North Dallas High School

The school once had a swimming pool in its basement. A teacher who taught there from 1922 to 1934 was quoted in the Dallas Morning News in 1972 saying it was one of the first Texas high schools with a pool, and that the board closed it for lack of interest. Paula Bosse of Flashback Dallas found that it opened to the public in summers for a fee, and that a 1937 article reported it reopened as a community pool. Alumni say it was covered over after the 1956 school year and became the band hall.

What the plaque says

North Dallas High School The city's fifth high school opened in 1922 on the far north edge of Dallas. At the time, there were three high schools for Caucasian students (Bryan Street, Oak Cliff and Forest) and one for African Americans (Booker T. Washington). The school board responded to growing enrollment with plans for a new school on John H. Cole's farm, the site of the first Texas State Fair in 1886. Board member Clinton Russell chose the site and helped plan the school. He took trips at his own expense to study schools in other cities, and he visited the site daily to personally supervise construction. William B. Ittner of St. Louis, Missouri, who designed hundreds of schools across the U.S., was chosen as architect of North Dallas High School (NDHS). The doors opened on February 13, 1922 with 650 students and E.B. Comstock as the first principal. The first graduating class began an alumni association and established two main events: an Easter morning breakfast and a banquet soon after Christmas. The school mascot (Bulldogs), yearbook (Viking) and colors (orange and white) were chosen in the first few years. The Bulldogs captured many city athletic championships, and an Oct. 1930 football game between North Dallas and Sunset High in the new Fair Park Stadium (later the Cotton Bowl) drew 45,000 fans, then a state record for a high school event. Many distinguished alumni have had notable careers in business, politics and the arts. Court-ordered school desegregation began in Dallas in 1960. Thirty years later, the NDHS student body was 65 percent Hispanic, 12 percent Asian, and thirty-two different countries of origin were represented. The state Legislature and U.S. Congress recognized NDHS as the first international school in the state and nation. (2008)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Dallas Museum of Art — 1.6 mi
  A city art museum that began as the Dallas Art Association in 1903, grew up in Fair Park, and has stood in the Arts District since 1984 under a forty-foot barrel vault.
• The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza — 2.2 mi
  A plow-company warehouse of 1903, identified by the Warren Commission as the building Oswald fired from, now a museum on its sixth and seventh floors above Dealey Plaza.
• Dallas Heritage Village at Old City Park — 2.5 mi
  Dallas's first city park, laid out around Browder's Spring in 1876, now a museum of historic buildings moved here from across North Texas, among them Millermore, a cotton planter's mansion.
• African American Museum, Dallas — 2.8 mi
  Founded in 1974 at Bishop College, a free Fair Park museum holding the Sepia photograph archive, African art and A. Maceo Smith's papers, and the story of the Hall of Negro Life.

More markers nearby

• Temple Emanu-El Cemetery — 0.5 mi
• Freedman's Cemetery — 0.5 mi
• Robert E. Lee Park — 0.5 mi
• Colonel C. C. Slaughter — 0.5 mi