Texas Venue Directory
Sons of Hermann Hall
Historic fraternal hall and dance venue · Dallas
Historic Dallas hall with concerts, weekly swing dancing, community events, and rentals.
About this room
Four Dallas lodges of the German fraternal order Sons of Hermann pooled money for a lot between Main and Elm and put up a two-story frame building, opened with a members' open house on April 3, 1911. The wooden structure was explicitly meant to be temporary; the plan was a proper fireproof brick building facing Main Street later on. The brick building never happened. The temporary hall is now one of the last free-standing wood-frame commercial buildings in downtown Dallas, a Dallas City Landmark and Texas Historic Landmark, with a ballroom upstairs and a bar downstairs. It has run a weekly swing dance since 1996 and an acoustic songwriter jam since 1994.
History sources checked August 29, 2026.
Things you may not know
- It is still standing because nobody ever got around to replacing it. The 1911 building was a stopgap while the lodges saved for the real one. It has now been the stopgap for over a century. Source
- The bowling alley, added in 1914-15, was laid out to run two different games: American ten-pin and German nine-pin. Source
- The lanes are still in the building. The alley was remodeled into a meeting and dining room in the 1950s, but in a back room you can still see the exposed lane ends and the indentations worn into the floor. Source
- There was a ballet and tap school inside the lodge, and by 1937 a Schuhplattler group, Bavarian slap-dancers, was using the same rooms. Source
- Parts of RoboCop were shot inside it. Source
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