Did you know that Skillman-Live Oak Center (commercial corridor) was originally anchored by Volk Brothers department store?
Skillman-Live Oak Center is a Main Street, but built in that transition period after WW2. This has parking (well before Dallas established parking minimums), but there isn't a ton of it. You'd never see a major department store in Dallas today built with hardly any parking like this.
Here's the same building today
Found this article from 2006 about Volk Brothers at Skillman-Live Oak Center
These tales could change how you think about Lakewood.
Her sons may not have liked it, but Betty Hathcox still remembers how much she appreciated taking them shopping for shoes at one of Dallas’ finest department stores — just blocks from her home off Gaston Avenue.
“It was a very beautiful store, and it was so convenient,” says Hathcox, who has lived in the neighborhood for 55 years. “The store was quite unique back then, something that big in the neighborhood.”
Her destination? The suburban location at Skillman and Live Oak of Volk’s Bros., then one of the city’s leading retailers, comparable to Neiman Marcus.
“You used to be able to get anything there,” says Hathcox, who bought her sons Stride-Rite saddle shoes, something of a rite of passage for boys who grew up in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
“It was very exclusive — good men’s clothing, a women’s department, even jewelry.”
The four biggest retailers in Dallas after World War II were Neiman’s, Volk’s, Titche’s and Sanger’s. So the fact that our neighborhood had a Volk’s was a big deal. In those days, the leading department stores were all downtown; Neiman’s, for instance, had only one suburban store, at Preston Road and Northwest Highway, well into the 1960s.
And by all accounts, Volk’s was an impressive store — not just because of the quality of its merchandise (it was where neighborhood women bought hats for Easter, and Hathcox still has some jewelry she purchased there), but also because of its design and layout. The main entrance on Skillman, near the middle of the building, was an atrium, and the highlight of the atrium was an indoor-outdoor goldfish pond.
“My mother used to drag my brother and I down there to go shopping,” says Alan Clarke, a life-long Casa Linda resident, “and the only thing that made it worthwhile was the goldfish pond.”
But Volk’s suffered the same problems that plagued so many other local retailers in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as malls changed people’s shopping habits, and residents moved to more distant suburbs. Colbert’s, a local women’s clothing chain, bought Volk’s in 1970, and the stores became Colbert-Volk’s. The downtown store closed in 1973, and the Skillman store disappeared by the early 1980s. Colbert’s hung on until the late ’90s (there was a store in Casa Linda almost to the end), and then it, too, went out of business.