Swank in The Arts; 149; Illustration art - Bart Forbes, Jack Unruh & Kip Lott

... ... ... ... Dallas is a city that has won some and lost some of the battles that historic preservation seems always to involve. Both the victories and the defeats have served to heighten the public sense of what the city was and the importance of keeping an awareness of the past while serving the needs of the present in the future. One of the best witnesses to this fact is the new vitality of the Dallas Historical Society and the success of Dallas rediscovered. Which William McDonald wrote and the society published. It's only been out a few months and its first printing is already sold out. Some of the elements that shaped this city are still in operation, for better and for worse.

I invited Long Taylor, curator of history for the Dallas Historical Society to talk about them. And we have enlarged that conversation with reproductions from the pictures used in Dallas rediscovered. Maps taken from George Kessler's 1911 master plan for Dallas and with pictures taken by Dan Parr within the last few weeks. Long you're the curator of an historical organization in a city where there's a really growing interest in preservation. Where is it that these two areas of activity meet and in what functions do they differ? Well, in a number of ways, perhaps in the first place, preservation involves the preservation of buildings and buildings are one kind of historical evidence so that when we go to look at the past of the city, we have various kinds of things we can look at. We can look at diaries, letters, we can look at photographs, we can interview people, we can do oral history, or we can look at the structures that those people built and frequently those structures tell us more about the history of the city than the documents and the interviews and the photographs do.

So in that way, preservation is important to history. Now, in another way, we serve preservationists by providing them with research from documents and photographs and oral histories. So that when, for instance, they were getting ready to restore the Bilo mansion and they're doing some work there now. And we got a call from the architect saying, you know, do you have any photographs of the Bilo mansion or the interiors of the Bilo mansion? Or is there anything in the deal with papers which we happen to have that relates to the building of the Bilo mansion? So frequently an archive or a library might even contain papers of the architect or the builder which would give you information about preservation. So we relate, we serve each other.

The preservationists help us by preserving evidence and we help the preservationists by providing them with another kind of evidence. You also have helped each other in the preparation of this really marvelous book. This is the first book that the Historical Society has published at least recently. Yes, this is the first one in the past ten years. Dallas, a photographic chronicle. Dallas rediscovered urban expansion. And Dallas really expanded in those years. What are the elements that come to your mind of Dallas history that made it look the way it looks today? Is there some special thing? Oh, sure. All cities, you know, take their spatial form from the historical forces. And in Dallas, the main force, of course, was the railroad. And the fact that when the Houston and Texas Central Railroad was built to Dallas, and it ran just for a central expressway, does now, it missed town by about a mile and a half. And so the town, which was clustered around the courthouse square, grew linearly east to pick up the railroad station. A second force, of course, was the TNP railroad.

When they came to Dallas the year after the HNTC, this is in 1873. They bought their tracks right down Pacific Avenue, right through town. And so they studied the growth of the town to the north for a considerable time. Those tracks were built up on a big high embankment at about 12 feet high. And it was very difficult to get across them. Was that a natural embankment or was it a... It was a filled earth embankment. It was built to compensate for the slight slope downwards towards the river. And speaking of the river, of course, that's another force that shaped Dallas, a spatial out. I'm always amused by the fact that a lot of people who live here do not know that the river has been moved. And that in the 1860s and the 1770s isn't right up to the 1920s. It ran at the bluff right at the foot of the courthouse, just about where the triple underpass is now. And of course, it flooded and caused all sorts of problems. Mill Creek, which flowed into it down there, about where Sears is now, tended to back up and flood that whole part of South Dallas. Which is why that section of town never really developed as a desirable residential area.

It was boggy and wet and unhealthy. And even after the first levees, the river was not contained to the west. That's correct. Which is that one reason that West Dallas has remained a poor part of town. Because there were no services that could be extended across the river. One of the points that this book makes is that land speculation is, in fact, a way of life in this whole country. But nowhere more so, probably than in Texas. What parallels do you see between those early days and the latter parts, say after the turn of the century and into the middle part of this century? Well, of course you have continuing real estate development and land speculation. It was accelerated enormously in the 20th century. But the seeds of what have gone on since World War II were there in the 1850s and 60s and 70s.

You had people buying land on the edge of town laying out a subdivision. And then, of course, there was a tool available that is not available now to real estate speculators. Which was the street car and a real estate speculator would buy a street car line or build a street car line to the place that he wanted people to settle in. And then, set off lots around the street car line. When did that stop? Oh, in the 1920s, I think, really. You know, a league park over here in Oakland was originally owned by a street car company. And it was a little amusement park in the end of the street car line. And the idea was that people would ride out there, amuse themselves, and then purchase lots along the line of that street car. Well, was that true of all of the rest of that northern part of the city, northern development, where there lines out? Pretty much the Belmont subdivision, which, you know, were a Belmont street.

In East Dallas, right? Greenville of Skillman over there. That was in the end of a street car line that was owned by the Belmont interest, August Belmont in New York. Well, you mentioned that buildings are a part of history and that the preservation of buildings tell you much about what you need to know. Is the same true of environment. You speak, for instance, of league park as being an amusement park. Is that the only other reason that there were parks in Dallas in the early days? Were they still a part of business? Yeah, the basic reason that our first parks were created were to aid real estate speculation. The very first city park, all city park, was part of a street car speculation now. In 1876, there were some very prominent men from Dallas who went to Philadelphia to attend the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. And they came back very, very much impressed with Philadelphia's system of public parks, which existed, of course, for health reasons, you know, for recreational reasons.

And it was there, the tremendous impression that Philadelphia made on them that caused them to lay out Turtle Creek as a park. Well, what was happening to Mill Creek at the same time? Because Mill Creek was there. I mean, nobody, nobody cared to speculate in that. Sure, because it was a poor part of town. It was in South Dallas, there were mills, it was where the textile mills were located, which, of course, has its name. But it flowed all the way up to almost SMU, didn't it? Wasn't that the original? Well, it was very, very, it was just a small, intermittent creek when you got up there. I see. Mill Creek widened out just before getting to that neighborhood called the Seaters. Uh-huh. Just about in there where it interstate 30 miles now. Well, I never realized that perhaps that was the reason that it was not saved, that it was not as beautiful further up as Turtle Creek was.

Well, as you know, well, of course, the reason that Turtle Creek was improved is because these people who went to Philadelphia happened to own a large piece of land around Turtle Creek. It was the X-Aul farm. And Henry X-Aul, who was the developer of Highland Park University Park, was one of those people who laid out the park around Turtle Creek. Do you think that could have been considered a good investment? Oh, definitely. Sure. I think it's one of the prettiest places in Dallas. Well, the reason I asked the question is if it was considered why didn't more people do it, is the years went on. In other words, why wasn't Mill Creek? Well, maybe Mill Creek or maybe other parks set up in that same way. Did that not show itself immediately? As a good investment. Yeah, I think it did, but, you know, Dallas in Texas in general has a very conservative political philosophy about the use of public power and public land. And I think that the members of our city councils over the years, until, you know, pretty recently, until in the 1920s and 30s, simply did not see public parks as something that public money ought to be spent on.

Hmm. Well, that's true all over Texas. Well, it's also true because there was still open land all around. You could get out in the country often recently. You could go down on the Trinity bottom and fish and hunt down there. Or go out on the prairie and hunt rabbits and that sort of thing. Would you... Well, let's go back to the things that you talked about. You spoke about the railroads. You spoke about the Trinity flooding, you spoke of the streetcar developments and various cons as being elements that changed Dallas. What of those are still operative? Well, of course, the evidence of the railroads is still very, very strong, central expressway, which runs right through town. It's laid out along the railroads track, along the Old Houston and Texas Central Park.

That's right. An even stronger piece of evidence is the enormous warehouse district. Because the presence of the railroads made Dallas a distributing center for all of... Well, all of North Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, the whole Dallas Street area. And it created this enormous warehouse district down there around the courthouse, where the part of the Old and North building is and the John Deere building. Now the West in historic district. It also created that small manufacturing district that lies between the Central Business District and Fair Park, where the Munger Gym Company was and a number of sort of small mechanic shops, which made things locally that were distributed in that trade area. There seems to be a pattern you've mentioned the coming of the railroad is destroying one neighborhood area. And more and more there seems to be a pattern of the residential area is going further and further and further out.

And in some ways that's still happening, although now there seems to be a tendency for things to move back in. Is there a precedent for that? I don't think so in the history of American urban development. I think this is a real change and maybe the first major change in the growth of American cities in two to three hundred years. What is it the New York Times? Our cities traditionally spread out further and further and further and they've just gotten uncontrollable. Gentrification, isn't it? Gentrification, right? That sounds pretty bad. I think the return to the inner urban neighborhoods is one of the most encouraging things that's happened in the past 25 or 30 years as far as cities go. But now this still though is based on business and on the feasibility of such a move, isn't it? Sure.

But I think it's also based on the desire of people simply to have pleasant surroundings and to be closer to their work, which again may be an economic force because obviously this gasoline gets more and more expensive. It's going to be more difficult to drive than our own drive from Richardson to the Central Business District. What are some of the other landmark times or elements of Dallas history that you can think of that had effect on the way it looks today? Well, of course, Dallas is a city that hardly knew that there was a depression in the 1930s. Because the East Texas hall building was going on. And there was a tremendous amount of money poured into Dallas in a big building building in the late 20s and early 30s. So that you have something like the mobile building, the old Magnolia building. Dallas, of course, became a banking center in 1912 when the Federal Reserve Bank was located here. And so you had a lot of really fine bank buildings downtown dating from the 20s and 30s.

What? One other, of course, we might talk about patchy because everybody always wants to know why those streets angle in that way. That's an indelible mark, you know, left on the spatial arrangement of Dallas, simply by the existence of an old boundary line. When Dallas was first laid out, it was laid out as a square grid on the John D. Lee Brine grant, which was a 640 acre grant. And that grant was laid up parallel to the river. And there was a much larger grant. The Grigsby League that surrounded it on three sides. And when the additions were laid up to the north, they were laid up along the line between the Grigsby League and the Brine League. And so the streets ran at a different angle than the original Brine plant. That certainly is the mark. I still, if anybody asks me which way is north downtown, I have to ask the least. Yeah, it's terribly confusing.

What do you see as the major factor in the development of this city to the north, rather than across the river? Well, I think the river itself, just simply as a physical barrier, you know, it's difficult to move a lot of traffic across that river. The development of Highland Park and University Park in the early 1900s sort of set the pace northward. And it made north the vast amount of way to go. The development of East Dallas really towards the north east, probably what you have if you look at the way that Dallas was growing from 1900 on. You have two forces, one going north sort of beginning with the McKinney Maple Avenue area, jumping over to Oclon and then going on a Turtle Creek into Highland Park, University Park, Greenway Park, and on to the north that way. And then another force sort of pushing out to the east on the other side of the Houston and Texas Central Tracks, going first through all these Dallas and then Munger Place and then Belmont subdivision and the Karuth addition and on that way.

What do you think is the factor that has had the most to do with Dallas' ethnic population, with the concentration of where the blacks lived or where the people of other heritages came to live? Well, that's a really good question. Of course, segregation is both a legal system and a social system in the 19th century required that blacks live in a separate area. So we really don't know very much about the development of black neighborhoods in Dallas. At this point it's kind of interesting. Why? Is it because the research hasn't been done or the data is? The research hasn't been done and the data isn't as easily available. Blacks tend to become invisible when you look at documents because they generally didn't keep records, but at the same time white people treated them differently than they did. White folks and so frequently deeds were not filed in the courthouse, things were just done on a much more informal level.

We do know that right after the first place there were not very many blacks in Dallas before the Civil War. And the black population evidently increased enormously during the war as people who were slaveholders refugeed from federally occupied Louisiana and from Missouri, in the North Texas, so that at the end of the war there were a large number of free blacks living here. And we know that in 1866 and 67 and 68, some of those free blacks bought land from Maxine Du, and they bought it along the H&TC tracks north of town, just about where Hall Street causes a central expressway now. And that section grew up to be called Friedman's Town, but it was not within the Dallas City limits and there really no records except for land deed records as to who was buying land there. A lot of people needed land there. You see your unreadied property, so there's no records at all of that. But that is the root of that particular black community. Now the Mexican community called the body oil, or at least what was called the body oil when I was growing up.

People too soon referred to it as little Mexico. Now grew up in the early 1900s, as many, many Mexicans fled the conditions in Mexico caused by the revolution of 1910. And a lot of those people seemed to have been railroad workers. I don't know whether they were people who had been employed on the railroads in Mexico, or whether simply because they were cheap labor, they were employed on the railroads here. But that neighborhood was evidently originally a sort of a lower middle class Jewish neighborhood. Now that's the area around McKinney. It's kind of where McKinney and Cedar Springs come together, right down in there. If you look at the city directory for like 1905 and 1910, there are a lot of people living there with Eastern European names who are described as peddlers, push card operators, or working in various department stores downtown. And even the teams in the early 20s, while Mexicans began to move into that neighborhood. And I think probably about 1925 or 26, it was pretty solidly Spanish speaking.

Well, there was a kind of a parallel, at least with the black immigration, after World War II. Now that, as I recall, was the pattern that began to set the range of the characters of South Dakota. When somebody blocks, you know, begin weaving East Texas and moving into South Dallas. But there's not an accommodation. It's not predictable what's going to happen, is it? Well, it's really not. You know, your hopes are that people will begin to turn inward towards their city again, and to move back into old neighborhoods. And also to simply renovate and improve old neighborhoods. I think, for instance, it'd be tragic if that body of area were obliterated and apartments built there. Or even if the price of land went up there to the point where the folks who have been living there for years couldn't afford to live there anymore. But if that neighborhood can be stabilized and improved while those seen people are still living there, be ideal.

You know, one would hope that that kind of thing could happen. One of the fears is that suburbs will continue to develop further and further north and further and further west. And the city will become more and more unmanageable. It seems to me like, you know, one obvious answer to our traffic problems is to get more people living closer to town. So we don't have to have a Roseland Expressway or a double deck central Expressway to move all those cars from the suburbs back into town. What's happening to the little towns around here? What's happening to Union Bower, to Allen, to Lancaster? It sounds like Union Bower is about to be eliminated pretty much the same way that the Vickery was. Do you remember Vickery? Yeah, by Vickery Springs out there, Greenville. Yeah, you know, you drive by there and out. There's virtually no evidence. So there was ever a little community there at all. Unless you look at it with a real train die and you can see some of it. Well, what is it that's happening? Is that subdividing or what? That's subdividing. Now, what's happening further out is a little more encouraging in the city like Walks of Hatchy, which is what, 30 miles from the house.

It has recently created a national registered historic district that encompasses about 25 blocks of Walks of Hatchy. The courthouse, all the buildings around the courthouse square. And so there, obviously, making an effort to keep what it is that makes that town unique intact. What is the first thing that generally happens when a small town gets to growing too fast? What goes first? Oh, gosh. Well, generally, the business has moved out on the highway. The old business center of town, you know, the town square. The courthouse town of County City, the courthouse square, if not, there's usually a main street someplace. And the business has begun to leave that main street and move out on the highway. And then in order to try to keep shoppers from going to the big city to do their shopping, some developer will build a shopping center out on the edge of town. And so the old center of town becomes depopulated. And then the merchants begin to get frightened. And they think that the reason it's being depopulated is because there's no place for them to park downtown.

And so they begin tearing down more buildings to create parking space. And it's just a vicious cycle. And in many cases, a lot of small towns attempting to, you know, to keep business there have eliminated the very things that attracted people to this. Incredible. What is the single factor that you see as having the most impact on the future of Dallas on its physical appearance in the future? That's a very tough question. Actually, I'm not sure there is any one single factor. I think continued population growth is probably the most important factor because obviously the population is going to grow and continue to grow as more and more businesses move to Dallas. And Dallas seems to be pretty much publicly committed towards that kind of growth as a good thing.

And so the problem then seems to me becomes, you know, how do you control that growth and make it work for the city instead of against it? So I would hope that more and more things like the Fox and Jacob inner city subdivision would come about. In other words, I don't think that all these people are moving away from the Northeast want to come to the same kind of situation they're trying to get away from. I think that they come here because we offer something different. And if we can determine what it is that makes Dallas different and attractive and then preserve that will be what we should do. The revitalized determination to understand the past and to bring its structures back into use is alive and well all over this part of the country. The town square of Lancaster has been restored and the Lancaster Historical Society is shortly to publish a history of Lancaster with hundreds of pictures, both old and new. The Tyler Historical Society, the Smith County Historical Society and the Tyler Museum of Art created a fascinating exhibition earlier this year called The Faces of Tyler with a fine catalog that documents the history of the city with text and pictures of structures from its pre civil war days to the present.

The Hillsborough Restoration League was formed as a result of a frantic and successful community effort to raise $21,000 for the purchase of the old MKT Depot. Now this East Lake Victorian building is being moved to blocks to land given by the city. It will house the Hillsborough Chamber of Commerce, a small museum and a community meeting room. Walks the hatches hard at work saving its town square and the rejuvenation of Grandbury has been celebrated all over the country as an example of what a small town can do when it is determined not to die. In Shreveport, Louisiana, a determined and single-minded group of people formed a nonprofit organization to restore the Splendid Old Strand Theatre, which will be opened at the end of this year as a sparkling 1800-seat performance house. The Old Strand opened in 1925 just a year after the Dallas Majestic. Like the Majestic, it was built for both vaudeville and motion pictures and so has the basic structure for a performance use.

With heroic effort and loving care, this wonderful building is being painstakingly restored to all its neo-baroque magnificence for the use and pleasure of Northern Louisiana, East Texas, and I am sure many visitors from much further afield. How satisfying to look forward to it tomorrow when we can say hello to yesterday. Thank you and good night. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.