May 2009 » book review

Community Spirit

Great American Suburbs: The Homes of the Park Cities, Dallas
by Virginia Savage McAlester, Willis Cecil Winters and Prudence Mackintosh
Abbeville Press, New York, NY; 2008
480 pages; 325 color and 75 b&w illustrations; $75
978-0-7892-0976-4

Reviewed by Eve M. Kahn

"The Bubble," it's nicknamed: two wealthy, independent municipalities within the borders of Dallas. For a century, these communities, named Highland Park and University Park, have resisted the city's numerous jealous attempts at annexation. The Park Cities have also preserved much of their architectural character. The houses represent most of the residential architecture styles that have caught on in the Southwest, from 1910s Craftsman Bungalows through 1920s Mediterranean villas, 1930s Moderne glass-brick cubes and 1950s deep-eaved ranches, plus a few 21st-century New Traditionalist works including an English Palladian lakefront manse by Britain's esteemed Quinlan Terry.

This exhaustive, lively study of the Park Cities is a labor of love from three Dallas-area authors: architectural historian Virginia Savage McAlester, architect Willis Cecil Winters and Prudence Mackintosh, a Texas Monthly columnist and longtime Highland Park resident. The team, according to the book's acknowledgments, "drove every block of each street in both communities." Further research materials came from local activist groups like the Friends of the Highland Park Library and the Park Cities Historic & Preservation Society. A dozen local historians chipped in data as well; especially welcome were their gleanings from obscure archives like the 1910s conference minutes of the Developers of High-Class and Scientifically Planned Residence Property, and the mid-20th-century address books of women who ran PTAs and clubs in the Park Cities. Only those handwritten listings, the authors explain, reveal "the names of the women married to the men whose names appear" in newspaper and property records.

Be forewarned that not every passage from Great American Suburbs will interest non-Dallasites. In fact, whole pages are devoted to insiders-only topics like bond issues and zoning corridors.

The authors explain how one family-owned development company, Flippen-Prather Realty, created Highland Park between 1907 and the 1950s and allowed for a huge range of architecture. During those same decades, dozens of developers with varied tastes laid out subdivisions in University Park alongside the domed 1915 main hall of Southern Methodist University's campus. Aside from the university's centerpiece, which was designed by the Chicago office of Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge, most of the Park Cities' buildings were the products of prolific local architects working in clients' favorite idioms. But many of the planners and landscape architects were imported Olmsted protégés, including Wilbur David Cook Jr. from Beverly Hills, CA, and the Kansas City firms of George E. Kessler and Hare & Hare. They imposed proto-New Urbanist street grids on the Dallas grasslands, plus ample concrete sidewalks and "bitulithic paving" (a glossy mixture of asphalt and crushed stone). The Park Cities' planners also set aside parklands crisscrossed by creeks and masonry footbridges and shaded the streets with groves of burr oaks, pecans and Chinese pistachios.

Along with giving lists of typical Park Cities' plantings, the authors are such detail-scrutinizers that they devote no less than 150 pages to mini-bios of the houses' sometimes obscure and always crowd-pleasing architects. Among the more intriguing personalities are Anton F. Korn, a Bavarian-born specialist in interpreting European precedents like half-timbering and Mediterranean stucco; Fonzie E. Robertson, a largely self-taught architect/contractor who attended to the minutiae of clinker-brick positioning and mortar-joint thicknesses on his Tudor Revival mansions; and O'Neil Ford, a San Antonio Modernist who brought some of the first Corbusian brises-soleil to the Dallas outskirts.

Amid all the architectural anecdotes and analysis, the authors often make room for impassioned preservation pleas. As in so many early-20th-century suburbs nationwide, they report, "Park Cities homes have been subject to an escalating number of teardowns." Abbeville went to press, however, before the economy tanked in late 2008. These days, new McMansions in the Park Cities are going unsold or have even ended up in foreclosure – but not, however, at the same alarming rate as elsewhere in greater Dallas. When the region's real-estate market recovers, this volume's heft and enthusiastic documentation of street after street will go a long way toward reassuring new buyers that their property dollars can be safely invested in the leafy Park Cities, defended by such staunch preservationists.  

WEB EXTRA:For additional photographs from this book, click here.

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