This diminutive commercial building at 500 square feet (20’ x 25’) is the smallest and least elaborate of the historic buildings in the District. Built of what the 1939 Sanborn Fire Insurance map characterized as “6 inch tile” (likely concrete with stucco facing, maybe added at a later date), the building appears to have been built, or possibly expanded from a smaller building, sometime after 1905 but before 1913. It was a part of a row of small shops that extended all the way to the alleyway. This row of modest shops on Court Street started at the back of the 2-story Wilson Building and all were single story, of uniform depth (all ~25 feet) and of various widths, perhaps 20-foot-wide frontages on average. These buildings were extant and in use at least through 1950 and in that year housed three “stores”, two “offices” and a “restaurant.” At some point after that year, all but the two small still existing buildings to west of the Wilson Building were gone and in their place is a parking lot.
The building in question is single story, but in the fashion of the era, the façade featured a quite tall, false front parapet wall which gave the building a much larger appearance from the street than its usable height would suggest. As was also typical, the roof sloped backward from the parapet wall to the rear of the building, giving both good drainage to its otherwise flat roof as well as strong bracing for the parapet wall. The façade shows minimal embellishments (cornice moldings, and window trim, etc.) for its era, but it is possible that original features of this kind have been stripped away during one or more modernizations over the last 100 years or so.
The uses of this building have been quite consistent, mostly recorded as “office” use over the years. Early documentation of this sort, as well as old photographs of this building, are undiscovered at this point, but the last known use was as the office for Eclipse Computers that occupied the space in the early 2010s but was gone by about 2017. Since that time, the building has remained vacant.
References
- Library of Congress Sanborn Maps: https://www.loc.gov/collections/sanborn-maps/?q=dallas+oregon
- Dallas, Oregon Reconnaissance Survey Report, dated August 31, 2020