BOU LE VARD AT A CROSS-ROADS

At the corner of Jefferson Boulevard and Marsalis, inside the Oak Cliff Methodist Church, the regular Wednesday noon gathering of the Oak Cliff Lions Club is in full swing. The pledge has been pledged and the prayer prayed, and the members have heard Don Hicks’ lead-off joke about the little old lady who went to the post office to buy some stamps. Seems the postmaster asked what denomination and the little old lady replied that the government sure had gotten nosy, that she was Cliff Temple Baptist, and now could she have those stamps?

Lion Norman Hansen, real estate, usually joins his fellow members each Wednesday, if only to keep abreast of the land gossip. Among the 300 members of the Oak Cliff Lions Club, second largest in the U.S., only lawyers, insurance men, and, of course, politicians outnumber realtors. Today, however, Hansen is missing the tail twisting and razzing of the Lions meeting. He’s calling on used-car lot owners several blocks east on Jefferson Blvd., asking if they’re interested in selling their property.

Some things have not changed in the used-car game. There are still those colored pennants strung across the entrance that snap and dance in a slight breeze. And no matter how hot it is, clumps of people stand near the cars in the curious uncommitted stance of veteran cops viewing a new homicide victim. Black dudes “looking for a new ride”; more frequently, His-panics discussing the pros and cons while their wives and kids wait patiently in the old car. “Lot lice” is the affectionate generic term used by some of the salesmen sitting inside the anchored ice-cold mobile home offices, no matter what the customer’s race, or color.

Today, not one car dealer will sell. So Norman Han-sen, a transplant from Oregon, gets to listen to a chorus of good-ol’-boy-isms:

“I’m like a one-eyed dog in a smokehouse, Norman, almost too much of a good thang.”

“Got a gravy train with biscuit wheels, Norman.”

“Busier than a one-legged man in a butt-kicking contest, buddy.”

His unsuccessful used-car lot sortie does not surprise Norman Hansen; in fact, it confirms two suspicions he has long felt. “One, there’s money to be made in North Oak Cliff, and two, the big money boys finally are realizing how attractive this area really is,” says Hansen, sitting in his windowless office, surrounded by maps, smoking a cigarette and working the phone.

As a top performer for Wiley Roberts & Sons, one of Oak Cliff’s oldest firms, Hansen knows the territory and has felt the intensified atmosphere in this long-forgotten part of Dallas that seems to be forever regarded, at best, as a quaint but socially undesirable section, time-fixed in complacent melancholy; and, at worst, as the dangerous, weedy-looking, unshaven face of Dallas, lacking even sporadic patches of the right stuff. No matter. Norman Hansen believes. His faith is not abstract, his glasses not rosecolored, his expectations not without foundation.

While other bulldozing landgrabbers were extending Dallas northward to the Red River, saying Norman’s lump of land was practically radioactive, his instincts told him. . .South.

Past epochs have had their symbolic Man of the Hour: the priest in medieval times, the Renaissance artist, the explorer in the Age of Discovery. It is our fate to live in the Age of the Land Developer. Listen to the beginning Holy Mutter from the high priest of our era:

“Raw dirt on the east end of downtown runs $100 a square foot. Inside, they want $25 a square foot- that’s office, not retail. Here in Oak Cliff we do it for S12, including utilities; retail properties go from $4 to $7. Jefferson Boulevard, Oak Cliff’s main street, is Oak Lawn 10 years ago. Raw land on Oak Lawn costs you from $50 to $100 a square foot. Over near the Melrose, I hear $50. From the Trinity River west to Polk, Jefferson Boulevard is the only area in town zoned CA-1, same as the Dallas central business district.”

His voice quivering like a tuning fork, the priest continues his chant, rising from cant to convincing gospel truth:

Jefferson and North Oak Cliff: two minutes from downtown. . .the best transportation system in the country. . . the zoo’s 55-acre expansion. . . Methodist Central Hospital’s S13-8 million expansion, young professionals moving into the prairie-style homes still available for under $100,000 in historically designated neighbor-hoods, Burnett Field’s proposed $100 million development, the 14-acre Oak Cliff Portal Park you ’II see coming in on the Houston Street viaduct; Republic-Bank Oak Cliff with $325 million assets; Trammell Crow’s Chain of Lakes proposal; maybe a magnet school near Eighth and R. L. Thornton.

Thy will be done.

The central tenet of the Oak Cliff scripture, what many followers believe converts the priest’s pronouncements into fact, is the rebirth of Jefferson Blvd., once the second busiest business district in Dallas. Ask long-time residents why Jefferson declined into a string of pawn shops, TV rental outlets, second-hand clothing and cheap jewelry stores as year after year it slumped deeper into its frayed coat and the answers vary: white flight, Oak Cliff voting dry, the opening of Red Bird and Wynnewood shopping centers, discontinuing the streetcars.

But what seemed to drain life from the street like an aphid sucking a leaf was the departure of popular stores -Penneys, Sears & Roebuck, Red Bryan’s Barbecue, Luby’s, Colbert-Volks, the Midway Cafe (where Elvis Presley ate a bowl of chili the day after playing the Cotton Bowl in October, 1956). In recent years, however, community leaders and merchants working with the city have begun attempts to rescue the once-proud street with a beautifi-cation program and a campaign to bring new businesses back.

Rick’s furniture, the company that replaced Sears in its huge 175,611 square-oot building, recently announced they were moving away to smaller stores in Duncanville and Arlington. The Rick family, the city’s oldest furniture dealer, had been on Jefferson since 1925. Furthermore, Southwestern Bell had vacated its building to the east on Jefferson and moved into new offices across from the Adol-phus Hotel. The future occupants of these buildings would greatly affect Jefferson and North Oak Cliff. The new Oak Lawn? Or once again, the suburb of dream and illusion still waiting its turn at the watering hole? The high priest of real estate handling both deals was Norman Hansen.



The street was born not in Oak Cliff, but north of the river. Named after Thomas Jefferson, it was one of 18 street names used by the city’s founder, John Neely Bryan, on the first plat of Dallas in 1844. One hundred years later the original Jefferson in downtown Dallas became Record Street. West of the Trinity, Jefferson travels north and south, east and west, while carrying the surnames boulevard, street, and avenue along the way.

It winds across Oak Cliff, through the island city of Cockrell Hill, past the runways of the Dallas Naval Air Station and into Grand Prairie, ending 17 miles later, after crossing the Great Southwest Parkway near Carson’s Bar. The curvature of the beginning blocks of East Jefferson resulted because the streetcars of the Dallas-Oak Cliff Electric Railway could not directly negotiate the elevation of the bluff. The transit system was built for $250,000 by the father of Oak Cliff, T.L. (Tom) Marsalis, a wholesale grocer-turned-developer in 1887, the same year he paid $500,000 for 2,000 acres in what is now the eastern section of old Oak Cliff.

The new suburb’s first commercial district began at Jefferson and 10th, the original terminus of the streetcar line. As the system pushed farther west, additional stores were built along the street linking streetcar stops and transfer points. Marsalis envisioned his new development as an exclusive suburb dotted with fine parks and large homes. He would sell only large lots to accommodate the sprawling Victorian homes popular in the 1890’s.

That dream was shattered by the Panic of 1893. Marsalis lost most of his fortune and began selling smaller lots. The result was that when Oak Cliff voted (201 for, 183 against) to be annexed by Dallas in 1903, it contained the most hetero-genous population in the city. As the wealthier families fled to the newer prestigious communities of Highland Park and Munger Place, their large homes along Jefferson were replaced by businesses, churches and schools.

There was the Oak Cliff Female College at Jefferson and Crawford, not far from the imposing Oak Cliff Methodist Church at Mar-salis. The church’s main entrance faces neither street but the corner intersection, a compromise that settled a street-facing feud between two wealthy parishioners. Oak Cliff’s first hospital, Briggs Sanitarium, was built at Polk and Jefferson; Sunset High School opened its doors in 1925 with 1400 students and 39 teachers across from Cedar Crest, the 15-room Victorian mansion of businessman L.O. Daniel. By 1926, the population of Oak Cliff was 70,000 and the suburb had 24 churches, 33 miles of paved street, five streetcar lines, two hotels, and two weekly newspapers.

Four years later, the street’s tallest building, the eight-story Oak Cliff Medical Arts Building, was finished on the 300 block’s north-side. Bob Baxter began his Rio Grande Life Insurance Co. on the second floor down the hall from Theo Beasley’s Republic National Life. Another tenant upstairs: Wyley Roberts Real Estate.

“The Depression didn’t hit Oak Cliff as hard as other places because we didn’t live too high, anyway,” says Bill Roberts, son of Wyley and vice chairman of the board of InterFirst Bank Oak Cliff. “As a teenager in the Thirties, I remember a lot of vacant offices in that building. The doctors and other tenants like my dad pooled their money to buy a pool table to pass the time waiting for customers.”

Later, the Medical Arts Building became Jefferson Towers, and then Carter Towers after Bill Carter, who made a fortune with Zebco fishing equipment. Carter covered the building with a garish yellow aluminum siding, which has since been removed.

It was the new look of Carter Towers that attracted Jill Kennedy’s attention one day last spring as she and her husband, Abel, drove down Jefferson. Suddenly there was a lovely building instead of the well-loathed, gaudy structure she had been accustomed to for years.

Jill Kennedy had grown up in Kessler Park, the beautiful upper-income addition of North Oak Cliff. Her parents and grandparents had been part of the late Sixties white flight that had left Oak Cliff for places like Wynnewood Hills and Midlothian -and only recently returned. To her great astonishment, Jill returned too, with her husband Abel Kennedy.

“We didn’t even consider Oak Cliff when we moved to Dallas last year after our marriage,” says Jill. “Like a lot of young couples, we wanted the more hip areas.”

For Jill and Abel that meant Lakewood. Almost immediately they disliked it. “Our neighbors were too busy making money to be friends,” Abel Kennedy says. He had grown up in Austin where his family had owned the El Gallo restaurant for many years. “Also, they were all white and all alike, upper-middle class, only interested in money and having a good time. Jill suggested Oak Cliff. I liked it right away. The trees and hills reminded me of Austin and I felt at home with the population diversity.” Abel Gonzales Kennedy is half Hispanic.

He knew he had made the right choice- buying the two bedroom bungalow on Ten-na Loma in the West Kessler area-one day while painting his new home. “An old lady across the street sent her grandson over with a jug of ice water. I thanked her and she said I had bought the Pike house, then told me its history and that the place had been robbed four times. When I showed concern, she said, ’Yeah, son, four times since 1939.’ “

The rest of the Kennedys’ neighbors quickly made them feel at home. They soon discovered many were involved in the West Kessler Neighborhood Association, which Jill and Abel joined. If it was the fine, old affordable homes and scarcity of Yuppies that initially brought couples like the Kennedys to North Oak Cliff, it is this small-town flavor and neighborhood commitment that convinces them to remain and become fierce partisans of West Kessler, Kidd Springs, Lake Cliff, Winnetka Heights and other areas north and south of Jefferson.

“I think most young couples in Lakewood or Oak Lawn or East Dallas think of their home as an investment, as a springboard to the Park Cities. There’s no real commitment. Also, most have to be two-income families to afford the place. Not so here. Real family life can happen earlier because your dollar goes farther,” says Daniel “Corky” Sherman, sitting in his law office on the second floor of a large restored home not far from his residence on North Clinton.

Both Sherman’s home and office are in Winnetka Heights, the neighborhood that best symbolizes the area’s rebirth. Because of the housing shortage after World War II, many owners of the area’s prairie-style homes and bungalows fled and converted their former homes into apartments. Much of the neighborhood became a semi-slum, the tenements inhabited by the new immigrants flooding in from Mexico and points south.

Young couples like Corky and Diane Sherman and the Kennedys began moving to Winnetka Heights in the early Seventies. Working with older residents, they formed the Old Oak Cliff Conservation League to save the neighborhoods.

“The turning point,” Sherman says, “was getting planned-development zoning for Winnetka Heights so that a structure, once down-scaled to a single-family dwelling, could not be reconverted to multiple-family. Kidd Springs has recently done this. Then, in 1981, Winnetka Heights became a historical district, the city’s largest, and that further protects us.”

The Kennedys, who had been looking for a restaurant site, learned that Jefferson Tower was undergoing a $3.9 million restoration by new owners. Project managers Mike Haney and Doug Goldrich were looking for young urban pioneers willing to gamble on Jefferson’s renaissance and replace some of the pawnshops and TV rental stores with restaurants that would prove to Oak Cliff dwellers that eating French cuisine in the daylight was not an unnatural act. The Kennedys agreed and took space next to the Gentlemens’ Den Tailors and Ramon’s Barbershop.

Jill and Abel Kennedy are committing more than a home-owner mortgage to North Oak Cliff. The day Jill spotted the newly sandstoned, undecorated Jefferson Tower had been spent like many others, searching out locations around Dallas for their restaurant. Now here was this nice eight-story building, with what seemed to be empty storefronts under snappy blue awnings along the street.

Their Boulevard. Cafe and Club would not be a genuine French restaurant-more a bar and grill serving steaks, hamburgers, chicken and drinks (“first one free after you pay the $3 membership fee”), but the ambiance and the decor would be a first on Jefferson. No ferns but sleek high-tech metal polished steel railings. Yes, perhaps a Lower Greenville mutant but with customers rarely seen at the Prospect Grill. New Old Oak Cliff, not Metro Cliff or Cliff Cities or One Cliff Place.



THE EARLIEST URBAN pioneer to risk it on the street was an ex-Duncanville schoolteacher named Belinda Bunch. When Clint and Belinda Bunch found they could buy a 3,000 square-foot home in Winnetka Heights for $30,000 compared to a 1,200-square footer for the same price in Duncan-ville, they didn’t hesitate. She became involved in neighborhood issues, serving as third vice president of the OOCCL for three years and agreeing to let their restored house be included on the 1981 home tour.

That same year, Belinda Bunch decided not to return to teaching. Instead, she wanted to open an early American antiques business, a project that also would allow her to spend time with her newly adopted daughter. And like the Kennedys, she wanted to serve her neighborhood, not make her fortune in North Dallas.

She spotted her perfect building while driving down Jefferson. “I signed the contract the same day-$20,000 for 1,200 square feet. Then I got scared,’” says Belinda. “The first bankers just laughed at me but Danell Licktenwalter, who is secretary of the Jefferson Avenue Merchants Association, and Dave Martin at RepublicBank-Oak Cliff believed in me and Jefferson. My husband’s a tile-layer and did the remodeling. Two months later, I opened the Country Corner for business.”

With Belinda working 13-hour days, her business prospered. She added a room and began selling exotic coffees, teas and gourmet cooking utensils. She also learned what residents living elsewhere thought of Oak Cliff. “People would say, ’Oak Cliff? Aren’t you afraid? Don’t you have shoplifters? Aren’t all your customers black?’ I was amazed. I never had any trouble. Only two shoplifters I knew of-one an old lady who took a rag doll-and I’m proud my customers were black, Spanish and everything else.”

In March 1984, something occurred that Belinda had not planned on. “I got pregnant after two miscarriages. I couldn’t run a store with a new baby. It broke my heart to sell. And again people were interested until I said it was in Oak Cliff. I even had five neighborhood ladies who volunteered to work free if I would stay open. Finally a nice lady on Winnetka bought my store so it will stay alive. The Country Corner didn’t fail because the money wasn’t there. It’s just that I got pregnant,” Belinda says.



NOTHING INTOXICATES WITHOUT pain. Driving along Jefferson and through some sections of surrounding neighborhoods, it is easy to believe that the dreams of Norman Hansen, Jill and Abel Kennedy, Mike Haney, Doug Goldrick and Belinda Bunch are darker than a poor man’s hopes, their 37th hand-picked illusion of the day. There are places where the discordant notes drown out the optimistic chorus.

The streets-Tenth, Ninth, Melba-immediately north of Jefferson Tower have been throttled by a cancer: Too many people, too poor, living in age-gnawed houses with missing doors and broken windows, hillocks of junk in the yard, a broken ice box on the porch, a stinking mattress in the street. Farther east, in the Lake Cliff neighborhood near R.L. Thornton freeway, sit vandalized apartment buildings in similar condition. To a lesser degree, King’s Highway near Davis and the 600 block of Wood-lawn in Kidd Springs suffer from the same blights. Here, the past has not become paradise.

On Jefferson itself, across from the Jefferson Tower and the Kennedys’ new restaurant, is the 12 Step, a place for recovering alcoholics who pay $50 a month to sleep above the Payless Shoe Store, Mona’s Dress Shop and Top Ten Records. These are men whose hard living shows through in a pocked forearm or a scarred wrist. Mike Polk, owner of the record store, has lost customers-Belinda Bunch for one-because of the 12 Step residents’ “panhandling and foul language.” Polk believes they caused J.W. Stark to close his next-door flower shop earlier in the year.

The area ranks almost exactly in the middle strata of the city’s crime statistics, but Richard Lucero, executive director of the Dallas Inter-Tribal Center in Jefferson, thinks the figures are misleading.

“We are on the verge of losing our liability and theft insurance because of so many robberies here,” says Lucero. “They take jewelry, typewriters-the postage meter and $1,200 worth of stamps last time. And we don’t allow females to work here at night without protection. Cliff Food across the street has been robbed several times. The police increased patrols after we complained before the City Council, but they did it during the day, not at night when we need it.”

Lucero’s organization offers health services to everyone, but the emphasis is on solving the problems of the 20,000 American Indians who live in the Metroplex, 60 percent of whom reside in Oak Cliff. Everywhere they rank as the poorest ethnic group in the city, with 48 percent unemployed and only 10 percent trained in skilled work.

“Their main health problem is bad teeth. Next, upper-respiratory infections, flu, chest colds, and we see a high rate of diabetes and hypertension, stress from adjusting to urban life,” Lucero says. Only Seattle among the nation’s urban areas has a higher caseload than Lucero’s center, but even he has hopes for renewal. “We’re staying on Jefferson Boulevard. This is our third location on the street, and in 1992 we get title to the building. If the area prospers, our people’s lives will be a bit easier.”

Last year a group of disgruntled Indians tried to get Lueero fired. “Serving too many Hispanics,” they said. “Indian money should be spent on Indians.” The Inter-Tribal Center’s figures show American Indians constitute 70 percent of their clients except in the Woman-Infant Children (WIC) programs where the figures are reversed. Hispanics make up 70 percent of the 1,200 monthly WIC clients.

The Latinization of Jefferson Boulevard is one of the first things a visitor notices. Almost every store has window signs promising that Spanish is spoken inside. Jefferson has a tortilla factory almost next door to the Inter-Tribal Center, at least six Mexican restaurants, an “alcoholicos anomimos” chapter two doors from the Disco Latino, curanderos and herbal remedies advertised at the Church of Life Herb Shop and two Spanish Christian book stores, one near the old Vogue Theatre-which is now a Spanish fundamentalist church. The Jefferson Drive-in shows only Spanish movies.

Census tracts 47 and 50-north and south of Jefferson from Beckley to Polk on the west and encompassing a large portion of the business district-show an increase in Hispanics from 19 percent in 1970 to 50 percent in 1980 out of the total population of 6,225. Forty percent over 18 don’t speak English well. Per capita income is $4,196, and only 36 percent are high school graduates.

The poverty statistics come to life on a Tuesday at the Inter-Tribal Center, where 30 people already have gathered outside at 7:30 a.m. to wait for the free cheese and butter distribution. When the doors open at 10:10, the line winds around the corner, past Rocky’s Used Cars. At least 500 people, older whites and Hispanics mostly, wait patiently in the sun with proof of residence and income to receive five pounds of processed American cheese and a pound of butter, courtesy of the U.S. Agriculture Department.

They may have forgotten for a moment that it’s not just another empty day on its way. Perhaps once they were mechanics, beauty-parlor technicians, spot-welders, farmers or shopkeepers; but now they are mostly old and noticeably poor. Their trademarks are rotten or missing teeth, torn sleeves, a worn plastic bag with heavily-taped handles, jeans worn too long and dragging the ground, torn nylons rolled into rings above the ankles. Some faces show pride-too poor to paint, too proud to whitewash-and others just stare straight ahead, resigned, used to waiting. By 2:30, all have been served. Health services director Milton Plomarity doesn’t know why there wasn’t any flour or dried milk this time.



“THE QUESTION IS, will it be another 10 years before enough upper middle-class people move over here to save what’s left of the original fabric of Jefferson?” asks Dave Shanks. “We are really an island in North Oak Cliff without the support system of surrounding wealth that benefits Oak Lawn and Lower Greenville.” Shanks, an architect, points out past glories and present vulgarities along the boulevard while wondering why pawnshop signs are always in black and gold.

Shanks singles out the top of a grand old home now hidden by Pumpkin Patch Antiques and another two-story house next to the Inter-Tribal Center as reminders of how the street once looked, its large homes mixed with businesses. Heading west, we pass the Texas Theatre, where Lee Harvey Oswald enjoyed his last moments of freedom.

A third-generation Oak Cliffer, Dave Shanks grew up in Southwest Oak Cliff near Kimbell High School, shopped at the Sears on Jefferson, ate at Red Bryan’s and spent many Saturday afternoons in the Texas Theatre. It was when he joined an architectural firm in North Dallas that he learned what others thought of his home turf. “An all-black dangerous wasteland, more like Harlem than what I remembered,” says Shanks.

The misconceptions galvanized his think ing about moving back to Oak Cliff to become part of its new growth; and there was his dream of one day owning a home on a hilltop surrounded by trees with a view of downtown Dallas. After working in Bryan Tower a few years, Shanks and his family moved to Stevens Park and he started his own firm in a small building on North Zang. Eight dollars a square foot compared to Bryan Tower’s $14 or the proposed $24 in the up-and-coming 70-story InterFirst Tower. And he bought his dream lot, on Greenbriar, with old oaks and a skyline view.

Shanks is an enthusiastic and active cheerleader for Oak Cliff, supporting Jefferson’s beautification, redoing storefronts without destroying the building’s original structure and who served on Mayor Starke Taylor’s South Dallas Task Force.

“Jefferson is at a crossroads right now,” says Shanks. “The beautification is fine but it really doesn’t pull people here. That’s why new places like the Boulevard Cafe and the Country Corner are so important. Jill and Abel Kennedy are the real urban pioneers.”

Lawyer Corky Sherman, who bought his first set of golf clubs at the Jefferson Army and Navy store, agrees. “People who sell Yuppie goods still think of Oak Cliff as it was 15 years ago. The Kennedys and Belinda Bunch are the first to realize things have changed. I appreciate the new trees, the 70-foot flagpole, the redwood planters, but I don’t need to rent a TV or pawn my wife’s jewelry. Until shops open that I can use, I’ll still drive to NorthPark and so will the attorney for American Airlines, the lawyer for Diamond Shamrock, the engineer and other professionals on my block.”

As a member of the park board, Sherman has had more than a passing interest in the latest Jefferson Boulevard beautification program, as has his wife Diane, the current president of the Winnetka Heights Neighborhood Association. The Oak Cliff Chamber of Commerce and the merchant’s association have been trying to clean-up and give Jefferson a face-lift since the mid Fifties when the Dallas County Transit Company discontinued their streetcars, ripped the tracks from their brick beds, and replaced the 40-foot trolly poles with T-shaped fluorescent street lights.

There was the pedestrian mall proposal of ’68, re-routing autos to Twelfth and Ninth Streets, replacing parking places with trees from Beckley to Polk. “Fine if I had monkeys instead of customers,” says C.B. Wylie, at the time owner of an appliance store. In the mid-Seventies, after a fire had destroyed Colbert-Volk and three other stores, after Penney’s and Sears had left for Redbird Mall and more than a dozen vacancies lined the street, former Dallas City Council member Rose Renfroe suggested emphasizing the historical nature of Jefferson Boulevard by removing the macadam and exposing the brick and perhaps using carriages to carry shoppers.

The latest scheme began in May 1982, when the city, using $500,000 from Community Development Block Grants, agreed to provide landscaping, lighting, new parking areas, planters and fountains, and a 70-foot flag pole (and a $650 flag) in the 200-block between Zang and Madison, a block east of Jefferson Tower. Nine months later, the winner of a 10-kilometer foot race cut the ribbon, a high school band played and officials pontificated. On to the 300 and 400 blocks!

But by the end of the year, the trees and shrubs in the median strip had died. The wind-tattered flag was gone, its pole broken. The two fountains were dry and clogged with trash. The fly in the frappe was a dispute between the city and the chamber of commerce over who was responsible for maintenance once the project was finished. Hence, no one cleaned, watered, swept or repaired.

Most of the confusion has been resolved and the Yaupon holly, purple-leaf plums, dwarf crape myrtles, and Asian jasmine are thriving beneath a new flag and pole. However, the five new red oaks may be jinxed. The first replacements were destroyed when the truck overturned. A week later, the tops of the second batch were ruined in transit when they hit an overpass. Officials will try again late this fall.

While others work to give Jefferson a come-hither look with landscaping, Freddie Burris and his partner Pat Riley are at their gym a few doors down from the Indian health center. They’re teaching the neighborhood kids how to box, hoping they will discover a career that doesn’t involve jail. Any afternoon after 5:30, Freddy is in the ring or over at the speed bag working with Arthur Gomez, one of their Golden Glove champions, or a new kid just learning to bob and weave.

Freddie Burris was a boxer and is a barber. Walk in his shop, the Barbering Quarter, on the fourth floor of the Republic Bank Oak Cliff building, and all you see, even before you smell the sweet aftershave, are boxing pictures, all the greats hanging up there alongside Freddie’s gloves, posters, and trophies.

Driving over to the gym in his spotless ’53 Chevrolet, Freddy talks about his career, about losing his first Golden Gloves match at 16 in 1958 to a Spanish kid named Robert something, then winning the Gloves three years running, turning professional and losing his first fight to Johnny Brooks from Wichita, Kansas. “He was a great one. Went on to beat Emile Griffin. . . lots of real champs. Hey, I wasn’t great. Ended up with a 40-20-1 record. I didn’t keep in shape, just fought when I needed the money. But I always loved it. I wanna get these kids off the streets.”

Inside the gymnasium, teen-agers skipped rope, grappled with the heavy bags, jumped rope, sparred in the ring. “We charge $20 a month if you’re out of school, $10 if not, and kids that are real poor and want to learn, we let ’em in,” Burris says. “Don’t turn anybody away. And I got to come up with $400 rent for this place each and every month.”



AS DALLAS CONTINUES to evolve into a tale of two cities-the well-to-do grouped in the north, the poor to the south -Jefferson Boulevard and surrounding neighborhoods may be the city’s only chance to have a true mixture of citizens, a melting pot of racial and financial statements that is the mark of a mature urban environment.

Imagine: Freddie Burris’ reformed teenage hotrod bandits, almost all Hispanic, sharing the street with American Indians. The nattily dressed doctors from Methodist Central Hospital having lunch at Cliff Jones’ new Pocket Full Sandwich Shoppe. The blacks who patronize Top Ten Records, the older whites who have been customers of Oak Cliff Music since it opened in 1926, or Goodman Music, which opened four years earlier-all sharing Jefferson Boulevard.

But no one, whether a new arrival or old-timer, knows whether the big money boys, who someday may be groveling over Jefferson Boulevard and its environs, will transform the area from a democracy into the expensive Condo Land North Dallas has become, a thousand variations of one song by those who never tire of being defiantly normal.

Meanwhile, Norman Hansen at Wiley Roberts & Sons has his wealthy clients from Houston on the telephone. They are discussing a preliminary contract to buy the Rick’s Furniture building and are conducting a feasibility study to convert the massive structure into a mini-mall. The federal government is doing the same thing to determine whether the General Services Administration would be happy in the vacated telephone building down the street. And Norman’s just sold the beautiful two-story building at the intersection of Jefferson and Tyler to two young women who will use the 5,000 square-feet upstairs for photographic studios. One of the purchasers, Kathy McDaniel, is part-owner of the Grape Restaurant. Greenville Avenue comes to Jefferson Boulevard.

To the north in Winnetka Heights and Kidd Springs, the potters (David Henley and Bruce Mayo), the glass artist (Roal Enix), the journalists (Cope Moyers and George Rodrique) and other young professionals keep moving in, snatching up the bungalows and old buildings for homes and studios.

The streets and quiet neighborhoods across the Trinity River no longer slumber and wait in reverie and remembrance. Change is in the air. If Realtor Norman Hansen had come from East Texas instead of Oregon, he might have said Jefferson Boulevard and Oak Cliff were through fishing with rotten string and an empty hook.

Every dog has his day.