it seems there may have been a special “extra” edition published on or just after April 29th — a full two weeks after the fact! The one thing I kept encountering in general Google searches were mentions of the vicious, celebratory editorial that appeared in the pages of the Herald — these reports always quote the line “God Almighty ordered this event or it could never have taken place.” I found that editorial. It appeared in the two-page Dallas Herald on May 4, 1865, along with detailed reports of the assassination.
The image resolution here is pretty bad (it is transcribed below), but, yes, this eye-poppingly vitriolic editorial did appear in the pages of The Dallas Herald — but it did not originate with the Herald (which is not to say that the Dallas editor wasn’t in agreement with the sentiments expressed). The editorial was reprinted from the Houston Tri-Weekly Telegraph (which had run it ten days previously, on April 24); its appearance in the Dallas paper is even clearly prefaced with the following: “The Houston Telegraph, in speaking of the killing of Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Seward, says…” — so it’s unclear why so many historians and authors mention this editorial as being the product of The Dallas Herald.
The editorial was unsigned, but it was probably written by William Pitt Ballinger, whose previous flame-fanning tirades against the president in the pages of the Telegraph must have caused even hard-core Confederate-leaning brows to raise. I’ve transcribed the full editorial below. For whatever reasons, the Dallas Herald omitted the first and last paragraphs — probably because of space limitations, but one would like to think that even a pro-Confederacy newspaper would think it best to leave out a phrase such as “The killing of Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Seward may be more wonderful than the capitulation of armies.” Yikes. Imagine a mainstream newspaper printing something like that following the assassination of President Kennedy.
Below is the full astonishing text of the editorial that originally appeared in the Houston Tri-Weekly Telegraph on April 24, 1865. The stark reality of historical events and the contemporaneous tenor of the times can look a lot different when seen from a distance of 150 years.
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We publish to-day the most astounding intelligence it has ever been our lot to place before our readers — intelligence of events which may decide the fate of empires, and change the complexion of an age. The killing of Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Seward may be more wonderful than the capitulation of armies.
With the perpetration of these deeds we can have no sympathy, nor for them can the Southern people be held any way responsible. While Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Seward had by their malignity created only feelings of detestation and horror for them in the minds of our people, and while in their death the finger of God’s providence is manifest, it is still impossible to look upon an assassin with complacency, even though he frees us from the threatened yoke of a tyrant. We look upon his as God’s instrument, and as such leave him with his maker, praying for infinite mercy to succor him in his hour of need.
God Almighty ordered this event or it could never have taken place. His purpose in it as His purpose in the surrender of Lee’s army, remains to be seen. The careful observer of the history of this war is struck with nothing more than with the fact that no great event has been foreseen by the actors, and that an Almighty hand has shaped the entire course of events. What this event will lead to no man can foresee. We are all instruments in His hands for the accomplishment of His purposes. The ways of Providence are inscrutable, utterly past finding out. It behooves us His creatures to look on in wonder and to act the part of duty according to the lights before us. That duty leads us to be true to our faith, true to our cause, and while it forbids our sanction to unlawful violence — to assassination — it commands us to accept all things as ordered by a Supreme Power, to bow to the exhibitions of that power, and to obey the manifest teachings of His will.
What will [be] the result of these tremendous events, no man can foresee. Theories will present themselves to every man’s mind. We have a dozen all equally probable, and all equally uncertain. Let us wait in patience for the next scene in this terrible drama.
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Top image is an engraving of the assassination in Ford’s Theatre from Harper’s Weekly, April 29, 1865.
Editorial is from The Houston Tri-Weekly Telegraph, published April 24, 1865 (Vol. 31, No. 13). You can view a scan of the original newspaper via the indispensable Portal to Texas History, here (it is at the top right of the page, last column). Reprinted without the first and last paragraph by The Dallas Herald ten days later on May 4, 1865 (Vol. 12, No. 36).
Editorial is probably by William Pitt Ballinger, a Galveston attorney. His editorial screeds for the Telegraph are mentioned in the just-published Loathing Lincoln: An American Tradition from the Civil War to the Present, by John McKee Barr (LSU Press, 2014), p. 53 — read an excerpt here. Read more about Ballinger — the “brilliant attorney and political insider” — here.
An interesting article titled “The Last Newspaper to Report the Lincoln Assassination” is here. The article is about The Houston Tri-Weekly Telegraph, but it looks like The Dallas Herald was even SLOWER to report the news.
“We received on Saturday last [April 29] the dispatches containing the assassination of Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Seward, by a letter from Maj. Stackpole to his family at this place, and published them in an extra. There was some little discrtepancy and an omission in them as published then, which we find corrected in the Houston Telegraph’s dispatches which we publish to-day.” (Dallas Herald, May 5, 1865)
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Copyright © 2014 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
by Paula Bosse
Two works by local artists closely connected with (if not actually IN) the influential Dallas Nine group of painters and printmakers. Both works are titled “Rainy Day.”
The top print is a lithograph by Charles T. Bowling (1891-1985) and is undated. (From the Bywaters Special Collections, Hamon Arts Library, Southern Methodist University.)
The second print, also a lithograph, is by Everett F. Spruce (1908-2002), dated 1944. (From the collection of the Dallas Museum of Art, a gift of A. H. Belo Corporation and The Dallas Morning News, via the Central University Libraries of SMU.)
Stay dry!
Click pictures for larger images.
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Copyright © 2014 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
Photo by Silver Lighthouse/Flickr
by Paula Bosse
Here’s a topic that isn’t very sexy, but it’s one of those mammoth-scale city-wide operations that had to be done, but no one wanted to tackle it because it was a huge undertaking and it was going to be a big hassle: re-numbering the streets. All of them. Throughout the entire city. I wasn’t aware that something like this had ever happened until I started using old criss-cross directories to try to pinpoint the location of old buildings that were originally built on streets that no longer exist (such as Poydras and Masten).
Why, for instance, is the current address of the Majestic Theatre 1925 Elm St., but in 1909 that same parcel of land on Elm had an address of 463 (-ish)? Weird, huh? Obviously street numbers changed at some point, but when? And why? Eventually I zeroed in on 1910 or 1911 as the year when addresses seemed to have changed, but I was having a hard time finding any information about what prompted the change in the first place. Until I hit on the key phrase “century system.” After that, my search became much easier.
As far back as the 1880s, the city seemed poised to address the haphazard street numbering situation, as it was causing “endless confusion” — the powers-that-be had even seemed to settled on the “century system” (so called because each block is numbered up to 100, with a new hundred starting in the next block). But progress moves at a snail’s pace in city government, and the plan didn’t start picking up steam until fifteen or twenty years later.
In the early days of the 20th century, the numbering of Dallas streets was, as one mail carrier described it, “freakish.” Numbers weren’t always consecutive. Sometimes odd and even numbers were on the same side of the street. Sometimes a run of numbers would suddenly start all over again. Houses sometimes had TWO numbers. People would move and expect to take their number with them. Buildings and houses often had NO numbers. Street signs were few and far between, and it wasn’t uncommon for street names to be duplicated in different parts of town. As you can imagine, unless you were intimately familiar with the area or neighborhood, chances were that you weren’t going to be able to find anything. Unsurprisingly, the real pressure to come up with some sort of logical, uniform street numbering system came from the city’s postmasters and postal employees (that they managed to regularly deliver mail to the proper recipients is just short of miraculous).
Postmaster Albert G. Joyce (one in a line of several postmasters who tried to effect change over the years) wrote an impassioned/frustrated plea for action in 1904:
(DMN, May, 18, 1904)
Everyone agreed that something needed to be done — especially as the city’s population was growing at an astronomical rate, but … nothing got done. Here, at the end of 1907, another exasperated postal employee shared examples of the problem:
(DMN, Dec. 7, 1907)
By 1909, a plan was finally starting to come together. This article describes how the numbering system would be implemented downtown, starting from the Trinity River, with Main and Ervay being the east-west and north-south anchors:
(DMN, Dec. 17, 1909)
Even though the plan had basically been decided on, it wasn’t put into action for at least a year. There were three main reasons to delay the implementation: city directories had already been compiled and were to be issued soon, the 1910 census survey was about to begin, and the post office (which would bear the brunt of the impact of the drastic change) asked that the changeover take place before or after the busy holiday season.
By the end of 1910, the final details had been hammered out. The main change to the previous version of the plan was that the city, rather than the property owners, would pay for the re-numbering. Also, I don’t know if this was a new detail or not, but there is mention here that numbering east of Greenville Ave. would “begin anew.” The re-numbering was expected to be completed in January, 1911.
(DMN, Oct. 1, 1910)
By the middle of January, 1911 the long-put-off task was completed, ending in Oak Cliff. The cost to the city of the “number placement” and the new street signs was $10,500.
(DMN, Jan. 15, 1911)
The problem that had been moaned about for decades had been fixed, and a uniform system of street numbering had finally been put in place.
(DMN, Apr., 30, 1911)
I can’t imagine how much of a headache and how unbelievably confusing the whole process and aftermath must have been. Several businesses, concerned that their clientele might have a difficult time “finding” them, hedged their bets by including BOTH address — the old and the new — on their letterhead and in their ads. This two-address thing went on for quite a while with some businesses — in fact, leading real estate man J. W. Lindsley was so annoyed by this practice that he complained about it to the Morning News in 1916 (a full five years after the switch!). Even though, ahem, Lindsley was one of the few advertisers in the Blue Book Directory for 1912-14 who did that very thing:
Unlike his competitor, Murphy & Bolanz, who had just the one (but still felt compelled to add the “new” to the address):
And that is today’s lesson on how Dallas finally bit the bullet and gave the entire city new addresses.
(And now I know that Neiman Marcus apparently IS the center of Dallas.)
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UPDATE: HOW TO FIND THE OLD OR NEW ADDRESS. When I first wrote this, I’m not sure if I knew about the very handy resource Jim Wheat provided on his website: the 1911 Worley’s Dallas street directory, here. This is one way you can determine what the post-address-changeover was if you know the pre-1911 address (or vice-versa): find the street name and click on it. You’ll find two columns: one showing the “new” address, and the other the “old” address. (These aren’t always exact, but it at least gets you in the right block number to investigate further.) If you don’t know a specific address, you can make an educated guess according to the cross-streets. Thank you, Jim Wheat!
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Photo of Young St. sign from Flickr, here. It’s great.
All newspaper articles from The Dallas Morning News.
The two real estate ads from The Standard Blue Book of Texas, 1912-14, Dallas Edition (Dallas: A. J. Peeler and Company, n.d.).
Slightly fuzzy Ervay-Main sign from Google Street View.
An early article about this issue, “Street Numbering, A Neglected Matter to Receive Attention Soon” (Dallas Daily Times-Herald, Nov. 22, 1889) can be found here.
And if you’re interested in just what goes into tackling a problem like this in modern times, hie yourself over to “Street-Naming and Property-Numbering Systems” by Margaret A. Corwin (American Planning Assn., ca. 1976). Read the entire report here, in a PDF. I’m nothing if not thorough.
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Copyright © 2014 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
by Paula Bosse
That parasol was white when she left the house.
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Stereograph card titled “Texas and Pacific Railroad ‘Flier,’ Dallas, Tex.” (1909), from the Library of Congress.
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Copyright © 2014 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
An Oriental Oil Co. competitor, at 1805 Commerce
by Paula Bosse
I cropped this detail from a much larger view of Commerce Street because this incidental, everyday moment caught my attention. Was that man filling his automobile with gasoline? Was that square, boxy, hip-high thing full of gas, right there at the curb of one of the city’s busiest streets? The sign above the pump reads “PENNSYLVANIA AUTO OIL GASOLINE SUPPLY STATION.” I looked into it, and now I know more about early gas pumps and stations than I ever thought I would.
In the very early days of automobiles, one would have to seek out a supplier of gasoline (such as a hardware store or even a drugstore) where you would buy a gallon or two and carry it home with you in a bucket or something and then carefully pour it into your car’s gas tank using a trusty funnel. After a few years of this inconvenient way to gas up, these curbside pumps began to pop up in larger cities. The pump seen above was at 1805 Commerce St. and belonged to the Pennsylvania Oil Company. It opened in early 1912. That got me to wondering about other such fueling stations, and it seems the first in Dallas may have belonged to the Oriental Oil Company, just down the street from the one seen above, at 1611 Commerce. Here is a fuzzy image of it, from the same, larger photo the detail above was taken from. (Click for larger image.)
Could this photo have been taken there? It was listed on eBay merely as “Oriental Oil Company, Dallas, 1910-1920.”
Oriental Oil’s first “auto station” opened in February, 1911, where “facilities have been arranged so as to fill the cars along the sidewalk.”
(Dallas Morning News, Feb. 26, 1911)
Drive-up “stations” had begun to appear a few years before, on the West Coast.
(Texas Dept. of Transportation, 2003)
In a 1924 Dallas Morning News article (see below), the pump seen in the above photos was described thusly:
Dallas’ first gas filling station had a one-gallon blind pump on the curb which was then thought to be the last word in equipment. Now if a filling station is not equipped with a visible five-gallon pump it is thought to be behind the times and the gas now sold must be water white, when in the old days it was most any color.
This, I think, is what the Oriental and Pennsylvania rolling tanks looked like — the make and model may be different, but I think the general design is the same:
When it was empty, it would be rolled away to be re-filled. I’m not sure about the payment system. Coupon books are mentioned in one of the ads, but I don’t know how (or with whom) one would redeem them as these pumps appear to be self-serve. Perhaps there was a slot for coins/coupons, and everyone worked on the honor system.
It seems that its placement would cause a lot of congestion on a major street like Commerce (which at the time was still shared with skittish horses), but Commerce was also a hotbed of automobile dealerships (Studebaker, Stutz, and Pierce-Arrow dealerships, for example, were within a couple of blocks of the Oriental and Pennsylvania filling stations).
The Oriental Oil Company — a forgotten, early oil company — had an interesting history. The Dallas-based company began business in 1903, starting their company “in a barn in the rear of the Loudermilk undertaking establishment.”
(Southern-Mercury, Dec. 31, 1903)
They were a fast-growing oil company (“an independent concern which in spite of the strong opposition of the oil trust is now enjoying permanent and growing prosperity” – Greater Dallas Illustrated, 1908), and they were one of the first to open a refinery in Texas (they eventually had two refineries in West Dallas). The company’s primary concern in its early years was the manufacture of various oils and greases for industrial use.
Oriental Oil Company Factory, corner of Corinth St. and Santa Fe tracks, circa 1908
In 1911, understanding just how profitable the new world of retail gasoline sales could be, they installed their first pump at the curb of 1611 Commerce St., near Ervay (“right behind the Owl Drug Store”). A 1924 Dallas Morning News account of the company (see below) states that this was the first gas pump … not only in Dallas … but in the entire state of Texas. I’m not sure if that’s true, but the Smith Brothers who ran Oriental Oil were certainly go-getters — the Smiths were grandsons of Col. B. F. Terry, organizer of the famed Terry’s Texas Rangers, and one of the brothers, Frank, was an early mayor of Highland Park and a three-term president of the Dallas Chamber of Commerce.
(DMN, Oct. 8, 1911)
(DMN, Jan. 28, 1912)
Shortly after opening their first pump on Commerce, demand was such that a second pump was soon opened at 211 Lane St. (a mere half a block away!). The DMN reported on Oct. 19, 1911 that a competitor — Consumers’ Oil and Auto Company — was going to be right across the street: “Permission was given to the Consumers’ Oil and Auto Company to place a gasoline tank under the sidewalk at 214 Lane street.” And in March 1912 the Pennsylvania Oil Company was installing ITS underground tank for the pump seen in the photo at the top — again, less than a block away. And in 1916 Oriental opened its splashy new “‘Hurry Back’ Auto Station” right across the street from where that Pennsylvania tank had been. (That Commerce-Ervay area was certainly an early gas station hotbed!)
(DMN, Aug. 29, 1916)
Newspaper reports also cite claims made by the company that the station mentioned in the ad above — at Commerce and Prather — was the first drive-in gas station in the United States. I’m sure this was good truth-stretching PR for Oriental more than anything, because this claim was not true (Seattle and Pittsburgh seem to be battling each other for that honor). It might not have been the first, but when this “auto station” opened in 1916 (assuming it was “new” as this ad states), it was still pretty early in the history of the drive-in filling station. Also, by 1916, “Hurry Back” had become the company’s slogan as well as the name of its gasoline.
(DMN, Oct. 22, 1918)
(Jewish Monitor, 1920; detail)
(DMN, Apr. 11, 1921)
(DMN, Mar. 5, 1922)
I love these ads!
By 1927, the company boasted at least 18 filling stations, two refineries, and branches in Fort Worth and San Antonio. In 1927 they had moved into new offices in the “Oriental Building” at the nexus of Live Oak, St. Paul, and Pacific. A newspaper report described the building as being “finished in Oriental colors with Oriental decorations and is marked at night by very attractive lighting” (DMN, May 1, 1927).
The Oriental Oil Company declared bankruptcy in 1934, selling off their property, refineries, and their name. No more Oroco gas. A lot of companies went bust during the Great Depression, but I’m not sure what precipitated Oriental Oil’s bankruptcy. Actually, I’m surprised by how little information about the Oriental Oil Company I’ve been able to find. Afterall, it and its “Hurry Back” gasoline played a major role in getting the residents of Dallas off their horses and behind the wheel, a major cultural and economic shift that changed the city forever. And it all started at that weird little curbside gas pump on Commerce Street.
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The first two images are details of a photograph by Jno. J. Johnson (“New Skyline from YMCA”), 1912/1913, from the DeGolyer Library, Central University Libraries, Southern Methodist University, viewable here.
Snippet of text from A Field Guide to Gas Stations of Texas by Dwayne Jones (Texas Department of Transportation, 2003).
Illustration of the two 1913 Tokheim portable gas pumps from An Illustrated Guide to Gas Pumps, Identification and Price Guide, 2nd Edition by John H. Sim (Iola, WI: Krause Publications, 2008).
Drawing of the Oriental Oil Company Factory from Greater Dallas Illustrated (Dallas: American Illustrating Co., 1908 — reprinted by Friends of the Dallas Public Library in 1992).
All ads and articles, unless otherwise noted, from The Dallas Morning News.
Color photo of the pink, purple, and gold Oriental Oil Bldg. is a detail from a photo taken around 1977, on Flickr, here.
For an interesting (and mostly accurate) mini-history of the Oriental Oil Company, then in its 20th year of operation, see the Dallas Morning News article “First Dallas Filling Station on Commerce Had One-Gallon Pump” (June 22, 1924).
Some nifty info on early gas stations (yes, really) here.
More info with some really great illustrations and photos here.
Another surprisingly fun and informative article is here.
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Copyright © 2014 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
Flashback : Dallas 