Dallas Architecture Porn, Part 281: For Sale, a Photo of Lang and Witchell's Drafting Room

Otto Lang and Frank Witchell built this city, more or less. Let's catalog, shall we: the Dallas Power & Light Building, the Lone Star Gas Company HQ, the Sanger Bros. Department Store, the Fair Park Music Hall, the Sears, Roebuck & Co.'s Catalog Merchandise Center (now known as the Southside...

By Robert Wilonsky

November 17, 2009

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Otto Lang and Frank Witchell built this city, more or less. Let's catalog, shall we: the Dallas Power & Light Building, the Lone Star Gas Company HQ, the Sanger Bros. Department Store, the Fair Park Music Hall, the Sears, Roebuck & Co.'s Catalog Merchandise Center (now known as the Southside on Lamar, of course), the Southland Life Building, Conrad Hilton's very first hotel (now known as Hotel Indigo), not to mention homes in Highland Park and along Swiss Avenue. And that's the surface of the surface.

Doug Newby writes that theirs was "the most important Dallas architectural firm in the early 1900s"; Marcel Quimby has said that "their firm was uniquely suited to create some of the most innovative buildings of the era." And their papers reside at the University of Texas in Austin, SMU and Texas A&M. Which is what makes this eBay find so extraordinary: For all of eight bucks you can buy a photo of the Lang and Witchell drafting room, circa 1915. Greg Brown, I expect you to ante up.

Bonus item: Someone's also selling a Squire Haskins aerial photo of the city dating back to the '40s. If you're not familiar with Squire Haskins, well, now you are.

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