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The iconic Alamo Plaza sign stood sentry over the corner of Fort Worth and Sylvan Avenue for nearly six decades. It remained there even after the roadside motel it identified was demolished to make way for the long-awaited Sylvan 30 development. Then, two weeks ago, it was removed.

The development's representatives have said that it's merely in storage and will return as soon as soon as they figure out what to do with it. But preservationists, as well as more casual fans of mid-century roadside motel architecture, are skeptical. Developer Brent Jackson had long promised the sign would stay put, according to Morning News' Roy Appleton. But there it went.

To ensure that the sign is returned to its rightful place on the side of the road, some concerned architectural enthusiasts have begun an effort to Save the Alamo Sign. Organizers were at the Oak Cliff Earth Day celebration over the weekend gathering signatures.

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scv.org

There's been a bit of a fuss lately over the Memphis City Council's decision to change the name of three city parks, scrubbing them clean of any reference to the Confederacy in hopes of making them more inviting to residents who may not exactly have felt welcome in early-1860s Tennessee.

Gone are Jefferson Davis Park, named for the CSA's first president; Nathan Bedford Forrest Park, honoring a Confederate lieutenant general and the Klan's first grand wizard; and the straightforward Confederate Park. Temporarily at least, they'll be Memphis Park, Mississippi River Park and Health Sciences Park.

The switch has inspired a backlash from groups that celebrate Confederate heritage. Like the Ku Klux Klan.

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By the time she died in December 2011, Kathlyn Gilliam's reputation as a pioneering civil rights advocate had been tarnished somewhat by her role, cemented during 23 years on the DISD board of trustees, in establishing the race-obsessed bureaucracy that has long since stopped benefiting the district or its students.

But that wasn't erase the decades of good work she did as a community activist and education reformer who served for decades on the front lines of the battle to integrate Dallas schools. It was that legacy that led Dallas ISD to name a collegiate preparatory academy in her honor and prompted fond remembrances from community leaders and Schutze.

Now, the city could make the South Dallas home she lived in for most of her adult life a historic landmark. It's a modest one-story affair at 3717 Wendelkin Street built in 1921 but well kept. The Landmark Commission will meet on Wednesday to discuss whether to grant the designation.

The Oak Cliff Blog

In October of 2010, Jane Bryant auctioned off put up for auction the front door of Lee Harvey and Marina Oswald's one-time apartment at 604 Elsbeth Street in Oak Cliff. (The sale was halted by litigation, and the door was later stolen). The door itself, with glass that had once been punched out by Oswald during an argument with his wife, was a testament to their brief and tumultuous time there. It also foreshadowed the building's ultimate fate.

In recent weeks, as it became clear the city would prevail in its half-decade long effort to tear down the dilapidated apartments, the door was joined on the auction block by various relics: a bathtub; a toilet; some floorboards; cabinets; individual bricks.

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State Fair of Texas

For now, the State Fair of Texas is sticking to its story that Big Tex wasn't reduced to a scorched metal frame during this summer's conflagration but instead is recuperating at an undisclosed Texas spa. Not only that, but he's well enough to send a holiday greeting that the fair passed along this morning.

See also:
-The Tragic Tale of That Giant Santa Who Once Sat Upon Porter Chevrolet on Mockingbird

From the Christmas missive, we learn that Big Tex thinks enough of himself to write in the third person, is fond of making macabre references to his "accident" ("Thanks also to those at the State Fair of Texas in Dallas who are giving Big Tex a helping hand to get this message delivered. Big Tex needs that hand because right now his own hands are not real useful, know what he means?") and believes, falsely, that he once had a laugh with Elvis ("Big Tex reminded him his first name is still Big, and that nobody much knew or cared about Elvis' last name. 'You're just Elvis,' Big Tex said. Well, Elvis must have thought that was pretty funny. He laughed and said, 'We ain't nothing but a couple of hound dogs, you know it?")

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Robert Groden, who won't be allowed in Dealey Plaza on November 22.

From the outset, Mayor Rawlings and the city of Dallas have made it clear that they intend to control the narrative on November 22, 2013 when they mark what they're simply calling The 50th. The 50th what? Never mind that. Just remember that this is about celebrating the life of a president, not dwelling on what happened five decades ago as his motorcade crept through Dealey Plaza.

Rawlings' narrative is already starting to buckle under its own wait as the measures intended to buttress it -- the security lockdown, the sweeping away of conspiracy theorists, the obsessive insistence on classiness -- instead paint a portrait of a city that still hasn't fully come to grips with the fact that it was party to one of the darkest days in American history.

Earlier this month came Mimi Schwartz's piece in Texas Monthly. Now it's the Wall Street Journal, which published a Christmas Day piece on the city's preparations for the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy Assassination.

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It was while pounding the pavement of Old Preston Hollow in search of a certain lost chicken that I noticed some train tracks running through the back yard of a an aging but stately house on Park Lane.

For those of you who aren't familiar with Preston Hollow, that isn't normal.

No one was home, but when I came back later I met Ed Landrum. He moved gingerly and had an oxygen tank in tow -- his health was the reason the tracks were empty -- but he took me to his backyard shop and showed me what usually went there: a three-ton Cagney locomotive he'd rescued from Kidd Springs Park back when it stopped being an amusement park.

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Wikipedia

The National Archives says we'll be waiting at least 'til 2017 for the rest of the CIA's file.

One thing the city of Dallas won't have to deal with in its attempt to keep the 50th Anniversary of JFK's assassination classy is a lot of new information that complicates our picture of November 22, 1963.

Salon reported yesterday that the National Archives is refusing to release 1,171 classified CIA documents related to the assassination in time for the anniversary as it had promised.

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Photo at right courtesy Dallas Times Herald Collection/Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza

​Got a note today from the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza's Liza Collins saying that the museum has restored and just re-hung the old 2.5-foot-by-17-foot Texas School Book Depository sign once displayed above the Elm Street entrance to the building. Removed n the '70s and stored by the museum since '83, it's been restored courtesy an American Heritage Preservation Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Per its website, the IMLS gave the Sixth Floor folks $150,000 last year to "implement a comprehensive two-year cataloguing project that will improve intellectual control of its collections and make them available to the broadest possible audience." But Museum curator Gary Mack says this was covered by a separate, much smaller grant.

Says Nicola Longford, executive director of The Sixth Floor Museum, in today's announcement: "As one of the few remaining signature architectural elements from the building's 1960s-era decorative facade, this sign is an important part of the Museum's collection. The sign's prominence in many well-known images is sure to captivate visitors and encourage interest in the building's history."

I was curious, though: Was there ever any thought given to putting the sign back in its original spot? Not really, says Mack, in part because Dallas County owns the building, after all. "And their name is in that spot. When Oliver Stone made his movie, he had to recreate the sign out of wood, and we've been preserving it since we got it in the '80s, so it's not going outside. Artifacts don't get treated that way. It's such a neat-looking sign -- very clean, very classic."

What about the Hertz sign, which came down in 1979 and is in the museum's possession? "We'd love to put it on exhibit," he says. "But it's huge. And we don't have the support structure. We're taking care of it. But who knows."

​Our own Nick Rallo, who knows of my fondness for old maps of Dallas, directs my attention this morning to today's posting on the Big Map Blog: Sam Street's Map of Dallas County, which dates back to 1900. It's especially interesting in that it details who owned what and where all the way up to Carrollton, including some quite-familiar names for whom streets and schools would one day be named. And today's post, culled from the archives of the Texas Historical Commission, also points us toward another one on the Big Map Blog last month: A Literary Map of Dallas, created by the Dallas Public Library in '55. Hmmm, needs an update.