About This Blog

This blog features: neighborhood restaurants, nearby restaurants, downtown restaurants, Casa View Shopping Center, nearby shopping, Downtown shops.

I will first list places and my connections with them. For the spirit of completeness, I will then list other places, known to me but not visited. I choose not to list the unknown.

I like the section entitled Places I Wish I Had Visited.

My focus is places and locations which existed from 1953, when I moved to Dallas, until 1965, when I graduated from high school. This list will continue with my college years, until I turned 21. I left Dallas in 1969 and, as I did not return except to visit my parents until 1973, my memory of East Dallas ends at that time.

Some categories were easy to separate – restaurants and shopping. Some experiences are not so easy to categorize, but are still meaningful. They may be all lumped in together, and then teased out as other connections are made.

Music wise, we may have thought we were born of the “wrong generation.” I always thought the older generation (i.e. 3 to 4 years older than me) had a richer and deeper experience.

But we, the beginning of the Baby Boomer generation, had it best – stable family life, rising expectations for the middle class and parents who wanted to give so much to their children, which most did not have in their childhood. We were left to play and roam outdoors to make our own fun. We had the best toys and the best music.

And yet we lived in tumultuous times – the Cold War, Civil Rights, Integration and the Kennedy Assassination through the killings of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

Hopefully we came out as loving, caring, sharing adults whose experiences made us better people and gave us the ability to show appreciation and gratitude for the neighborhood and experiences which enriched us and our loved ones.

Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Unique Shopping Centers - The Quadrangle

The Quadrangle opened on September 16, 1966 at 2800 Routh Street and featured a collection of specialty shops clustered around courtyards and arcades just off Cedar Springs Road near Downtown Dallas, the area now called Uptown.

The center was the brain child of oilman real estate developed, Morris Spencer, and operated by his son, Nelson Spencer.  They visited specialty shopping centers across the country trying to pick out the best ideas from each.

According to Dorothy Erwin;s September 16, 1966 article in the Dallas Morning News, "To name their clusters of shops, they thought the words center, village or park to describe their effort.  Nelson recalled the atmosphere of the college quadrangle where it was pleasant to stroll and meet friends - a relaxed, unhurried feeling.  Thus it became The Quadrangle."

All the shops mostly faced inward.  The Quadrangles' own structure of the beige earth-stucco walls and brown-stashed western red cedar balconies, the pear tree and flower boxes in the courtyard, have inspired each merchant to more artistic endeavors in planning their own shop.

Perfect for one's wife, girlfriend, or significant other, we cheered each other on when one found the exact, on-the-money perfect occasion's card which bid us time until the next birthday or anniversary rolled around.  For us well-meaning ones, card buying can be brutal.

Carolyn and I used to eat at a stylish, fast-casual restaurant called Tin Star (there's one now at the Food Court at North Park) across the street from the Quadrangle.  It moved a couple of blocks over in the land of the no on-street parking and a validated parking kit and you have to navigate three different one-way streets to find the place - too much hassle.

I write my own Valentine's Day cards these days.

Each shop has that custom look, inside and out, and the trim is in deceorator colors - yellow, blues, greens and orange doors and window trims.  The overall flavor has a hint of Santa Fe Spanish or Contemporary Southwestern.. It is a modern-day, air-cinditioned bazaar with the lasting charm of yesteryear.

Fourteen houses were torn down to provide the land which is bounded by Routh, Howell, Laclese and Worthington Street.

The Quadrangle was built in three pieces, starting in 1966.  Theater Three joined the complex in 1970.  The center still exists today, smaller and a different exterior design.  Photographs Do Not Bend is now the oldest tenant.

In the 1980s Ken Knight operated a popular, stylish card and gift shop in The Quadrangle.  I found myself in his shop one night after work, on Friday February 13th, the night before Valentine's Day, trying to buy a perfect card for Carolyn.

With me in the store were about 50 guys, also looking for the perfect card.  We were holding the cards up, looking for approval that this was the one.


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