Dallas Rediscovered: A Photographic Chronicle of Urban Expansion 1870-1825

Dallas Rediscovered: A Photographic Chronicle of Urban Expansion 1870-1825 by William Lindsey McDonald. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780932018007.

In the years between the Civil War and World War I, a raw and vibrant city was forged out of the Texas blackland prairie by Eastern promoters and local opportunists; a city of opulent Victorian Gothic mansions, of elaborate cast-iron commercial emporiums, and of sharecropper shanties where the poor struggled to survive. This city, its monuments and ideology, have today almost totally vanished, replaced by a modern metropolis of reflective glass and abstractionist concrete. Dallas Rediscovered examines this city in all its turn of the century splendor through hundreds of period photographs expertly reproduced by a duotone printing process, complemented by a lively and informative text. The author searched for nearly two years -- in museums, archives, and private collections -- for the rich cross-section of photographs, many of which are in print for the first time. He explores Dallas through its architecture, its system of spatial growth and land utilization, and through the developers, land speculators, and urban designers who were so extremely important to the creation of the modern city. This wealth of fascinating material will be of interest to historians, architects, sociologists, urban planners, collectors of old photographs or anyone interested in the shaping of a city.