The story of 1900 Elm

Before it was 129 homes, 1900 Elm was where Dallas went shopping.

Two partners on Elm Street

Edward Titche came to Dallas in 1894 to run a store his late uncle had left behind. He was twenty-eight, had grown up working in his parents' shop in Louisiana, and had already tried a grocery in Birmingham and a clerk's job at a New Orleans department store. In 1902 he joined forces with Max Goettinger, and Titche-Goettinger opened at the corner of Elm and Murphy. Two years later it moved into the new Wilson Building near Elm and Ervay, and over the next quarter century it outgrew that too.

The 1929 store

The answer was a building of its own. Construction began in 1928 on the block of St. Paul between Main and Elm, and the new Titche-Goettinger opened in November 1929, weeks after the stock market crash. The design came from George L. Dahl of the Dallas firm Greene, LaRoche and Dahl, the architect who would go on to shape Fair Park for the 1936 Texas Centennial. He clad the seven-story store in Indiana limestone with Italian Renaissance detailing outside and Art Deco finishes inside. Seven floors of selling space sat over a basement and a sub-basement.

The first floor was arranged the way great department stores were: gloves, hats, purses and hosiery up front, where a shopper who came in for one thing might leave with three. The basement sold the bargains. Titche-Goettinger grew into one of the largest stores in the Southwest, and Edward Titche, having seen the new building open, retired that same year.

Texas-size

In 1955 the store doubled. An addition along Main Street between St. Paul and Harwood, designed by Thomas, Jameson and Merrill to match the original in height, depth and stone, took the store from about 250,000 to 504,000 square feet across seven floors, the largest store in Dallas. For scale, a typical Walmart Supercenter today is about 178,000 square feet, and the downtown Neiman Marcus flagship had 129,000 square feet of selling space on nine floors. The newspapers called it Texas-size. Max Goettinger, then ninety-three, came to the opening. One detail that still charms the people who write about the building: it ran on a network of pneumatic tubes, whisking sales slips and cash between floors.

Titche's, Joske's, and the quiet years

Suburban branches followed in the 1950s and the name shortened to Titche's. Allied Stores bought the company and in 1979 renamed every Titche's a Joske's. The top three floors became offices in 1985; a 1986 remodel tied the ground floor into the Dallas Pedestrian Network; and when Dillard's bought Joske's in 1987 the downtown store was left out of the deal and soon closed. For a few years the block went quiet.

Back to life

The city named the building a Dallas Landmark in 1990 as part of the Harwood Street Historic District, and it joined the National Register of Historic Places in 1996. The 1955 wing became the Dallas Education Center in 1994, the first shared campus for several Texas universities, now the Universities Center at Dallas. In 1997 the 1929 building was converted into 129 lofts with a retail concourse on the ground floor, one of the first residential conversions downtown, with the columns, crown molding and casement windows kept in place. The University of North Texas System bought the whole block in 2009, and 1900 Elm Lofts has been home to downtown residents ever since.

What that means when you live here

It means the column in your living room is a 1929 column. It means a window you can open on a spring evening, a lobby floored in terrazzo, a building the city decided was worth keeping, and a front door on the block where Dallas once came to shop.