Pythian Temple, Dallas

Designed by William Sidney Pittman, the first African American architect in Dallas, the Grand Temple of the State Grand Lodge of the Knights of Pythias was completed in 1916. It was declared a Historic Landmark in 1989.


According to an article from the December 20, 2007 Dallas Observer: 

"It was, in the early 1900s, the hub of Dallas' then-thriving middle-class black community -- a social see-and-be-seen and a business center, among its many purposes. The Fisk Jubilee Singers, George Washington Carver and Marcus Garvey were featured guests as well. 'This building was the black professional building, says author and historian Alan Govenar. 'It was a meeting ground of the best minds of the day.' Adds Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price. 'It's a signal of an era where African-Americans in this city understood that they could in fact produce something within the confines of whatever constraints were out there'."

Allen Chapel AME

Pittman graduated from the Tuskegee Institute mechanical drawing program and the architecture program at Drexel University in Philadelphia, and then returned to Tuskegee to head the architecture department. While there, he married Booker T. Washington's daughter Portia. The couple moved to Washington DC where Pittman established a successful practice, and in 1913 moved to Dallas. He designed structures throughout the state, including the Colored Carnegie Library in Houston, the city's first library for African Americans. 

Joshua Chapel AME

Pittman did not work as an architect after 1928. Supporting himself as a carpenter, he published a controversial weekly newspaper, The Brotherhood Eyes. 

Other buildings Pittman designed which are still standing are Allen Chapel AME in Fort Worth, Joshua Chapel AME in Waxahachie, Wesley Chapel AME in Houston, and St. James AME in Dallas, now used as a office building. He and other African American architects were the subject of a symposium earlier this year by the Dallas Architecture Forum