Dallas -- Dallas TX - American Guide Series on Waymarking.com

The waymark coordinates are for the Dallas City Hall -- the current City hall when the WPA writers came through, supplanted in 1978 by the current Dallas City Hall, as seen in the movie RoboCop (no, REALLY).

Old Dallas City hall is on the US National Register of Historic Places, and since 1978 has been the home of the Dallas Municipal CourtSystem. This grand 1909 building is famous for what happened in its basement on 24 Nov 1963, when Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby gunned down Lee Harvey Oswald, who had killed President John F Kennedy in Dallas' Dealey Plaza the day before.

The WPA writers were impressed with the progressive spirit of the city, and had a lot of good things to say about Dallas -- even as they also noted its distinct and evident racial segregation, whose legacy Dallas still wrestles with today.

From Texas: A Guide to the Lone Star State:

"DALLAS

Railroad Stations: Union Railway Terminal, Houston St. between Jackson and Young Sts., for Chicago, Rock Island & Gulf Ry., Fort Worth & Denver City Ry., St. Louis, San Francisco & Texas Ry., Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe Ry., Missouri-Kansas-Texas Lines, St. Louis Southwestern Ry., Texas & New Orleans Ry., and Texas & Pacific Ry.; Highland Park Station, Abbott Ave. at Knox St., for Missouri-Kansas-Texas Lines; Jackson and Browder Sts. for, Texas Electric Ry. (interurban).

. . .

Airports: Love Field, 6 m. NW. of city on US 77, for American Airlines, Inc., Delta Air Lines, Braniff Airways, Inc.; bus fare 7¢, airport taxi 50¢, other taxis 90¢, time 30 min.

Streetcars and City Busses: Fare 7¢, 5 tokens for 30¢. Taxis: Fare 35¢ for 2.5 m., 10¢ each additional m.

. . .

Accommodations: 14 large hotels, including 7 apartment hotels; more than 25 tourist lodges and numerous auto camps; adequate trailer camps.

Radio Stations: KRLD (1040 kc.); WFAA (800 kc.); WRR (1280 kc.);
KGKO (570 kc.).

. . .

DALLAS (512 alt., pop. 1930 U. S. Census, 260,475; est. pop. 1940, 300,000) is the metropolis not only of north Texas, but of a large part of the Southwest. It is an industrial and commercial city, founded in the days when Texas was a republic, and possessing a citizenry more cosmopolitan than that of most other Texas communities. Many of its old families trace their ancestry back to the highly educated, if somewhat visionary men who came from Europe to found the socialistic colony of La Reunion, and remained to help build Dallas. The progenitors of others came from the Old South after the Civil War, bringing both culture and agricultural skill, or from the industrial North, bringing equal culture and manufacturing skill. The result was a blending of expertness in both the production of raw materials and their transformation into manufactured articles, which as years passed, have made Dallas the commercial center of a tremendous area.

Set in the midst of vast cotton fields and a near neighbor to rich oil fields, Dallas is the foremost inland spot cotton market in the United States and one of the Southwest's important oil capitals. It leads the world in the manufacture of cotton gin machinery, due to the inventions in the 1880's of Robert S. Munger, a Dallas man, who made many improvements on the earlier inventions of Eli Whitney. In the United States it ranks first in volume distribution of cottonseed products and its cotton mills produce approximately ten million yards of fabric annually. It ranks second in the United States in the production of wash dresses and in the manufacture and distribution of women's hats. The fashion center of the Southwest, Dallas holds important style shows each spring and autumn.

Divided by the Trinity River, and with a vast prairie over which to spread, Dallas could have developed in a sprawling manner, instead of becoming, as it is, the most compact city in Texas. However, where the three forks which give the river its name converge, they met a hard rock obstruction which constricted the valley's width from five miles to one, and on that comparatively narrow foundation Dallas piled itself up. East of the river the downtown area and East Dallas, North Dallas, and South Dallas merged into one, carrying approximately two-thirds of the total population. On the west, Oak Cliff carries the other third. Highland Park, University Park, and Preston Hollow, three [page 226] self-governed suburbs, lie in close association with the eastern and northern sections. Fruitdale adjoins the southern limits of the city. The total population of the city's metropolitan area in 1940 was estimated at 380,000.

Unlike some other Texas cities, Dallas has no tradition of invasions and battles, or of wild days when cattlemen, gamblers, and out-laws participated in lurid scenes of violence. It came into existence as a serious community with citizens of a peaceable and cultured type. In addition to its leadership in the handling of cotton and in manufacturing, Dallas ranks second in the Nation's per capita express business, fifth among telegraphic centers, and fourth among insurance centers. As headquarters of one of the 12 districts in the Federal Reserve Bank system, it serves the financial needs of Texas and parts of Louisiana, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona.

. . .

The Houston and Texas Central brought the first train to Dallas in July, 1872, while 5,000 shouting, perspiring people milled around in the dust, struggling for a better view of this emblem of progress. It had taken 24 years, a bonus of $5,000 in cash, 115 acres of land, and a free right-of-way to induce the railroad to come to Dallas, but less than a year after its arrival the population rose from 3,000 to 6,000.

A year later the Texas and Pacific arrived.

Then Dallas really began to boom. From the Blacklands and the Grand Prairie long wagon trains brought wheat, wool, cotton, and hides. Sheep and cattle were driven in. Passenger fares, cut to half the stagecoach rate, encouraged travel by rail. The town was swamped. Wagons jammed the streets and sank to the hubs in black, waxy mud.

. . .

Dallas was a strangled, congested city. Four walls and a roof constituted a building unless it had architectural pretensions of the "ginger-bread" era, expressed in turrets, cupolas, and scrolls. The Praetorian Building, built in 1907, C. W. Bulger & Son, architects, was 15 stories above a jumble of roofs and was hailed as "the first skyscraper in Texas." It marked the turning point in construction, although it is Victorian in style.

The need for something other than rapid growth was emphasized when the Trinity River broke its own record for floods in 1908, driving 2,000 people from their homes and causing damage of two million dollars. For three nights the city was in darkness. The drinking water supply was cut off and an epidemic of malaria followed. It was realized that conditions called for an immediate remedy.

This nebulous idea was crystallized by the Dallas News, which published a series of articles on the work of the American City Planning Congress and another series on Dallas' unplanned and unsightly state. By January, 1910, the Dallas Chamber of Commerce, converted to the News' proposal, formed the Dallas City Plan and Improvement League and induced the mayor and city commissioners to employ George E. Kessler, a pioneer city planning engineer.

The completed Kessler plan so staggered the city fathers by what then seemed the impossibility of its objectives, that several years passed before anything further was done. Not only did the plan involve the opening and widening of downtown streets, the building of a union station, and the consolidation of freight terminals, but it also proposed to move and straighten the channel of the Trinity and to move the tracks of the Texas and Pacific out of town. The last produced a terrific hue and cry from the railroad company and from the business interests extended along the tracks.

By 1912, the Houston Street viaduct, 1.16 miles long, solved the transit problem between Dallas and Oak Cliff. The Union Terminal, of modern classic design, Jarvis Hunt of Chicago, architect, was opened in 1916, and the Kessler street- widening program was under way.

During that same period the river and the railroad tracks were both helping to keep the plan's memory green. When floods surged ominously through the valley, citizens remembered they had no protection against the invading waters and that "the plan" had been devised to keep floods in leash. The incessant clanging of the trains, once music to the ears of all citizens, was a steady reminder in another direction. The danger from the Texas and Pacific trains which, entering the city on the upgrade, had to pass along Pacific Avenue at considerable speed, was too frequently dramatized by accidents and deaths.

Groups, individuals, and press continued to agitate the idea until the Kessler plan was revived and the mayor appointed a commission to devise ways and means. In April, 1919, the city charter was amended to provide for an official plan commission, but the city had grown so much [page 230] in the meantime it was necessary to bring Kessler back, in 1920, to revise his plan.

The revision, expanded, was basically the same. In addition to straightening the Trinity River channel, it called for flood control and land reclamation; the construction of the belt line railroad to eliminate grade crossings; building inner and outer boulevards; segregating land areas for adaptable uses and to prevent infringement of business upon residential districts and the consequent creation of "blighted districts."

This required immense sums of money, which could not be raised without tremendous effort and constant agitation. The News continued its campaign. Other papers co-operated. To complete the street-widening projects property owners were assessed in proportion to the benefit to be derived by them from the improvement. In 1925 the Texas and Pacific's double line of tracks and switches were removed from downtown Pacific Avenue.

The city's growth had by then outstripped its water supply in White Rock Lake reservoir and a dam was constructed in the Elm Fork of the Trinity River, 30 miles north of Dallas, to form Lake Dallas (see Tour 7a). The lake, now the main water supply of the city, has a storage capacity of 63 billion gallons.

Soon the beneficial effects of the Kessler city plan were visible everywhere. New buildings sprang up along the widened streets. Pacific Avenue, freed of railroad tracks, became an attractive boulevard and the city's traffic flowed freely north and south along widened intersecting streets. So convincing was the contrast between "before and after," that public approval, capping the vast sums already expended, voted an omnibus bond issue of $23,900,000 in 1927 to complete the Kessler plan and other improvements.

Spots for scenic boulevards and parks were donated by citizens, forming the nucleus of a park area that in 1940 had 5,235 acres.

In 1926 property owners in the Trinity River Valley organized the City and County of Dallas Levee Improvement District. Its objectives were both flood control and development of the zoning idea to provide an industrial district. Work was started in 1928 to unite two forks of the river and change its channel, moving 21 million cubic yards of earth, reclaiming 10,553 acres for industrial purposes, and leveeing the new channel to free the city from danger of floods. It was finished in 1931.

That was not all. The two parts of the city east and west of the river were joined by four additional modern steel and concrete viaducts. May 2, 1936, marked the completion of four underpasses, carrying connecting highways under railway tracks to these viaducts. This gave the city a total of seven river crossings.

Dallas has manufacturing and distributing plants in sufficient number and variety to present an interesting picture. The Ford assembly plant, factory branches for distribution of other makes of automobiles and trucks, factories turning out cotton cloth, cotton gins, cotton oil products, cotton and silk hosiery, soft drinks, oil well machinery, and [page 231] paints and varnishes are in the larger unit group. Other factory units include those making women's dresses, millinery, men's work garments, hats, ties, chemicals, cosmetics, pottery, and furniture. In volume of business transacted annually in the industries, the wholesale trade ranks first, with retail trade and manufacturing taking second and third place.

Dallas has been only intermittently disturbed by labor troubles through its industrial history. A strike in the needlework trades in 1935 and an attempt to organize the Ford assembly plant in 1937 were noteworthy industrial disputes of recent years. Dallas is known as an "open shop" city, but ranks of organized labor have been materially augmented since 1930.

Dallas city government is operated under council city-manager form, adopted by charter amendments in 1931. One of the accomplishments of this system has been budget control under which the budget is based on reasonable expectancy of tax collection. The new system has resulted in an annual "underrun," or saving, below budget allotments.

. . .

The Negro is the largest of the minority racial groups in the city. Dallas Negroes live in three main districts: Thomas Avenue in the northern part of the city, Wheatley Place in southern Dallas named for Phyllis Wheatley, Negro poet and the Deep Ellum-Hall Street district. The Negro sections have their own business enterprises, professional people, service organizations, chamber of commerce, two newspapers, clubs and churches, and a Little Theater movement. The National Negro Medical Association has a local office in Dallas with 23 members. In addition to the Booker T. Washington and Lincoln High Schools and numerous grade schools are the Wiley Junior College, a unit of Wiley College for Negroes in Marshall, Texas, and two business schools. Three of the nine grade schools adjoin parks which are general Negro recreation centers with baseball diamonds and tennis courts."

Book: Texas Page Number(s) of Excerpt: 224-231 Year Originally Published: 1940

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