Partner Gertrude Maxton Lewis

Queer Places:
703 E Grace St, Richmond, VA 23219
815 W Franklin St, Richmond, VA 23220
Hollywwod Cemetery, 412 S Cherry St, Richmond, VA 23220

Mary Dallas Street (May 31, 1885 – November 10, 1951) was born into a substantially wealthy and socially acceptable family in Richmond. She was the daughter of Mary Gormley and George Levick Street. The only other surviving child was George, Jr, four years younger than Mary. Her father was president of a company that manufactured parts for railroad cars. The family lived at 703 East Grace Street, Richmond, while Mary was growing up, but in 1919 moved to 815 West Franklin Street, Richmond, a home she inherited after her parents' deaths in the 1920s.

Educated at Miss Jennie Ellett's School and in Chestnut Hill, PA, Street enjoyed horseback riding, membership in the right clubs, and travel abroad. Large and masculine, she wore tailored clothes and was known to have passionate attachments to other women. "Mr. Street," as some called her, was often seen driving her pale-blue Packard on the streets of Richmond. The love in her life was Gertrude Maxton Lewis, a blonde-locked teacher at Miss Jennie’s School. Already in 1914 they are linked together, along with Jessie Hazard. But her love interest would have been known only to a small number of people, perhaps those who frequented parties at her 815 West Franklin Street home. Lewis died in 1932 and Street was her legal executrix.

One of the four editors of The Reviewer, a literary magazine of the early 1920s, Street contributed funds as well as 27 pieces of her writing to the journal: twelve book reviews, six poems, five short stories, three sketches, and one editorial. Then, she seems to have published nothing for over a decade when her first novel, Summer's End, appeared in 1936. A second novel, Christopher Holt, followed ten years later. Her writing is conventional, romantic, and often sentimental. The plots in the novels are full of coincidence, but Street shows a modest gift in describing place. She was a minor writer in the lively Richmond literary community of the 1920s.

Mary Dallas Street remained in Richmond until 1935, when financial problems and a bitter break with her brother over the family business probably contributed to her moving to New York City, where she lived until shortly before her death on November 10, 1951. She died in Charlottesville and is buried in Richmond.

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