Virtual Tour of Downtown Dallas

Beau Arts Style, 1921. Located at Commerce and Akard, this site was the Texas headquarters for the Magnolia Oil Co., later the Mobil Oil Co., and is now the Magnolia Hotel. The building stands as proof that Dallas had claims to being an oil center even before the East Texas field was discovered in 1930 by Dallas resident Dad Joiner. Twenty-nine stories high, it stood as the city's tallest building for twenty years until Robert L. Thornton's Mercantile Bank went up during World War II. The "flying red horse," Pegasus, which revolved, was placed on top of the building in 1932 to celebrate the coming of the American Petroleum Institute's annual meeting, held in Dallas for the first time. It was finished and up and running for the first time on the evening of Nov. 12, 1934. The horse was a symbol that the city had arrived as a center for petroleum. There are two horses up there -back to back. Some said this was done so that no one could call Dallas a "one-horse" town. Over the years the flying red horse came to be adopted as the city's unofficial logo. The architect was Alfred C. Bossom.

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