NOSTALGIA

You walk into 4949 Swiss Avenue and the first thing you see is the heavy wooden staircase curving up and away that looks like it was copied from some old Eastern mansion, which it was. This thin old man in a faded Banlon shirt asks you to please wait in the living room, which you do.

It is very dark, but you can see that the room is filled with fine old furniture. There is a large sofa and a fireplace and nearby a drawing of a dynamite blonde, framed and sitting on a little table…

And suddenly you are looking at yourself in this huge mirror that covers nearly the entire back wall. You also see the two dark pianos, the beveled glass windows, the fleur-de-lis wallpaper, the whole old brown room – and this slow, easy feeling comes rolling up inside.

And you look at it, at all of it, and you smile. It feels very, very good.

Then there is a slight clatter on the stairs and life’s “Ideal Dream Girl” steps into the room. She is Mary Ellen Logan and she has lived on this street since she was a child.

On July 4, 1973, an eight-block stretch of Swiss Avenue and parts of three adjacent streets were designated Dallas’ first historic district. It was the result of more than 25 years of work and planning by residents of the street.

Swiss is the showcase of the district. It stretches eastward from downtown and along it for the last eight-block rise to La Vista are some 90 multi-storied homes of brick and stone. Nearly all of them were built before 1925 and all range from large to something the size of Gatsby’s great house.

“The most significant characteristic of this area is not its age, grandeur or architectural significance,” writes one respected student of sticks and bricks, “but rather that it remains an area intact, miraculously, after all this time.”

No doubt. But “significance” comes too from the people who once and still inhabit Swiss Avenue and from a particular style, long gone, that intrigues us even now.

“I went to Ursuline and I was very sheltered,” says Mary Ellen Logan, a blonde wearing dark red lipstick. “People up here were very, very protected. We always had servants who more or less watched over us.”

She was the daughter of an oil driller come to the city and she lived around the corner from the exclusive girls school, studied dancing and hurried home every day to practice piano.

There were parties up the street and at home; dances with a rented nickelodeon right in the front parlor, and bacon and eggs for everybody later.

Mary Ellen still has that vivacious style. She says she was “very sophisticated” and “sought after,” and her conversation contains the names of the men she has known.

“Oh, honey,” she says, “I could write a Who’s Who…”

She was once a “Paris model” in New York and posed for the six statues that bore flags at the 1936 Texas Centennial. Her huge stone likenesses still grace the esplanade at Fair Park.

Her figure is fuller now and her mouth is a reminder of the red, ripe and pouting ones the boys used to dream about.

She lives in the big house with the rolled green roof with her husband, Cristian Bendtsen, thin, sophisticated, a Belgian count who cooks and brings sherry and remembers how “Scott and Zelda and I ran around together, played hell in Paris”.

“Oh, we had a ball,” he says. He is wistful; memories flood.

Mary Ellen remembers mostly being Life Magazine’s “Ideal Dream Girl.” Her face was a composite of Gloria Dickson’s hair, Olivia de Hav-illand’s nose, the lips of Ann Sheridan and the eyes of Priscilla Law. She has the picture to prove it. And it does.

And Mary Ellen remembers her first date, a dance and a long, light blue gown. It was very feminine.

“His name was Bill Dixon and he escorted all the debutantes and he was simply handsome, just simply handsome,” A laugh, an eyebrow, very sexy, she is saying.

They drove out to Vickery Park where a pavillion, a band and laughter waited.

“It was summertime and it was raining. He lifted me out of the mud and he carried me up there and ohhh, I thought that was so gallant.”

So Swiss was that way for Mary Ellen in a special time in Dallas, and maybe it is like that still, for some.

But before that Dallas was mud.

As late as 1872 it was a dirt street town of 2,960 and the only thing going for it was that a few of that number had sense enough to lure a railroad to within loading distance. That started the boom and the boom started Dallas.

By 1901, the city had boomed to 72,353. There was tremendous vitality. “More smokestacks for Dallas” was the theme and the city already had 16 banks, led the country in leather and cotton machinery production and was the world’s largest inland collection point for cotton.

In 1905 R. S. Munger, a cotton gin manufacturer, and his son, Collette, completed collecting lots on the east side and announced the opening of the “handsomest, most attractive, residence district in the entire South.”

They only sold lots but their deed restrictions insured, perhaps more than anything else, the continued preservation of the area.

All houses, they stipulated, had to be two full stories, located at least 60 feet from the street and 10 from the sidelines, cost at least $10,000 (adjacent streets were cheaper) and face in the same direction.

All streets were paved and the parkway landscaped. All deliveries, wiring and sewage, of course, were relegated to the wide rear alleys.

“Of course, we are going to ask you to pay for all this,” read the Mungers’ original promotions, “but had you not rather do that than be forced to endure the various discomforts of your present surroundings just because your neighbor has his own ideas about these things?”

It sounded like excellent logic to those who could pay and the street became a monument to private enterprise and the society such enterprise pays for. At least 30 founders or presidents of companies have lived there since 1905, not to mention vice presidents, judges, lawyers, educators and influential ministers of one ilk or another.

Dr. Raleigh W. Baird built the first house, a white frame colonial at 5303 that is now being restored. Mary Ellen’s home was built in 1908 by J. R. Tennison who modeled the staircase and much of the lower interior after Carter’s Grove, a Virginia classic.

W. W. Caruth bought 4949 during the debutante days of his daughter. Mattie eventually married D. Harold “Dry Hole” Byrd, a fabled but very real oil millionaire. They stood before the fireplace and the marriage date, June 8,1935, is inscribed there.

J. D. Padgitt, a leathermaker who helped organize the State Fair of Texas and lobbied, even then, for Trinity River navigation, lived in the home next door. The family of former Lieutenant Governor M. M. Crane bought it later. As attorney general in 1917, Crane headed the impeachment of Gov. James E. “Pa” Ferguson.

Special prosecutor in that case was William R. Harris of 5703 Swiss. His daughter married Wallace Savage, a Dallas mayor, and they still live in the large, dark red Frank Lloyd Wright prairie-style home.

It goes on. There is the striking Aldredge mansion at 5500, a majestic giant of sand-colored garlands, planters and balustrades; the Wright influenced home at 5002 that housed R. W. Higginbotham and W. L. Snow-den, two men known for handling money (Higginbotham stopped a bank run singlehandedly and Snow-den was convicted of grand theft), and the huge Georgian brick and concrete home of former County Attorney Cur-rie McCutcheon.

There were former Mayor J. Wood-all Rogers; former Secretary of StateT. B. Love; former Magnolia Petroleum Co. President E. R. Brown; insurance man and father of acongressman, Carr P. Collins; the latebishop of Dallas, Joseph PatrickLynch; W. A. Criswell, still pastor ofthe world’s largest Baptist church;Edward Titche; Carrie Neiman; Joseph Schepps; Theodore Marcus, andLouis Tobian.



It is a hot day in May at the 2nd annual Swiss Avenue House Tour and Donnie Moeller, though quite the style in his white driving cap, dark plaid knickers, vest and stockings, is a little worried in the early going.

It’s open house up and down the street.

“Hello. I’m Jackie Squire and this is my home,” welcomes the stunning brunette with eyes of blue ice at 5302.

Down at 5928 Dr. Raymond Courtin struggles to remember the name of his ivy. Mrs. Savage struggles, too, at 5703 and fails to recall the fashion of her fine old rugs. “But I know they aren’t American Kara-stan,” she says.

Moeller is co-chairman of the tour this year and he feels the responsibility. He need not fret. The avenue is jammed with cars. Old ladies gawking right and left swerve into the parkway curb. Tires squeal. People are dying to see those houses. In two days the Historic Preservation League, Inc. clears $5,000.

The league is led by Anne Courtin, of the white Italian Renaissance beauty at 5928. The league is supported mainly by tour proceeds, nomi-nal membership fees and contributions. It replaced the property owners group organized in the ’50s by Wallace Savage.

Preservation has been a long road for those two but it has had its rewards. Savage owns several of the homes. Mrs. Courtin bought hers for $22,500 18 years ago and now wouldn’t take $100,000 for it although there is a chance she could get it.

There were battles, mainly holding actions, against economic and social blight and against the speculators eager to profit from commercial or multi-family rezoning.

In the ’50s, apartments of concrete and cinder block took over adjacent Gaston but they never got Swiss. More recently a high-rise apartment planned for the corner of Collette and Swiss was blocked in the courts and now, though there is provision for development in the historic ordinance, any new structures must adhere closely to the original restrictions set down by the Mungers.

The league was formed in 1972 with advice from Jacob Morrison, a man closely connected with the preservation of New Orleans’ Vieux Carre. The ordinance was drawn with help from city planners and delegations from Swiss Avenue and East Dallas lobbied hard at meetings of the planning commission, zoning board and finally the city council.

They were trying to show, as Moel-ler says, “how even the prospect of the ordinance had drawn people into the area and if people knew it was going to be preserved, even more would be brought in.”

Most of the work was done by Mrs. Lourtin, Lyn Dunsavage of 6217 Bryan Parkway and Virginia Talk-ington, Savage’s daughter. They wrote, researched, spoke and advertised. To them preservation is a progressive, if not futuristic, attitude concerned with realities confronting America today.

“Why destroy everything that exists just to build a new box,” asks Mrs. Dunsavage. “The character of this country is changing.”



And there is Mary Ellen Logan at the piano in that front room, life’s ideal dream, smiling and winking, an aging countess spreading that olden, golden charm.

“This is Dallas proper,” she says. “When this house was built men had time and they could put their love and artistic temperment into a home like this. But nowadays they just have to get it up as fast as possible.”

There is no doubt and her hands ripple easily across the keys. The music, a rolling rising sound, fills the house and spills across the wide, tiled front porch, out over the perfect lawn and on down the wet, wide street.