When It Was Safe To Walk

There was a time in Ft. Worth when it was safe to walk just about anywhere. Today there are places where you can walk with safety, but it’s not like it used to be. Just in case you’re about to disagree with me, let’s see what it was like in the 1960s on the East Side.

Now just so you can put this into perspective the East Side, in that time period, basically ran from I-30 on the north to the T&P railroad tracks on the south. East and west boundaries were the Riverside/E. Lancaster intersection and Handley Drive/E. Lancaster. White Lake Hills was just starting to be developed and there was nothing east of White Lake Hills and north of I-30 but ranch land. No Woodhaven, no River Bend, etc. As for Eastchase, that was nothing but wooded, rolling terrain.

South of the railroad tracks was Rosedale and Vickery. At that time, a nice area that was quite safe. There was a Buddies Supermarket on the corner of Ayers and Rosedale and just to the west was a Safeway. Small businesses were plentiful.

I came back here in 1961. My parents and I moved into a house on Chicago Street and, since we didn’t have a car, we did what so many other people did. Walked or took the bus. The idea that we might be in danger from disreputable people or pestered by vagrants never crossed our minds. We walked everywhere. Down Panola to Ayers where Temple Baptist Church was located, up and down E. Lancaster to grocery stores, drugstores, True Value hardware, office suppies, Gateway Theater, hobby shops and on and on. Didn’t matter whether it was daylight or dark.

My father and I walked plenty of places at night, my mother got off the bus at night and walked a half block home by herself and so on. This was a normal way of life. People were friendly, helpful and considerate. If you were walking home with heavy bags of groceries, you just might have a stranger stop their car to give you a ride rather than see you carry those groceries the rest of the way in the heat or rain. There were even times my mother put the dog on a leash and walked a mile or so down E. Lancaster to the old Meadowbrook Bowling Lanes....by herself, in the dark, after ten o’clock at night. There was also a Brunswick Bowling Alley at about the 5400 block of E. Lancaster. That was two miles from the house and my parents walked up there late at night one time.

Those were good times and safe times. But, as happens so often, things change. When it actually started, I can’t say, but over a period of time it became a little less safe. By the mid-80s, things were definitely on a downhill slide. Old businesses that had been in the area forever began to leave, in large part because the people who had supported them were getting older and moving. Antique shops that gave a second life to single family homes and used be all up and down E. Lancaster began to disappear. Along the way, the East side developed a reputation as an undesirable, high crime area.

But the pendulum continues to swing. While it still retains the perception of a high crime area, that’s no longer true....except in some people’s minds. In fact, the crime rate is substantially less than some of the ‘desirable’ parts of Ft. Worth. There have been improvements and you can now get out and walk again without any real concern for your safety. Like many areas of Ft. Worth, there’s a lot of work left to be done, but progress is being made.

Will it ever get back to the way it was in the 1960s? I don’t know. Society changes and people change. So do the demographics of an area. All you can do is to work to make it as good as you can. But there’s darn sure nothing wrong with using the 1960s version of the East Side as the template for what you’d like it to be again.