Dallas as it Once Was: A Glimpse at Dallas’s Neighborhoods From Decades Past
Share News:
On this first day of 2023, let’s take a look back at Dallas as it once was. Imagine the clip-clop of horse-drawn carriages that once traveled down Greenville Avenue. A Japanese pagoda in Oak Cliff that was accessible only by footbridge. A Dallas neighborhood with noisy yet loved resident peacocks. Here’s a look at the origins of Dallas’s most beloved neighborhoods as we’ve covered through the years on CandysDirt.com.
The Neighborhoods
Beckley Club Estates
Situated in the shadow of the Dallas Zoo near Beckley and Illinois avenues, Beckley Club Estates is full of eclectic 1920s bungalows, one-lane bridges when three small lakes were once located, and … prepare yourself — peacocks.
Beckley Club Estates got its start in 1925 when Sydney A. Temple, President of the Dallas Trust and Savings Bank, laid the proverbial ground for Beckley Club Estates. The burgeoning neighborhood had some absolutely outstanding features — three rock-bank lakes fed by nearby Cedar Creek, paved streets lined with premium trees, and the Beckley Fishing, Bathing and Boating Club, to which all residents were issued a share of stock and membership.
Here the prices ranged from $1,475 to $2,750 for lots ranging in width from 50 to 100 feet. To purchase, you had to cross the foot bridge over Lake Helen to the Japanese pagoda, seen above.
But Beckley Club Estates is also home to a couple dozen peacocks who roam free through the neighborhood. In 2015, our feathered friends received international media coverage when one of the oldest peacock males (the one with the longest feathers) was stolen and later returned.
Read more about the origins of Beckley Club Estates and where those peacocks came from.
Bob O’Link Drive in Lakewood
There’s no more memorable street name in Lakewood than Bob O’ Link Drive.
But who is Bob O’ Link in Dallas? A Dallas luminary, maybe an entertaining older gentleman named Robert but his friends call him Bob? Longtime Lakewood residents know.
They can recall O’ Link fondly, remembering the good times had together and just as vividly, remembering the times they left “his” company frustrated. Generations of Lakewood residents knew O’ Link from 1924 to 1971, when “he” was practically a neighborhood fixture.
That’s because longtime Lakewood residents know that Bob O’ Link Drive was not named for a man, but for the bygone Bob O’Links Golf Course, a public neighborhood course built on a portion of the McCommas family’s 600 acres, stretching from Abrams to White Rock Lake.
Read more about Bob O’ Link Drive in Lakewood and its namesake.
Creekside Place
There’s a tiny neighborhood of 80’s custom homes at Alpha and Hillcrest that are just heavenly for quite a few reasons, the biggest of which is six tons and 11 feet tall.
The 44-home community of Creekside Place was developed in the 80’s by the Dallas Hill family — Mrs. Margaret Hunt Hill, the daughter of oilman H.L Hunt, and her husband Al Hill Sr.
And boy, they could pick a spot. Creekside Place is surrounded by the private Northwood Club golf course on one side and a privately-owned 13-acre greenbelt, which is owned and maintained by the HOA.
The Hills brought in the firm of Clark and Heath to build all but six homes in Creekside Place. Dale Clark is the better known of the two having built over 400 homes in Dallas with a special penchant for building large elegant homes close to greenbelts. As Candy has mentioned before, if you lived in Dallas in the 1980’s, you knew of Dale Clark homes.
A few years back, Karen Eubank did some “digging” to find a fascinating history of this Creekside Place community.
Geneva Heights
In the path of development. That’s how Geneva Heights was advertised in 1930s Dallas. When Tudors were first built, they were part of a new subdivision of Greenville Ave.-adjacent homes called Geneva Heights, which boasted wide streets and deep lots. Over the years, many of these ‘20s and ‘30s homes have been updated and expanded, and are enjoying third, fourth or even fifth lives.
Of course, this Greenville Ave. home is located walkable to restaurants, retail, and grocery stores, yet far enough away not to get hung up in traffic. If you do get stuck in traffic, just think back to this area’s history. We’ve come a long way since gravel paved roads and cable cars of the Belmont-Ervay line.
Lakeland Hills
Located near Northwest Highway and Plano Road, this Lakeland Hills subdivision of Midcentury Modern homes was a showcase of custom contemporary design in Dallas in the 1950s.
“Homes for the discriminating, all of contemporary design” the Longhorn Construction Company advertised for its Lakeland Hills addition of 1,000-plus homes in northeast Dallas.
Lochwood
Researching Lochwood in the Dallas Morning News, I discovered a treasure trove of articles. A few about the Lochwood Addition, an East Dallas neighborhood of reasonably-priced post-war homes. But the lion-share of newspaper articles, personal blogs, and Dallas historical forums were about one place at the corner intersection — Lochwood Shopping Center (now known as White Rock Marketplace)
Located at the crux of Garland Road and Jupiter, Lochwood Shopping Center first opened in 1957 to news coverage and much fanfare. This place was a big deal because it was master-planned for development with the Lochwood Addition of homes.
Munger Place
Imagine the hollow clip-clops of horse-drawn carriages traveling the freshly-paved roads of Junius Street and just picture old-world Dallas from this porch. The year is 1908 and the city of Dallas is bustling with new development. Mr. William Frank Knox is a railroad man for Gulf Texas & Western Railroad who is eager to put down roots for his wife and two young kids in Munger Place.
This new East Dallas neighborhood is ahead of its time in the early 1900s as the first deed-restricted neighborhood in Texas. The developers, the Munger brothers, stipulated that homes must cost at least $2,000 to build, are required to stand two stories tall, and are prohibited from facing a side street. Mr. Knox has selected this large 0.28-acre lot to build the Knox family home — just the second home built on this block, which boasted paved streets, sidewalks, electric street lights, and two Sycamore trees on every lot
Read more about Munger Place and put yourself back in time to Junius Street 1908
Parks Estates
On Thanksgiving Day 1924, eager sales agents paced the freshly paved streets of Tremont and Largent in East Dallas’s newest residential addition, Parks Estates. The addition that neighbored Lakewood Country Club was touted as “One of the most unusual real estate opportunities offered in Dallas in recent years.”
This new neighborhood at Junius and present-day Abrams offered improved lots with features that many other new neighborhoods didn’t have: master-planned streets and underground utilities. The street design here discouraged passthrough traffic. “The beautiful site is laid out in a manner to avoid excessive traffic, reducing noise and traffic nuisances to a minimum,” a 1924 Dallas Morning News ad promised.
