The Times They Are A’Changin’

My parents and I returned from El Paso on May 3, 1961, running headlong into major changes to Ft. Worth in general and particularly to the East Side.

Downtown was still basically the same, though it had acquired a futuristic 30-story skyscraper in the interim…the aluminum-skinned Continental National Bank building at Houston and W. 7th. It was easily identifiable from any point in Ft. Worth that offered a view of downtown as a result of the giant rotating clock mounted on it's roof. Two opposing sides displayed the time, while the letters CNB adorned the other two sides. Ft. Worth National Bank was directly across Houston Street from Continental (Remember the TV commercial with the girl singing "Ft. Worth National, that's my bank!" ?). Also, the corner diagonally opposite from CNB was Texas Electric, complete with a time/temperature display jutting out from the building and an image of their mascot, Reddy Kilowatt (Anyone remember him?).

Seminary South shopping center had been built at the intersection of I-35W & W. Berry Street. They drained a small lake to do it, so the shopping center actually sat below street level on the lake bed. This was the first modern shopping mall in Ft. Worth and it was accompanied with all kinds of gloom and doom predictions that it would ruin downtown. Turned out the predictions were correct for a long time, though now the tide has turned.

On the East Side, things had changed in spades, though most of the changes were good and simply made the East Side a more desirable place to be. The Monnig’s East Shopping Center had been built and there were plenty of small businesses, antique shops, two bowling alleys and the like. You could walk the neighborhoods or up and down E. Lancaster with no concern for your safety. Believe it or not, it even extended to women. Yep, things were good....but they would be changing in ways that no one suspected. If we had only known!

One harbinger of what was to come (though very few people would have believed it at the time) was the fact that when my father came on ahead to a job at Ranch Style Beans (he made the sauce for the beans) and look for a house, his boss told him to not look at anything south of E. Lancaster. What'd my father do? Looked at houses that were south of E. Lancaster. We eventually wound up at 416 Chicago (seven houses south of E. Lancaster), which is where I've been for the last 46 years and I suppose is where I'll be for the rest of my life.

In the intervening eight years, the toll road (I-30) had been built to speed access to Dallas, as well as to bypass all the lights and traffic on the old Dallas Pike. Oh, you never heard of the Dallas Pike? Believe it or not, you drive on it every day. It's nothing more than E. Lancaster…or Highway 80….or I-80…or I-180….or Division Street…or the Dallas Turnpike…or the Dallas Pike…or….you get the idea. Depending on the time period or where you live in relation to it, every one of those names describes the same road. Is it any wonder we get confused when someone mentions a certain street name?

In any event, the construction of I-30 has been considered by many to be the primary reason that the East Side has changed (or deteriorated) the way that it has, with a singular inability to attract and keep major destination businesses. When you could hit I-30 near downtown and be on a straight shot to Dallas with very few interchanges or exits to deal with, you're simply not going to have any reason to divert to a local highway. What's the result? Businesses begin to die. Of course, they don’t die right away. In fact, the East Side was still quite vibrant well into the 70s. Matter of fact, let's take a look at what the area was like in 1961.

Starting at Henderson and E. Lancaster, the Main Post Office was exactly that, the Main post office where all mail was sorted. It was a busy place with mail arriving and departing by both truck and train. If you wanted a letter to get someplace in a hurry, you sent it via air mail, with those letters and packages being delivered to the airport for that special treatment. UPS and FedEx were still nearly 20 years in the future.

Moving east, you had the T&P Depot that was still in full operation with passenger trains coming and going on a regular schedule. The downtown overhead was in full bloom, the result of an extremely short-sighted city council that voted against building I-30 below grade…and y'all know what kind of battle resulted from that decision before the overhead was torn down and I-30 moved south of the railroad tracks.

Oh, by the way, remember a couple of posts back when I said I'd tell you about the cold storage plant? During the 1940s, Swift & Co. had an ice cream manufacturing operation in the long freight building that sits just across Henderson Street west of the main post office. If you still don't know what building I'm talking about, it's easy to identify. It has about 30 or so loading docks with rust-red roll-up doors facing the south side of Lancaster. That's the building that had an artesian well inside, which is why my parents, grandmother and I didn't need to boil water during the '49 flood.

Anyway, continueing east on E. Lancaster, the area between I-35 and the T is now pretty much known as Mission Row (Union Gospel Mission and so on) was small businesses and gas stations. What we now call The T was the Ft. Worth Transit Company and just to the west of their main office on the south side of E. Lancaster was an electronics company (similar to a Radio Shack outlet) where I bought my first component stereo. Nobody bothered to lock their cars when they went into a business place and it was a generally safe location. And speaking of Radio Shack, they built a two-story headquarters building in the early 60s on W. 7th Street, just a little ways down from Montgomery Ward and across the street. Only it wasn't called Radio Shack. Instead, it was Tandycrafts and it contained everything from Leathercraft to Radio Shack. When they had their grand opening, my father and I rode the bus over there to explore the place. The atmosphere was very much like a bazaar and Radio Shack even had a radio controlled robot running around the building to give you a taste of what the near future would be like for all of us. Somehow, I don't think what we've wound up with is quite what they envisioned.