WELCOME TO UPTOWN EAST

THROUGHOUT the dusty annals of Dallas’ illustrious but oft-ignored history, the comer of Bryan and Peak has always managed to kick up a little dirt. Few areas of sprawling Dallas have been home to a more varied cultural cross section. From the glorious and regal to the gutted and penniless, these two streets have been home to both ends, of Dallas life. Now, with equal parts of capital, elbow grease, and luck, the urban pendulum is swinging toward a happier medium.

During the early 20th-century heyday of trolley travel, the Bryan line was the main route eastward and Peak was a loop around the city, going through Oak Lawn and Deep Ellum. The intersection was brought to life by a varied array of businesses: mom and pop shops, a nickelodeon-even a dance hall. But the advent of World War II, its byproduct, the mass-produced automobile, and massive rezoning helped turn the neighborhood into a business strip of another kind, home to assorted prostitutes, pimps, junkies, and other felons.

“When we weren’t chasing hookers off the street,” says Dallas Police Cpl. Ronald Cow-art, “we were answering a mugging or shooting a couple of streets over.” The Sun Rexall at the comer of Haskell and Bryan, the first twenty-four-hour drug-store in Dallas, was locally known as the “Junkie Rexall.” And one of the local bare was known as the most violent place in the city.

But things have changed, says Cowart, a soft-spoken Vietnam vet who’s walked the Bryan/Peak beat for a remarkable seventeen years. Cowart defines the area as between the historical district (Swiss and Live Oak) on the east, Ross Avenue and Southland’s Cityplace project on the west, Lower Greenville on the north, and Fox & Jacob’s Bryan Place development on the south. The heavy crime stats are down, Cow-art reports, due largely to the growing Asian community. (Since the fall of Southeast Asia in 1975, the Bryan/Bsak area has absorbed more than 4,000 refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.)

This ethnic transition, in addition to the financial and personal involvement of Dallas developer Don Cass, has renewed retail interest in the area. Cass, who caught the developing bug while doing considerable renovation work along Lower Greenville Avenue, sees the Bryan/Peak area as a logical extension of the urban move back downtown. Cass bought his first Bryan/Peak property in the early Eighties and now owns more than 25,000 square feet. Among his early tenants, he says, was a motorcycle gang who lived in one of the buildings.

The tenant mix they’re aiming for now, says Joyce Sanders of Louis G. Reese Realtors, “is an eclectic one that will promote a creative retail environment.” So far, so good. There’s a funky vintage clothes store, a Vietnamese restaurant, and a catering/take-out shop among other retail ventures.

The optimism of Cowart and Cass is shared by Mark Davis and Robert Ellington, the partners of Cafe Brannon, the latest Bryan/ Peak renovation and the show-piece of the intersection. The old Brannon building is the former site of a furniture store, dress-manufacturing sweat shop, and a TV repair store. The thirty-seven-year-old Park Cities/Preston Hollow developers (Highland Realty Development) firmly believe that they “are in the right place at the right time.” Davis calls Ellington a “real estate hound” who’s always “looking under every rock for a good deal.” And the Bryan/Peak area is a good rock, they say, with the potential to get better. And a lot of that potential, they admit, comes from Southland’s mammoth City-place project under construction just a couple of blocks away.

Ellington and Davis have sunk $2.5 million into the Brannon project. Their job now, they say, is finding the right mix of tenants to occupy the 20,000 square feet of office and retail space that overlooks the downtown skyline, Oak Lawn, and parts of Fair Park. (It was here, on the second floor, that the Blue Room carried on business throughout Prohibition.)

The real urban pioneers in the area, says Ellington, are T.L. and Ho Lung, the Vietnamese proprietors of La Pagode restaurant, a Cass project, across the street. It’s been a long two years, the Lungs admit, but business is picking up.

To harness the growing enthusiasm of his neighbors and to gain support of the city, Ellington is spearheading the formation of the Uptown East Merchants Association. “It’s a classy way,” he says, “of spreading the word.”

But not all is nirvana yet, cautions Cass, who’s eyeing more property in the area. “The city is going to have to force the remaining slumlords to clean up their acts or the city will have to demolish the properties. That’s the only way to bring other interested developers in.”