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.

Remember Window Shopping?

Back in olden times (the late 1940s thru the 1950s and even into the 1960s), a major form of entertainment was window shopping. In other words, you strolled thru downtown (shopping centers were just getting started in the early 1960s) looking at goods displayed in the storefront windows. Not only did it matter if the stores were open, it was actually more fun when they weren’t. Sundays were popular because everyone was closed.

What? Closed on Sunday? That’s right. Not only were Blue Laws in force, the general belief was that Sunday was the day you went to church. Also, most stores, even the big department stores, closed at 5:00 or 5:30 p.m. every day.

Window shopping was both an art and entertainment. You strolled slowly past the windows of various stores, lingering in front of those that caught your eye. While standing there, you imagined owning a particular outfit or jacket, shoes, toys, bicycles, etc. that you’d love to have but were way too expensive for you to afford. The flip side of the coin would be to find reasonably priced items that you either needed or wanted, then return when the store was open to purchase them.

Many’s the time you did neither. Instead, you just looked with no purpose in mind other than an outing with your family. Eventually you hopped a bus or took a cab and headed home.

Until stores started migrating to the suburbs and those new-fangled shopping centers, (Enclosed malls didn’t come along until quite a bit later. Sometime in the 1970s, I believe.), just about everything you wanted was in downtown Ft. Worth. All the big department stores, of course. Leonard’s, Everybody’s (An early version of a discount department store and owned by Leonard’s.), Monnig’s, Stripling’s (I worked in the toy department there in 1963), Cox’s and The Fair. Then there was Meacham’s, F.W. Woolworth, Cromer’s Ace (Bicycles were in their window.), Western Union, The Camera Shop, several greeting card stores, newsstands, banks (no branches), drug stores, restaurants, cafeterias, coffee shops, churches, jewelry stores, western shops and even a couple of automobile dealerships (Pontiac and Chevrolet, I believe.).

Of course you had City Hall where you could pay your water bill, Lone Star Gas Co., Texas Electric and a healthy collection of office buildings. And let’s not forget the Worth, Hollywood and Palace Theaters, along with the late, lamented Ft. Worth Public Library building that sat on that pie shaped piece of land at the intersection of Ninth and Throckmorton and was eventually demolished despite the protestations of a substantial number of residents when the new library was built. Just up the street on the corner of Eighth and Throckmorton was Barber’s Bookstore. For those who couldn’t afford the price of a new book or didn’t want to part with that much cash, there was Thompson’s Bookstore. Located on Throckmorton only a block or so south of Leonard’s, it was hole-in-the-wall offering used books and magazines. I spent a lot of time in there...and a fair amount of money.

As I said, there was just about any kind of business you could want and quite a few you didn’t, such as high interest small loan companies (Yep, they’ve been around since the beginning of time.). From Ninth Street south to Lancaster, the area was known as Lower Main. It was, with the exception of the Telephone Company (AT&T) and the Catholic Church, basically a collection of more or less disreputable flop houses, walk up hotels, bar & grilles and liquor stores, with the occasional antique shop thrown in for good measure. The Cellar (where Secret Service agents went the night before JFK was assassinated) was below ground level at Tenth and Commerce, I think. Union Gospel Mission was located on Throckmorton, about two blocks north of Lancaster, until everything was razed for the current Convention Center and the Mission wound up out on E. Lancaster.

How do I know about that particular part of Ft. Worth, since you darn sure didn’t do any window shopping in the area? Mainly by riding buses home. Their route took them straight down Houston to Lancaster or over to Calhoun and then south to Lancaster before heading east. Believe me, you saw some very interesting things while looking out the bus windows. Beyond that, one of my uncles died in 1957 while sitting on a barstool in Richelieu Grill waiting for his breakfast. Massive coronary. He was 65 and had received his first Social Security check only a week or two before.

I went with a couple of cousins to obtain his belongings from his hotel room (A walk-up flophouse with screen doors on the rooms.). By the time we got there, someone had popped the screen and taken everything he had.

Yep, downtown Ft. Worth in that time period was a very interesting mix of the good, the bad and the ugly, but they were good times overall. I still miss it.

The Flood, Keeping Your Feet Dry, Alligators & Milk Cans.

When 1949 arrived, rain came with it...lots of rain. All that rain led, in turn, to the infamous '49 flood. If you've been watching the films of all the flooding that occurred at the end of July 2004, especially the area south and southeast of Dallas, visualize that scene in Ft. Worth proper. You have to remember that there were no levees containing the Trinity River on the west side of town, the water treatment plant sat down on the Trinity flood plain (just like Don Carter's bowling alley and the subsequent Hope Community Church on the East Side) and there was little if any protection for any of the other low-lying areas. Result? When it started raining…and raining…and raining (NOAH! WHERE'S THAT ARK WHEN WE NEED IT?), the water followed the path of least resistance.

Once the water rose high enough to overflow it's banks, what came next was predictable. What wasn't predictable was just how bad it would get. The near west side of town, essentially meaning from the bluffs on the east side of the Trinity onward, went underwater. Montgomery Ward was a going concern at that time and their building was flooded all the way up to the second floor. Of course, that much water also contaminated the water treatment plant, meaning you had to boil all of your water (bottled water in every convenience and grocery store wasn't an option then) unless you had access to a deep well that hadn't been flooded. And one more thing. Typhoid shots.

How did the East Side fare? For the most part, pretty well. Keep in mind that the East Side is, in general, one of the highest parts of Tarrant County. In fact, the hill that National Farm Life (On the north side of I-30 and about a mile or so east of Oakland.) sits on has actually been identified as the highest point in the entire county. Put another way, if the East Side ever floods to the point of being submerged, you'll be using a boat to travel over Ft. Worth.

Despite that advantage, there were still problems. Sycamore Creek, which runs under E. Lancaster just west of Marshal Grain, was also out of it's banks and over the highway. My father was working for Swift's at the cold storage plant (the T&P warehouse just west of the post office on E. Lancaster) and rode the bus home every day during the flood. According to his stories, the water was so deep over the road that all passengers had to stand up in their seats in order to keep their feet dry as the bus made it's way slowly thru the water. Strange, isn't it, that buses in the 1940s could successfully navigate water so deep that the water would be up inside the bus so far that it was nearly to the top of the seat cushions, yet today you're warned not to drive into water that barely reaches your car's bumper?

And, of course, floods bring out all kinds of strange critters living in close proximity to humans that you normally never see. Cottonmouth snakes for one, though those were pretty well expected. What wasn't expected was a little beastie that followed my father down Morris Street when he was walking home from the bus stop. An alligator about three or four feet long that apparently had crawled out of the Trinity. As he told it, the little fella was just simply following him down the street. They ignored each other and the 'gator finally ambled on somewhere else. My father came on home and didn't tell anyone about it…until a photo showed up in the paper showing a man who had caught this alligator. My mother couldn't believe he missed an opportunity to get his picture in the paper!

Finally, does anyone remember those big aluminum milk cans with handles on the side to make it easier to lift? And the big, screw-off lids? The things probably held twenty or twenty-five gallons of milk. It so happened that Swift's had a deep artesian water well inside the cold storage building (presubably it's still there) that was not contiminated by the flood waters and my father would bring artesian water home in those milk cans. As a result, my parents, grandmother and I had clean, fresh water that didn't have to be boiled before drinking.

Cars, Taxis, Buses and (Gasp!) Walking

If you're curious about how people got around back in the late 1940s and early 1950s, it was just like it is today, only better. At least I think it was better.

Private cars, of course, but for those who couldn't afford to own a car there were plenty of other options. Taxi fares were very reasonable (dirt cheap by today's standards) and the same went for buses. If I remember correctly, bus fare was something like ten or fifteen cents on the city bus. Incidentally, instead of being called the T, as it is today, it was the Fort Worth Transit Company.

Walking wasn't done for exercise but was, instead, a perfectly normal…and safe… means of getting around. No one thought it unusual to walk half a mile or a mile to one of the few neighborhood groceries (a slightly larger version of what we now call convenience stores) and then walk back home carrying two or three large sacks (paper, not plastic) of groceries. When you needed to buy a large supply of groceries, or items that the neighborhood groceries never carried (such as candied fruit in bulk, not pre-packaged, for holiday fruitcakes) you took the bus downtown to Leonards Department Store (they had a huge grocery section on the ground floor, comparable to today's smaller supermarkets). After buying a full shopping basket of groceries (which might have cost you all of ten or twelve dollars, if that) you splurged and took a taxi home for the phenomenal sum of $1.50 or $2.00. For that price, two passengers rode and the taxi driver even helped unload the groceries from the taxi.

If you're wondering just how safe it really was in those days, consider the following. Many's the time my mother was waiting on a bus (which ran every fifteen minutes during peak periods) when a rank stranger driving down the street would stop and offer her a ride to work. That's it…just a ride to work. The person, either man or woman, was simply headed toward town and didn't see the point of leaving another person standing on the curb waiting for a bus. It was nothing more than simple consideration for a fellow human being. Once they got downtown, my mother would get out near the phone company to go to work, thank the person for the ride and go on, knowing she'd never see that person again.

Even more shocking by today's standards is the fact that when I seven and eight years old, it was commonplace for me to walk two blocks to the bus stop…by myself…ride the bus downtown and meet my mother for lunch at the phone company, maybe spend time in some of the shops downtown (particularly bookstores or newsstands), then ride the bus back home…alone. I was never bothered, assaulted, abducted or otherwise threatened by anyone. And believe me, I talked to any stranger that I happened to be near!

Oh, yeah, one other thing. Waiting for the bus out in the neighborhood was always fun because you could entertain yourself by catching and playing with Horned Toads. When the bus came, you put'em back on the ground or in the grass where you found them. And at night in the summer, fireflys were virtually epidemic. Try finding either one today!