Disir
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- Sep 30, 2011
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Pearlie Mae Brown , 80, still doesn't have her house fixed. An engaging smile breaks across her face, then disappears, subsumed by worry. Rocking on the front porch of her small beige cottage on Crossman Avenue in West Dallas , she seems too tiny, too delicate to be the fulcrum in a bitter power struggle. But there she is.
She was slender 10 months ago when the business about evicting began. The worry since then has taken another 20 pounds from her bird-thin frame. She thinks now at least she may have a place to live until she dies, whatever shape it's in, but when the people using her as a pawn get done playing, you have to wonder how much time Pearlie Mae Brown will have left anyway.
Is there a villain? If you want to choose one from the many excellent candidates for villain - an original cause of the misery in Brown's life and the lives of hundreds other poor West Dallas citizens - step off her porch with me. Walk out into the middle of the frayed, little, uncurbed lane in front of her house, turn and gaze due north.
Two blocks away, half-real in a gauzy haze of construction dust, an immense brown cliff rises straight up out of the earth. It blocks the street. It blocks the sun. The huge, half-built apartment building dwarfs tiny tumbledown houses at its feet and soars above the tree line. It lies straight across Crossman Avenue , making an arrogant dead end of it.
This vast new building is only one corner of a gigantic, high-end apartment and mixed-use development soaring up from the soil. Land here was dirt cheap from before World War II until five years ago.
In 2012, as soon as a new bridge designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava linked West Dallas to downtown, the early stages of gentrification began. The first big projects held themselves tight against the foot of the bridge as if huddled there for shelter, afraid to venture deeper into a place where people were poor and not white. That's over. Now the big new developments are popping up everywhere.
West Dallas always suffered some of the social dysfunction that besets all poor places, but it probably never was the scary ghetto white people assumed. Mainly it was stable, hardscrabble but churchy, family and clan centered, a place where people could walk from little houses they could afford to manufacturing jobs that kept ever-so-humble roofs over their heads.
"My father, he worked over there where they put all them apartments," Brown says, nodding toward the mountain at the end of the street. "That used to be Austin Bridge Company ," which is now Austin Industries .
"He worked there for some years. I don't know how many years. He was working there when I was small, and after I got grown he was still working there," she says. "My mother, she did home health care.
"I was born in West Dallas , about a block from here, at 1020 Muncie Ave. I went to Fred Douglass Elementary over there on Bayonne. And then to C.F. Carr school."
When the developers started moving west from the bridge, gobbling up whole neighborhoods, the Dallas City Council decided nobody in Dallas should have to live in squalid, substandard housing, and some Dallas housing has always been truly squalid.
http://www.architecturalrecord.com/...fwgoU3_iw**&images_premium=1&define_caption=1
It never changes.
She was slender 10 months ago when the business about evicting began. The worry since then has taken another 20 pounds from her bird-thin frame. She thinks now at least she may have a place to live until she dies, whatever shape it's in, but when the people using her as a pawn get done playing, you have to wonder how much time Pearlie Mae Brown will have left anyway.
Is there a villain? If you want to choose one from the many excellent candidates for villain - an original cause of the misery in Brown's life and the lives of hundreds other poor West Dallas citizens - step off her porch with me. Walk out into the middle of the frayed, little, uncurbed lane in front of her house, turn and gaze due north.
Two blocks away, half-real in a gauzy haze of construction dust, an immense brown cliff rises straight up out of the earth. It blocks the street. It blocks the sun. The huge, half-built apartment building dwarfs tiny tumbledown houses at its feet and soars above the tree line. It lies straight across Crossman Avenue , making an arrogant dead end of it.
This vast new building is only one corner of a gigantic, high-end apartment and mixed-use development soaring up from the soil. Land here was dirt cheap from before World War II until five years ago.
In 2012, as soon as a new bridge designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava linked West Dallas to downtown, the early stages of gentrification began. The first big projects held themselves tight against the foot of the bridge as if huddled there for shelter, afraid to venture deeper into a place where people were poor and not white. That's over. Now the big new developments are popping up everywhere.
West Dallas always suffered some of the social dysfunction that besets all poor places, but it probably never was the scary ghetto white people assumed. Mainly it was stable, hardscrabble but churchy, family and clan centered, a place where people could walk from little houses they could afford to manufacturing jobs that kept ever-so-humble roofs over their heads.
"My father, he worked over there where they put all them apartments," Brown says, nodding toward the mountain at the end of the street. "That used to be Austin Bridge Company ," which is now Austin Industries .
"He worked there for some years. I don't know how many years. He was working there when I was small, and after I got grown he was still working there," she says. "My mother, she did home health care.
"I was born in West Dallas , about a block from here, at 1020 Muncie Ave. I went to Fred Douglass Elementary over there on Bayonne. And then to C.F. Carr school."
When the developers started moving west from the bridge, gobbling up whole neighborhoods, the Dallas City Council decided nobody in Dallas should have to live in squalid, substandard housing, and some Dallas housing has always been truly squalid.
http://www.architecturalrecord.com/...fwgoU3_iw**&images_premium=1&define_caption=1
It never changes.
