Dallas

Dallas has no natural reason to exist. There is no port, no natural harbor, no mineral deposit and no navigable river. It is where it is because the city bought two railroads.

In 1872 the Houston and Texas Central was routed through town after local subscription. The following year the Texas and Pacific was building east to west, and the Dallas leadership had a rider inserted into state legislation requiring the line to pass within a mile of Browder Springs \u2014 which happened to be in Dallas. The legislators reportedly did not notice. Within a year the town had the only rail crossing in the region and its future was settled.

Cotton did the rest. Dallas became the largest inland cotton market in the world, and by 1900 it was also the center of the machinery trade that served it. The photographs of the warehouse district, the compresses and the wagons queued with bales are the industrial record of that.

The State Fair of Texas has been held there since 1886 and is the largest state fair in the country. The Art Deco buildings at Fair Park went up for the Texas Centennial Exposition in 1936, and that complex is among the best surviving collections of Deco architecture anywhere.

The skyline arrives fast in the photographs. The Praetorian Building of 1909 was the first skyscraper in Texas. The Magnolia Building of 1922 was the tallest building south of Washington and carried the red flying horse that became the city\u2019s emblem.

Deep Ellum, east of downtown, is the other subject and produced something more lasting than any building. It was the commercial and entertainment district for Black Dallas from the 1880s, and the blues that came out of its theaters and streets \u2014 Blind Lemon Jefferson played there \u2014 fed directly into American popular music.

For dating, the streets do it. Mud and wagons through the 1890s, brick paving and streetcars after, automobiles from the 1910s, and a downtown that gets taller every decade.

The Trinity River is the thing the city has fought with longest. It floods, it silts, and it has been dredged, levied, straightened and rerouted repeatedly. A 1908 flood put the west side underwater and killed several people, which is why the levees exist and why the river is now a channel between earthworks rather than a river through a city.

Neiman Marcus opened in 1907 and is inseparable from how Dallas came to see itself. A luxury department store in a cotton town was a statement of ambition, and the store’s advertising and window displays through the following decades are their own body of photographic material.

The Katy, the Cotton Belt and eventually eight other railroads followed the first two, and by 1900 Dallas was a rail hub before it was anything else. Photographs of the yards, the depots and the freight houses are the infrastructure the whole city rests on.

Oak Cliff, across the Trinity, was a separate city until 1903 and annexed with some reluctance. Its streetcar suburbs, its viaduct across the river and its own commercial district give the photographs of the south side a distinctly different feel from downtown.

The Bayou City