FrontBurner

By the generations still alive to argue the case, the years 1984 to 1988 are most often cited as Deep Ellum’s heyday, a time and a place where you might find a suburban 16-year-old checking IDs at the club door and ecstasy on every corner. It was a scene captured by a young Skip Hollandsworth for this magazine’s March 1987 cover story, whose subtitle read: “Underground in Deep Ellum: a generation of kids searches for identity. Are they part of a new counterculture? Or are they rebels without a cause?”

That outside-looking-in take was, at the time, a sore point for some on the inside. “With all the creative types in the scene—writers, poets, and songwriters—it seemed like D Magazine could have gotten somebody that was more in touch,“ says David Adriance 36 years later. He appeared in the story as a skateboard punk known on the streets as David Dude. “All these kids, even the wealthy ones, were considered black sheep and kind of lost themselves, and we all found unity with creativity.” 

Those creative connections would serve as David Dude’s ramp into many adventures. He rubbed elbows with rock stars around the world while working as the merch manager for Dallas’ Reverend Horton Heat. Once, while visiting his Starck Club-investor girlfriend in Paris, he met a pair of French artists who negotiated the sale of his orthopedic cast—which had been drawn on by graffiti-art legend Keith Haring. The proceeds funded a summer of European surfing. 

At the time of the article, though, David Dude was living at the Theatre Gallery, a warehouse-turned-illegal event space that many young bohemians called home over the years. The Theatre Gallery’s founder, Russell David Hobbs, was more or less Deep Ellum’s master of ceremonies, presiding over a three-ring circus of visual, theatrical, and musical artists who were given free rein inside the space. “At that moment, it was really about real, convicted artists, painting and spilling their guts out onstage through theater and live music,” Hobbs says, “and the street scene was an exploration into art and reality and social experience. We were all trying to break on through to the other side.”

In the early 1970s, Dallas was one of about six cities in the country that established field offices for the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs. Native Americans often relocated to these cities in search of jobs. Bob Beames, the former director of the bureau, told the Dallas Morning News in 1973: “Except for eastern Oklahoma, few places offer Indians work where they live. Job opportunities are simply better off the reservation than on it—in the cities rather than in the country.”

News editorial writer Jim Hawkins reported that most of the Native Americans who came to Dallas voluntarily were in their early 20s, “already married as often as not.” There is only one reference in his editorial to what was called “The Corner,” a “favorite rendezvous” for these newcomers located at Peak and Bryan streets. In part, because they were dropped off in parts of town that didn’t have easy access to jobs, transit, or housing without much support. The Corner was where they gathered.

That’s where writer Doug Holley spent some time in 1975 for “The Cement Prairie,” our second of the 50 greatest stories we’ve ever published. We’re highlighting one per week throughout our 50th anniversary this year.

The center of Holley’s story is Tom & Jerry’s Lounge, maybe three blocks north of Peak, at 4536 Bryan St. This section of Bryan is now part of the Uplift Peak Preparatory charter school complex, and where T&J’s once stood, you’ll now find a parking lot. Peak and Bryan is home to longtime restaurants Vietnam and Bangkok City, which opened in the 1990s, as well as new apartments. Its history as a gathering place for Native Americans has vanished.

In the 1970s, “The Corner” was adjacent to a block filled with bars, a few of which were once highlighted by this magazine in another feature from 1975 titled “The Meanest Bars in Dallas.” Two years after Holley’s story, the News reported that a man wounded a few patrons with a .25-caliber automatic gun inside Tom & Jerry’s on a Tuesday night. The fight had apparently spilled over from Pinky’s Lounge, one block away.

Holley himself narrowly avoids violence at one point of the story. But that isn’t his focus. Offensive language aside—and the similarly offensive framing and stereotyping, for sure—the story is largely told through the Native Americans who decided to make a life in what an employee at the American Indian Center described as “the cold-blooded city.” The story illustrates how difficult it was to find work, housing, and other basic necessities, despite the promise of such coming from officials like Beams.

In fact, the News editorial that quotes the former director of the Bureau of Indian Affairs is a cold view from above, all numbers—there were 6,000 Native Americans in Dallas in 1973, according to the Census at that time—and admonishments. Holley’s story is an intimate look at what it took to make a home in a strange place. It also introduces readers to the services that gradually sprouted up around the city, including the Urban Inter-Tribal Center of Texas, now known as Texas Native Health. In 2022, the organization announced plans to triple its space near the Medical Center to 15 exam rooms.

“The Cement Prairie” captures Old East Dallas at a very different time, and it’s one of the 50 greatest stories we’ve published.

You can read it here.

The exhibit Facing the Rising Sun: Freedman’s Cemetery opened in 2000 at the African American Museum in Fair Park, chronicling the history of the thriving Black community just north of present-day downtown. Curators Phillip Collins and Alan Govenar expected it to be up for only a year.

Two decades later, it’s still on display. It serves as the inspiration for two new exhibits in adjoining exhibition halls, Central Track: Crossroads of Deep Ellum and Seeing a World Blind Lemon Never Saw, which opened last week and commemorates the 150th anniversary of the historic neighborhood. Both, again, are organized by Collins, a curatorial advisor and former museum staffer, and Govenar, founder of Dallas-based Documentary Arts and a longtime chronicler of Deep Ellum.

“They’re an outgrowth of that exhibition,” Govenar said, exploring the same themes of trauma, racism, violence, resiliency, and geography as the original show. He also curated three accompanying pieces: When You Go Down in Deep Ellum and Unlikely Blues: Louis Paeth and Blind Lemon Jefferson at the new Deep Ellum Community Center; and Invisible Deep Ellum, an installation under the I-345 overpass that memorializes the Black-owned businesses that were destroyed when the highway was built.  

The freeway replaced what was known as Central Track, the main corridor of the roughly seven block neighborhood between Elm Street and Swiss Avenue. Govenar described it as full of life as well as diversity. It’s a place where Jewish, Italian, Greek, and other European immigrants joined freed slaves who “came together if not by choice then necessity.” For a city whose power structure often claimed membership in the Ku Klux Klan, it was a safe space away (for a while) from strife.

The show highlights the reprehensible depiction of Black life in the 1920s by the Dallas Morning News, juxtaposing racist news clips with posters for minstrel shows from the same era. They’re all offensive, Govenar said, and that’s the point. But the subject matter is also the result of the limited depictions of Black life in the area.

Even as his book Deep Ellum: The Other Side of Dallas, co-written with longtime journalist Jay F. Brakefield, has just been published in its third edition by local publishing house Deep Vellum, no additional photographs have emerged from collectors or archives.

“It’s astounding,” he said.

Few could have captured President John F. Kennedy’s death and the immediate aftermath like veteran reporter and historian Darwin Payne in his new book, Behind the Scenes, Covering the J.F.K. Assassination. He returns to the murderous weekend that ended with the deaths of President Kennedy, Dallas Police Officer J.D. Tippit, and accused killer Lee Harvey Oswald.

Payne will speak at 1 p.m. Nov. 17 at the Sixth Floor Museum in Dealey Plaza, in the former Texas School Book Depository where the first bullets rang out 60 years ago.

The large museum space freeze-frames Nov. 22, 1963 with the same view, from the sixth-floor southeast corner, that the sniper had. Payne and a handful of other reporters and photographers inspected it soon after the shooting. Earlier that day, after sprinting four blocks from the Dallas Times Herald, the 26-year-old newsman had begun interviewing eyewitnesses at street level.

Behind the Scenes — part memoir, part reporter’s stream of consciousness, part history of presidential visits to Dallas and an overview of presidential assassinations — is loaded with back stories and details to which few were privy. Its immediacy comes from Payne’s notebooks and an unfinished manuscript he discovered in a closet during the pandemic lockdown. The reader feels the urgency of the moment and is reminded of the tragedy’s moving parts that alternately fascinated and horrified. 

The account brackets three days that riveted the world as the police, print and radio reporters, and ascendant broadcast television sorted out the signal calamity of the century in real time, piece by piece.

On December 12, tens of thousands of people will gather at the Cathedral Shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Catholic church made of red brick and limestone at the corner of Ross Avenue and Pearl Street. Buses will drop off worshippers on pilgrimages from all over the country. Children will don indigenous Mexican costumes. Matachines, traditional Hispanic dancers known for their colorful costumes and large headdresses, will perform, “doing exactly what they have done for centuries,” says rector Jesús Belmontes. Folks will leave roses as the sound of drums send them on their way. And the cathedral’s 140 bells will ring out in concert. 

December 12 is the feast day for Our Lady of Guadalupe, the patron saint of the church and of Mexico. The day’s masses are always magical, Belmontes says. The event regularly draws crowds of up to 30,000 people. But this year will be special. In late September, the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops officially designated the cathedral as a national shrine. This year’s feast day will serve as a special celebration for the news. 

Established 121 years ago, Cathedral Guadalupe “is the very heart of the Diocese of Dallas,” says Bishop Edward Burns. It is his official bishop’s seat, or his position’s home church in the diocese. The church has also attracted worshipers from across Dallas and the U.S., as well as Latin American immigrants, inside its doors as congregants for decades. Its services are still delivered in English and in Spanish. That, along with a special image behind the altar of the Lady of Guadalupe—who is also called the Virgin of Guadalupe—and the church’s long history in downtown Dallas, were the impetus for the recognition of a national shrine, Belmontes says. 

There are 71 Catholic national shrines across the country, and only two others in Texas, neither of which are dedicated to Virgin of Guadalupe. Because of this new designation, Belmontes and Burns expect even more crowds to the cathedral, which is now officially called National Shrine Cathedral of Our Lady of Guadalupe. 

The title is “a big honor for our congregation and for our community to know that this church is known as a shrine in the entire country,” says Belmontes.

Four years ago, workers were clearing debris from an old office building in Corsicana, preparing for a renovation, when they discovered a time capsule: 400 envelopes of film and photographs, all taken more than 50 years ago. Of course, the workers weren’t looking for a time capsule, and they almost dumped the entire cache of about 2,500 photographs into the trash. 

The building’s contents were once the property of the now-defunct City Office Supply, which sent off customers’ film to a processing lab. When those customers failed to retrieve their photo orders, City Office Supply dutifully stored them for safekeeping. The company did this from 1948 to 1966, amassing four cabinets of abandoned images. 

The two decades of photos—which form the upcoming exhibition “DUST,” hosted by the Corsicana Artist & Writer Residency—show the candid, everyday life of the town of Corsicana and Navarro County. There are images of parades, high school dances, and road trips. 

The story of Greenland Hills begins with a tale of two brothers and one helluva business scheme. In 1923, Fletcher and Frank McNeny bought 98 acres of the old Bennett dairy farm. It was on the outskirts of Dallas, near the end of the trolley line at Mockingbird. It was empty space, but it wouldn’t be for long. 

The neighborhood is now in the center of Dallas—bordered east to west by Central Expressway and Greenville Avenue and north to south by McCommas Boulevard and Vanderbilt Avenue. “We were almost a suburban development in its day, and now we’re completely in the middle,” says Stuart Mut, an architectural historian who has lived in the neighborhood for 46 years. 

Greenland Hills is commonly referred to as the M Streets, nicknamed for the number of streets that begin with “M.” Famous for its pricey Tudor Revival cottages, the neighborhood is celebrating its centennial anniversary this year with a home tour earlier this month and a neighborhood block party planned for November 4. Taking place at Glencoe Park, the festival will include live music and cake, of course. “The vision was to think about what it was like to go have a picnic in the park 100 years ago,” Greenland Hills Neighborhood Association president Laura Pratt says.  

One hundred years ago, the McNeny brothers were doing something that hadn’t really been done in Dallas before. Unlike other developments, which built large homes first and then in-filled smaller properties, Greenland Hills “platted, subdivided, and laid out the infrastructure all at once,” Pratt says. As they built homes, they ran sewer, water, and gas mains. They incorporated with the city and later added 176 acres. They paved streets and sidewalks. And they brought in mass transit—the trolley, bus routes, and the Sherman/Dennison Interurban streetcar line. 

This month, The Stoneleigh—pardon, it’s actually now Le Méridien Dallas—will become the second hotel in Dallas to reach its 100th anniversary, following The Adolphus, which opened in 1912. And, just like any old man on his birthday, The Stoneleigh has decades’ worth of yarns to spin. “If only the walls could talk,” says Victoria Clow, president of Preservation Dallas. “I’d love to hear the stories they could tell.”

The neon red Stoneleigh Hotel sign almost never graced the Dallas skyline. Architect F.J. Woerner was so stubborn with his specifications that contractors wouldn’t bid on the design. Yet, according to Woerner’s daughter, Louise Sellers, he didn’t take care to preserve the original blueprints. “Somebody called me when Corrigan bought this, and he said, ‘Do you have the plans?’ And I said, ‘No, I’m sorry, but those were done on linen,’ ” Sellers says. “You know the waxed paper, beautiful linen material. Mamma boiled the wax off and made me clothes out of the plans. It was the most beautiful linen you ever saw.”  

About 20 years ago, two business partners were counting bricks of drugs and money in an empty bar on Fitzhugh Avenue. Two officers from the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission walked into the run-down shopping center and interrupted the drug deal. The counters eyeballed each other, then pulled their guns on the TABC officers. They yell in broken English: GET THE F— OUT RIGHT NOW.

The officers complied, the story goes, and never returned. In the late 90s and early 2000s, scenes like this were unfolding regularly east of Central Expressway on Fitzhugh. The street was marked by clubs and bars that frequently made news for violence and drug busts.

If the dealers knew then that the present-day street value of queso and guacamole a few blocks down at Joe Leo Fine Tex Mex was easily moving at $14.49 a serving, they might have decided to trade crime for real estate.

Today, this stretch of Fitzhugh is home to an Australian coffee shop chain with no wi-fi and flanked by a growing number of mid-rise apartments with rent paid by people who probably would never imagine such scenes playing out steps away from their espressos.

Eric Sanchez is one of the keepers of this history. One recent afternoon, the co-owner of the 12-year-old bar Strangeways is impersonating those TABC officers, Foghorn Leghorn style, plucking at invisible suspenders. He is sitting outside of his business, which he opened with his family in August 2011.

He’s discussing the past because this beloved neighborhood bar is closing, the result of the landlord choosing to sell the building to another owner. A link to the former East Dallas and its future is going away with the closing of the bar. Swankier businesses at much higher price points threaten to swoop in and take its place. All the work the Strangeways family has put in could become part of the same mythology that defines old Fitzhugh, another tale told by the next loquacious barkeeps. If they know the story.

This year marks the 120^th anniversary of Oak Cliff’s annexation by the city of Dallas, in 1903. The neighborhood’s history stands out in many ways. Perhaps the most notable event was the capture of Lee Harvey Oswald in the Texas Theater on November 22, 1963, when he attempted to evade police by hiding out in a screening of the film War Is Hell after he assassinated President John F. Kennedy and killed Dallas Police Officer J. D. Tippit.

Oak Cliff was the site of the Hord’s Ridge community, founded by slave owner William H. Hord in 1845. Another notable settler, William Brown Miller, moved to what is now the eastern Oak Cliff area in 1847. Miller, born in Kentucky, built a plantation and became one of the largest slave owners in Texas. Many descendants of the Miller slaves still gather for family reunions.

After the Civil War, flourishing Freedman’s Towns developed in the areas bound by the Trinity River to the north, Fleming Street to the west, Compton Street to the south, and the Trinity Heights streetcar line to the east. One of the only remaining intact Freedman’s Towns in the country is the Tenth Street Historic District. The Freedman’s Town along the Trinity River levee between the streetcar line, the Corinth Street bridge, and Eighth Street was known as The Bottom.

In 1887, Hord’s Ridge and several hundred acres on the south bank of the Trinity were purchased by Thomas L. Marsalis and John S. Armstrong. Initially conceived as a high-end residential area, the duo renamed the area Oak Cliff. By year’s end they sold over $60,000 worth of land for the project before Marsalis took over development following a dispute with Armstrong. Some of his projects included the Park Hotel, Oak Cliff Park—which later became the Marsalis Park and Zoo—and a railroad that operated down Jefferson Boulevard and toward Lake Cliff, eventually crossing the Trinity River.

In May 1908, heavy rain caused the Trinity River to crest over 50 feet, leading to major devastation throughout Dallas including Oak Cliff. Floodwaters in Oak Cliff was an issue that continued into the future. Over 200 homes in South Dallas and Oak Cliff were destroyed by floods in 1989 and 1990.

The area known as The Bottom saw a decline in the 1930s as the Great Depression and the construction of the Trinity River levee led to many residents moving away. The Bottom and the Tenth Street area were further impacted in 1955 when hundreds of homes were torn down for the construction of Interstate 35E, which also resulted in the bifurcation of Tenth Street from the western portions of the neighborhood.

Then came a tornado on April 2, 1957, tearing through Oak Cliff along with parts of West Dallas.

The photograph gallery herein shows a portion of the varied and important images of Oak Cliff’s enduring history. They can all be found in the archives of Dallas Public Library, from an image of the Texas Theater to the infamous 1908 flood and 1957 tornado. There are also several images Tenth Street neighborhood and The Bottom.

The Dallas Public Library has many other images showing Oak Cliff’s past. You can learn more by searching through the library’s online catalog. Go to “Advanced” and use the “Limit By” option to select “Digital Archive” then type in your topic.

A piece of century-old Dallas history now lies in ashes in the Great Trinity Forest. The Lock Keeper’s House—or the Lock Keeper’s Quarters, as it was known in the early 1900s—caught fire in July and was consumed by flames, leaving only a concrete slab, a chimney, charred trees, and scattered ashes on a bluff above the Trinity River.

It was a surreal, obscure site that was difficult to access, a two-story Victorian-style house that pointed toward the McCommas Bluff preserve just south of the Trinity River Audubon Center. You can get there by following a concrete path from the Great Trinity Forest Gateway and Horse Trail, near Interstate 20, off Dowdy Ferry Road. You’ll still have to look out for the narrow path that leads up to the bluff, but the house would have been visible from points north. It was an eerie, unexpected structure ideal for drone footage and spooky music.

Fifty or so feet below the house, the river water rushes over the Trinity’s first lock and dam, one of the few physical reminders of a time when early Dallas planners envisioned the city as an inland port accessible to barges carrying goods to and from Galveston and Houston.

“It’s one of those things where you blame yourself. Why couldn’t I get anyone to buy it?” said Ben Sandifer, my tour guide for the day. Sandifer, an accountant whose passion lives in these woods, said it has been difficult to return to the site to see the dust of history.