Stumbled upon a two-part Walker, Texas Ranger on TV last night, and actually watched most of it (not always easy to do, given the number of shootouts in each episode and the quality of the writing). I stayed with it, mostly because of the wave of nostalgia that flooded over me.
In the late 1980s and 1990s, Dallas was the self-anointed Third Coast for TV and film production, and a surprising number of of movies and programs were filmed here. The most famous were probably Robocop and Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July — Tom Cruise in Oak Cliff! — but also Chuck Norris’ Walker series.
Walker did a lot of location work downtown and in East Dallas, and we ran stories in the Advocate’s early days about neighborhoods where parts of episodes were shot. Two things stood out in last night’s episodes: Walker was dangling a suspect out of an apartment window on lower Swiss Avenue near the Dallas Theological Seminary, and then he beat the crap out of the bad guy in what used to be a dry cleaning plant, I think, on Ross just northeast of downtown. I’m pretty sure the apartment building is still there, but the dry cleaning plant has morphed into townhouses.
