Dallas Center for Architecture

Preservation Dallas is pleased to present the 2010 season of Summer Sizzlers—a series of adult education lectures, offering insight into local preservation topics, architecture and history.

Dallas' Historic Lodgings—Plaza Courts to Luxury Hotels

Speaker:  Sam Childers—Historian, Writer & Museum Consultant

In Dallas’ infancy, accommodations for the traveler consisted of boarding houses or unfurnished rooms, but within 10 years of the city’s founding, Dallas could boast its first hotel. As the village evolved from town to city, its elegantly appointed hotels that rivaled those in New York or Chicago established Dallas as a modern city.  With the rise of the automobile following World War II came dozens of motels and motor courts—and Dallas had established itself as a hotel town.  Sam Childers has selected images from a wide variety of libraries, archives, and museum collections to illustrate the history of hotels in Dallas and the role they played in the growth and image of the city.