Entries Tagged as 'Memorials'
Last episode I waxed poetic (as I so often do) about Dallas Heritage Village, which is located on the environs of the big D’s original city park — which is called, cleverly enough, Old City Park. The curators have collected and maintained 38 wonderful old buildings from all over North Texas, including a log cabin (and the mansion its owners subsequently moved into), barns, animal pens, a bank, a saloon, a law office, a print shop, et cetera. They’ve basically created a small North Texas village from the turn of the last century, and have included sweet little touches like a fountain, a clock on a column in front of the bank, benches, fences, and connecting streets to add to the verisimilitude and tie what could have been a jumble into a unified whole. There’s even a bandstand with a surrounding village green, shaded by majestic trees.
[Read more →]
Tags: Memorials · Attractions · Architecture · Museums
In my last entry, I talked a bit about Bonnie and Clyde, who happen to be buried in Dallas (though not together). I even directed the interested onlooker to the grave of Bonnie Parker, which is located in the Crown Hill Memorial Park on Webb Chapel Road, one of our main thoroughfares.
[Read more →]
Tags: Memorials · Attractions
Like any large city, the DFW metroplex has its share of celebrity graves. For example, baseball legend Mickey Mantle is buried in Dallas, and the grave of rocker “Dimebag Darrell” Abbott (late of Pantera and Damageplan) can be found in Arlington. Someday, I’ll put together a sweet little entry or two about how to find the graves of a bunch of people while you’re visiting. Although it’s not something that floats my boat particularly, I do understand the draw of celebrity graves, and why some vacationers would make a pilgrimage to see the final resting places of heroes, legends, and role models.
[Read more →]
Tags: Memorials · Attractions
As long-time readers may recall, I currently live in Garland, which happens to be the tenth largest city in Texas (no, really). As such, it actually has a lot of good stuff going on, though by no means as much as Dallas, Fort Worth, or even, say, Plano or Arlington. Much of its cultural wealth is concentrated in old downtown Garland, which has existed as such since 1887, when the local post office was created midway between two rival towns, Duck Creek and Embree; the new post office was called Garland Station after the U.S. Attorney General of the time, Augustus Hill Garland. That’s him down there. Please note that I didn’t take this picture; I’m not quite that old. It was probably taken by the famous Mathew Brady, though no one’s sure.
[Read more →]
Tags: Art · Memorials · Attractions · Architecture · Museums
When last I left you, Gentle Reader, I was poised to describe the Freedman’s Memorial in Dallas, which is located at the former site of the old Freedman’s Cemetery. That cemetery was a local institution from 1869 until the 1930s, when it was largely wiped out by road construction. Its location (what’s left of it) is now a Dallas Landmark site.
[Read more →]
Tags: Memorials · Archeology · Attractions
In the 1930s, the good city fathers of Dallas, all of whom were white as the driven snow, decided that those newfangled horseless carriages that were getting so popular needed a better way to get from south to north and vice versa than the surface roads they already had. This was right around the time when the marketing geniuses of Madison Avenue (not to mention their clients in Detroit and out on the oilfields) had started pointedly suggesting that us independent-spirited Americans needed individual conveyances, so we wouldn’t have to use public transit with all the other riffraff. The fact that said public transit was cheap, in place, and quite effective was of no consequence; over the next few years the rails were grubbed up or paved over, the overhead copper wire recycled into alternator motor windings and the like, and the Car became King. It was only in the late 1980s, as both car and fuel prices skyrocketed into the stratosphere, that we realized the error of our ways and started putting all those things back, at hideous expense.
[Read more →]
Tags: Memorials · Archeology · Architecture
While Texas Christian University is a charming place, it’s hardly your typical tourist attraction. Nestled in a quiet neighborhood in central Fort Worth, TCU is known more for its attractive campus (and girls) than anything else.
Don’t expect a sports powerhouse here: the Horned Frogs try, sure, but I get the impression that the school’s more concerned about the education of its students than about athletic bragging rights. Frankly, that’s a real breath of fresh air, but it doesn’t make this tranquil campus an overwhelming draw for the average vacationer.
[Read more →]
Tags: Memorials
A while back I wrote a brief entry about the Sixth Floor Museum – the facility in Dallas’ historic West End that celebrates the life (and tragic death) of President John F. Kennedy, who was murdered by an assassin stationed in the very warehouse, and on the very floor, where the museum is located now. The Sixth Floor Museum is the most obvious of the local tributes to that day in November 1963, but it’s not the only reminder of our shared civic tragedy.
