Downtown Dallas: Butler Brothers Building

[R1070]

a light gray color with some abstract artist graffiti on it would have looked awesome.

[Hannibal Lecter]

I don't think this postcard has been posted before.

[joshua.dodd]

Look at how beautiful and naturally organic the city looked back then. Wow! Kinda makes me sad.

[texasstar]

Look at how beautiful and naturally organic the city looked back then. Wow! Kinda makes me sad.

If you were transported back to then, you would probably find a smelly, unsanitary, dilapidated mess. But, don't let that stand in the way of romanticism.

[cowboyeagle05]

And postcards frequently romanticly pictured buildings with more color and plant life than what was reality. Just like developers do with modern renderings of new buildings. They often embellish because after all, it is an advertisement for the building.

Texasstar is right though part of the reason the suburb was invented was the dirty grimy cities. Victorians added their own garden evolution to more urban areas but once buildings started climbing upwards the focus was less pretty trees and brick laid sidewalks but the progress of production and the industrial machine. Concrete and the strength of a human-built world was what people considered the progressive norm. Nature was a weak element and didn't belong in the human progress of cities. Not just factories were dirty and often terrible places to work but even shopping areas and particularly inner-city living involved lots of noise and overall lack of city services. Poor people and immigrants lived in the dirty cities while those who could afford the trolley ride to the further out areas were those who had greenery.

[joshua.dodd]

Dallas is already smelly. The Trinity River carries Fort Worth's sewage, and you can smell it bad when it turns over.

[I45Tex]

I looked up Butler Brothers, which was an interesting national supply house with similarly large buildings in many cities.

Some have been destroyed, like the one in the Chicago Loop, but a couple of the other survivors have been renovated or re-renovated lately:

Dallas (1911/1960/2016)
https://www.butlerbrothersbuilding.com

Minneapolis (1908/1974/1981/2020)
https://www.butlersquare.com
https://www.butlersquare.com/history

Saint Louis (1906/2023)
https://victorstl.com/gallery/
https://www.builtstlouis.net/central-co ... ing01.html