Freed’s Furniture, as anyone who has lived here for any length of time knows, is where you can afford your dreams. The family-owned company has been selling furniture in Dallas since 1938. They boast of this longevity in a TV spot that caught the attention of a longtime FrontBurnervian. The reason it caught his attention: Freed’s used a historical photograph of downtown, digitally removing the name of another furniture store, Winn, and replacing it with Freed’s. Have a look. The old photo at top was taken by Arthur Rothstein in 1942. You can order a poster of it from Shorpy. The Freed’s screen grab was sent in by our eagle-eyed FrontBurnervian. Freed’s corporate site says the original store was indeed on Elm Street, which is where the historical photo was taken, but it was a half mile east of the Majestic, on the other side of where I-345 now stands.
I called Clay Freed to ask him about it, and he acknowledged that they “slightly photoshopped” the image. He said his dad came up with the idea. “We were just pointing out that we’ve been around since the ’30s, and we wanted to show what Dallas looked like in the ’30s,” Freed said. Except, as I pointed out to him, that’s not what it looked like.
