The adventures and various works of a photographer, road tripper, former patron of the local arts, aspiring app developer, and late night coffee drinker and conversationalist.
1998 Misfits show flyer
If it looks like it should be a barn from the outside, it's probably because it WAS... or it basically was, at one time. It was an urban barn whose inside was given over to western swing and dance and to a honky-tonk inspired atmosphere. Over a total of about seventeen years, 2727 Canton Street in Deep Ellum paraded through a whole series of different owners and target clientele, being known successively as Tommy's Heads Up Saloon, Tommy's Deep Ellum, The Institute, and The Venue, before finally settling in as Deep Ellum Live, the name it is most remembered by today. The list of acts to have taken the stage over its storied history reads like a "who's who" of the 1980s and 1990s local and national music scenes. But in 2004, Deep Ellum Live closed its doors for good and lay mostly dormant for over a decade, finally being resurrected from the dead by an entrepreneurial couple as part of their personal Deep Ellum reclamation project. What is the story behind this iconic fixture of the Dallas music scene?
Continue reading "Ghosts of DFW music history: Deep Ellum Live"
This adorable photo depicts two children standing on Main Street in Dallas, likely sometime in the 1930s. They appear to be standing behind an advertisement for the Special Electric Telegraph Company, attempting to convince passersby to use the telegraph to send a message to a loved one for Valentine's Day. The text on the display, just barely legible in the photo, reads "Tell it the modern way - by telegraph" with the words "Valentine's Day" printed at the very bottom. Pictured behind the children is the Standard Paint & Paper Co., located at 2022 Main Street (now a parking lot), and across the street in the distance is the office complex at 2121 Main, construction of which was completed in 1930 and which is still standing today. I believe the photo is from the 1930s based not only on the office building, but on an advertisement that appeared in the 1930 Dallas City Directory. I purchased this original photo from a vintage collector back in January.
Looking east down Main Street, circa 1930
Today a parking lot sits at the former location of the Standard Paint & Paper Co., between the Masonic office building and the Municipal Court building. Buildup and traffic along the street makes it challenging to get the same shooting angle as in the original photo. Dallas has definitely changed in the past 90+ years.
Looking east down Main Street, March 2024
Despite my best efforts, I haven't been able to dig up any information on the Special Electric Telegraph Company. If you can point to any resources detailing when they were in business or where they were located, feel free to post a comment below.
This is part of a continuing series of posts exploring locations of former DFW musical landmarksImage courtesy of Central Motion Pictures
On an sweaty August evening in 1997, I headed down to Deep Ellum to meet up with some friends. After finding a place to park my car, I journeyed down Elm Street and made contact with my group, and although I don't remember whose idea it was, we ended up patronizing a coffee house to pass time before seeing some local music. In the group was my coworker, Heather, and her boyfriend at the time, Chris, her friend DeShanna, another co-worker named Glenn (a forty-something year old scenester who probably had no business being down there with a bunch of teenagers), and Björn, a former foreign exchange student turned annual visitor from Germany. Björn was excited at being able to buy brownies at the coffee shop, declaring to me that he was only able to get them when visiting America. I ordered a turkey sandwich, and after taking a few bites I realized that it contained real turkey and not the turkey slices I was accustomed to getting when ordering sandwiches. After leaving the café, our group finished off the night at Trees with a UFOFU and Bobgoblin show, and I ended up trying to bum $10 for a copy of UFOFU's with everyone coming up empty until Glenn was able to help me out. For the next few years I wouldn't recall much about that coffee shop, but I would always remember that sandwich and the brownies and the night's experiences that followed our visit. Thus was my introduction to Deep Ellum's premiere coffee house and hangout at the ripe old age of eighteen.
Continue reading "Ghosts of DFW music history: Insomnia Coffee Bar"
1988 show flyer
The Deep Ellum neighborhood has been home to a dizzying number of music performance venues over the past century. In the early days of Ellum's renaissance, many an aspiring entrepreneur opted to roll the dice on a new venue. Some, like Charlie Gilder, were able to successfully circumnavigate the sea of red tape put forth by the City Council and obtain permits and liquor licenses; other, perhaps more bullish, entrepreneurs chose to go a different way, with all ages clubs and "unofficial" liquor on tap. Some of the resultant venues, such as the Prophet Bar and Theatre Gallery, achieved fairly long term success and drew a regular contingent of music fans and clubgoers, but Deep Ellum's history is also full of short-lived, fly by night venues that had their brief moments in the sun before flaming out and disappearing completely. And perhaps the most infamous of these long gone, also-ran hotspots was a hole in the wall off Commerce Street, a one time weighing scale and butcher equipment outlet turned punk club known as the Honest Place.
