Historic Dallas Parks

Historic Dallas Parks

Author: John H. Slate

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 132

ISBN-13: 9780738578910

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Dallas, called "Big D," is the eighth largest city in the United States and rests on 343 square miles of rolling prairie. To meet the growing recreational and cultural needs of its citizens, the Dallas Park and Recreation Department maintains more than 23,018 park acres--one of the largest municipal park systems in the country. Dallas has over 400 individual parks, including community centers, swimming pools, athletic fields, and a metropolitan zoo. From such well-known places as Fair Park, home of the State Fair of Texas and the Texas Centennial Exposition of 1936, to Dealey Plaza, and to lesser-known neighborhood parks, Dallas parks have a rich history stretching from the days when Dallas was a western boom town to a 21st century metropolis. Historic Dallas Parks explores the origins and early development of this nationally recognized system with interesting background stories and facts and illustrated with photographs and historical documents from the collections of the Dallas Municipal Archives.


White Rock Lake

White Rock Lake

Author: Sally Rodriguez

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2010-01-01

Total Pages: 132

ISBN-13: 9780738578835

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In 1909, Dallas city leaders approved the damming of White Rock Creek to create a new water source for the increasing needs of a growing city. As a result, so much of the life and history of Dallas has echoed through the life and history of White Rock Lake. In the early decades, the lake was home to many private summer homes and boat houses, as well as hunting and fishing clubs. Soon thereafter, a bathing beach, sailing clubs, public boathouses, and picnic facilities were added. The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration transformed the lake with more recreational and leisure amenities. World War II brought increased military uses that included a POW camp for German officers. Those early city leaders could hardly know that the lake they were creating 10 miles outside of Dallas would become an urban oasis enjoyed by over two million visitors a year.


Dallas Landmarks

Dallas Landmarks

Author:

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 132

ISBN-13: 9780738558523

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Dallas has a reputation as a progressive city--always ready to build something new to replace the old. In the late 19th century, as Dallas became the transportation and commercial center for North Texas, brick and stone edifices supplanted the simple frame structures of the early days. By the 1920s, the city was the financial capital of the region and boasted the tallest building west of the Mississippi. In 1936, Dallas hosted the Texas Centennial Exposition in Fair Park, an ensemble of art deco buildings that is a National Historic Landmark. As business grew, so did the skyline. Today Dallas has a rich collection of historic buildings that chronicle the city's growth and progress.


Fair Park

Fair Park

Author: Willis Cecil Winters

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 148

ISBN-13: 9780738579399

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In 1936, Texas commemorated the 100th anniversary of its independence from Mexico with a series of statewide celebrations. A central exposition was proposed, with four cities waging a sometimes bitter campaign to secure the rights to stage this auspicious event. At stake for the host city was unparalleled national exposure and a strong economic boost in the midst of the Great Depression. Using the existing grounds and buildings at Fair Park as the basis of its bid, Dallas outhustled and outspent its competitors to be designated as the host city of the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition. The fair was planned by chief architect George Dahl with legions of talented designers and artists who collaborated to produce one of the great American world's fairs of the 1930s. In addition to the centennial celebration, 1936 marked the 50th anniversary of Fair Park as the site of the great State Fair of Texas. Many of the exhibition structures, livestock barns, and sports and performance venues built for the fair over the previous 50 years were incorporated into the new layout and design of the exposition. The architectural style that was applied to the old and new buildings at Fair Park was described as "Texanic," a combination of Texas iconography and classical motifs with the more spare, streamlined regimen of the moderne style. The result was a revelation to the millions of visitors that attended the Texas Centennial Exposition in 1936.


Highland Park and River Oaks

Highland Park and River Oaks

Author: Cheryl Caldwell Ferguson

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2014-08-27

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0292759371

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In the early twentieth century, developers from Baltimore to Beverly Hills built garden suburbs, a new kind of residential community that incorporated curvilinear roads and landscape design as picturesque elements in a neighborhood. Intended as models for how American cities should be rationally, responsibly, and beautifully modernized, garden suburban communities were fragments of a larger (if largely imagined) garden city—the mythical “good” city of U.S. city-planning practices of the 1920s. This extensively illustrated book chronicles the development of the two most fully realized garden suburbs in Texas, Dallas’s Highland Park and Houston’s River Oaks. Cheryl Caldwell Ferguson draws on a wealth of primary sources to trace the planning, design, financing, implementation, and long-term management of these suburbs. She analyzes homes built by such architects as H. B. Thomson, C. D. Hill, Fooshee & Cheek, John F. Staub, Birdsall P. Briscoe, and Charles W. Oliver. She also addresses the evolution of the shopping center by looking at Highland Park’s Shopping Village, which was one of the first in the nation. Ferguson sets the story of Highland Park and River Oaks within the larger story of the development of garden suburban communities in Texas and across America to explain why these two communities achieved such prestige, maintained their property values, became the most successful in their cities in the twentieth century, and still serve as ideal models for suburban communities today.


The City That Killed the President

The City That Killed the President

Author: Tim Cloward

Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing

Published: 2023-09-05

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 1646052382

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A creative cultural history of Dallas through the lens of its defining twentieth century event: JFK's assassination. The assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, shocked America. Instantly, Dallas was blamed for the killing, labeled “the City of Hate.” In the half century since the president’s murder, this city’s artists and writers have produced important, if often overlooked, work that speaks to the difficult burden of our civic shaming. Here are the works of poetry, theater, journalism, art, the actions of our citizens and political leaders, all the fragments of our cultural life that address this tortured local history. The City That Killed the President is a fitful discourse offering a window into Dallas itself, a city reluctant to grapple with its past.


Building an Ark for Texas

Building an Ark for Texas

Author: Walt Davis

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2016-09-16

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 1623494427

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Recounted through the eyes of a major participant, this book tells the story of the Dallas Museum of Natural History from its beginning in 1922 as a collection of specimens celebrating the plants and animals of Texas to its metamorphosis in 2012 as the gleaming Perot Museum of Nature and Science. The life of this museum was indelibly influenced by a colorful staff of scientists, administrators, and teachers, including a German taxidermist, a South American explorer, and a Milwaukee artist, each with a compelling personal investment in this museum and its mission. From the days when meticulously and skillfully prepared dioramas were the hallmark of natural history museums to the era of blockbuster exhibits and interactive education, Walt Davis traces the changing expectations of and demands on museums, both public and private, through an engaging, personal look back at the creation and development of one exceptional institution, whose building and original exhibits are now protected as historical landmarks at Fair Park in Dallas.


White Metropolis

White Metropolis

Author: Michael Phillips

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2010-01-01

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 0292774249

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Winner, T. R. Fehrenbach Award, Texas Historical Commission, 2007 From the nineteenth century until today, the power brokers of Dallas have always portrayed their city as a progressive, pro-business, racially harmonious community that has avoided the racial, ethnic, and class strife that roiled other Southern cities. But does this image of Dallas match the historical reality? In this book, Michael Phillips delves deeply into Dallas's racial and religious past and uncovers a complicated history of resistance, collaboration, and assimilation between the city's African American, Mexican American, and Jewish communities and its white power elite. Exploring more than 150 years of Dallas history, Phillips reveals how white business leaders created both a white racial identity and a Southwestern regional identity that excluded African Americans from power and required Mexican Americans and Jews to adopt Anglo-Saxon norms to achieve what limited positions of power they held. He also demonstrates how the concept of whiteness kept these groups from allying with each other, and with working- and middle-class whites, to build a greater power base and end elite control of the city. Comparing the Dallas racial experience with that of Houston and Atlanta, Phillips identifies how Dallas fits into regional patterns of race relations and illuminates the unique forces that have kept its racial history hidden until the publication of this book.


History Lover's Guide to Dallas, A

History Lover's Guide to Dallas, A

Author: Georgette Driscoll

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 1467142263

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Don't let the drawl fool you--Dallas boasts a dynamic history full of explosive growth. The cityscape itself seems eager to measure up to the outsized personalities that forged the town's identity. A sixty-seven-and-a-half-foot-tall giraffe statue greets visitors to the Dallas Zoo, while guests exiting the Joule Hotel encounter the gaze of a thirty-foot eyeball. A colossal Pegasus glows above it all from its perch on top of the Magnolia Petroleum building. Subtler storylines also thread their way through the forest of glass and steel, from the jazz of Deep Ellum alleyways to the peaceful paths of the Katy Trail. Author Georgette Driscoll looks beyond the inscriptions for the events that shaped Dallas into the city it is today.


Oak Cliff and the Missing Pieces

Oak Cliff and the Missing Pieces

Author: Gregory M. Hasty

Publisher: Archway Publishing

Published: 2023-08-23

Total Pages: 522

ISBN-13: 1665746467

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Oak Cliff and the Missing Pieces is the first book written about the area's history in over three decades. It not only captures the beginnings of the early settlement, it takes the reader beyond a century and a half of growth and tracks how the community has evolved. The book is unique in that it captures the history of West Dallas in conjunction with its Oak Cliff neighbor and how the two transformed together over time into what we see today. The collection of historical accounts and hundreds of photos identify individuals and places of prominence finally memorialized in one anthology. The narrative also takes readers through facts and stories that have been ignored or concealed, revealing an authentic depiction of how the community was, at times, abused and neglected. Readers will enjoy this introspective examination of the area south and west of the Trinity and will once and for all put together the missing pieces of the storied land that has long been misunderstood. All proceeds from the sale of Oak Cliff and the Missing Pieces will go to benefit non-profit organizations in Oak Cliff and West Dallas.