Dallas, TX Photo - an Old-Style neon Place Marker for Deep Ellum

An old-style neon place marker for Deep Ellum, a neighborhood composed largely of arts and entertainment venues near downtown in Old East Dallas. The area was originally called Deep Elm, but the pronunciation "Deep Ellumâ €? by early residents led to its current and historically accepted name. As one of Dallas's first commercial districts for African-Americans and European immigrants, Deep Ellum is one of the most historically significant neighborhoods in the city. The district boasts the city's largest collection of commercial storefronts from the early 20th century and includes many individual structures significant in their own right. In 1914, Henry Ford selected Deep Ellum as the site for one of his earliest automobile plants.

Carol M. Highsmith (born 1946) is a photographer, author, and publisher who has photographed all 50 of the United States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico for 30 years. She specializes in documenting architecture, ranging from the monumental to the everyday and whimsical. Highsmith is donating her life ’s work of more than 100,000 images, copyright-free, to the Library of Congress, which established a rare one-person archive. Out of 14 million images, the Carol M. Highsmith collection is featured in the top six alongside of Mathew Brady and Dorethea Lange.

Credit line: The Lyda Hill Texas Collection of Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith's America Project, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.