This was an illuminating, if difficult, project to put together.
The prized achievements of the past were plowed under in the name of business, progress, and a new vision of the future.
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Vaudeville theater operators became civic-minded philanthropists, cotton salesmen became tech industry giants.ĭallas is where dentist Doc Holliday became a professional gambler where Ray Charles made the leap from road-weary musician to superstar and where poor-as-dirt Depression-era teenagers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow fashioned themselves into fairy-tale bandits and cult heroes.Ī look at the downtown skyline, circa 1945įor Dallas’ transient inhabitants, the land and the city were tools best used at the service of one’s personal ambition, and so it is not surprising that Dallas’ urban form has also endured its own continual overhaul. Widowed pioneer women became industrialists. The raw prairie was developed into rich cotton fields a tiny trading post grew into a burgeoning commercial center a small frontier town became a major center of the cotton, railroad, merchant, oil, and financial industries.Īnd Dallas’ residents have also long sought to remake themselves against the backdrop of the mythic promise and wide-open possibilities of the American frontier. In doing so, what we discover is that Dallas has long been defined by a desire for transformation. In the following guide, we attempt to unearth that lost city. The result of this impetuous preoccupation with building and rebuilding is a city left with few physical markers of a past that, though invisible, continues to shape the present. One of the most remarkable aspects of this city’s history is how, in its relatively short 178-odd years of existence, so many neighborhoods were born, evolved, destroyed, replaced, erased again, and remade anew once more-all in the name of striving toward some realization of Dallas’ ideal form. Ironically, that obsession with the new is one of its oldest and most enduring characteristics.ĭallas’ transience describes not only the inhabitants of the city, but also its physical form. Ever since John Neely Bryan planted his cabin on the banks of the Trinity River, Dallas has been a city focused singularly on the unspoiled promise of the future, not the inheritance of the past. Perhaps that is because not many people stick around long enough to learn the history, or those who do tend not to show much interest in it. Dallas has always been a transient city, and that lack of rootedness has often led to the misconception that it is a city without much history.
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