The Aldredge House on Swiss Avenue. Photo by Rasy Ran.
This year marked the 50th anniversary of the Swiss Avenue Historic District’s annual home tour.
In addition to viewing the seven homes on display, visitors could enjoy food and drinks, live music and photo opportunities with Sparky and McGruff.
The Swiss Avenue Historic District is recognized as a historic district by the City of Dallas. It has a historical marker from the state of Texas, and it’s listed on the National Register of Historic Places, which is maintained by the National Park Service.
But when the first home tour on Swiss Avenue was held in May 1973, the district lacked all of those recognitions.
Proceeds from the 1973 tour would go toward purchasing markers to designate the district — spanning Swiss Avenue from North Fitzhugh Avenue to La Vista Drive — as a historic area and to fund preservation efforts.
Residents of the district at the time had formed a historic preservation league to advocate for saving the homes in the area and other historic places throughout Dallas.
“We feel that basically what is needed is informing people what saving history is all about, and it doesn’t have to be just a museum approach,” Anne Courtin, the president of the Historic Preservation League, told a KERA reporter at the time.
The Historic Preservation League later became Preservation Dallas.
Learn more about the 1973 home tour and preservation league in the video below, courtesy of the KERA Collection in the G. William Jones Film and Video Collection at SMU.
