West Dallas residents share stories of neighborhood, changes

DALLAS (AP) - Felix Lozada stands in the heat at a bridge plaza that bears his name: Felix H. Lozada Sr. Gateway.

The Dallas Morning News (https://bit.ly/2eprIRR ) reports the poor West Dallas neighborhoods behind him have been his home for nearly all of his 94 years - save for his World War II service.

He rhapsodizes about his La Bajada neighborhood, resurrecting its famous history. When he was just 12 and playing in the weeds, he heard gunfire. A Model A whizzed by with a woman in the back seat. “It’s Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker,” a child shouted. “Hey, Bonnie…fire a round!” shouted others.

Lozada has seen many changes. La Bajada has been mostly Hispanic for many decades, and is now a neighborhood where nine out of 10 residents are Latino. He’s fought for the future of the bakers, grocery store clerks and truckers who live here.

He’s witnessed his community’s identity crisis from his faded white house on Bataan Street. Its identity is changing again.

Lozada’s dressed like an old-school dandy at the annual Independence Day celebration. A red-and-white striped shirt and blue slacks. His son Raul keeps him steady by shadowing him on the stage.

“If you want to accomplish anything, you need to unify,” Lozada tells the crowd of about 200, speaking in Spanish and English.

Looming over them is Dallas’ bright, white $182 million Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge. All around Lozada are the arching aspirations of the people changing West Dallas’ destiny: the developers, the hipsters and even the people who grew up in the barrio. The bridge, which so dominates the West Dallas story, was opened in 2012, quickly attracting developers.

Lozada met them with a fight.

New construction can’t exceed 27 feet of height in the neighborhood just north of Trinity Groves because of an ordinance he helped shape. It effectively blocks builders of high-rise lofts who were looking for views of the city’s increasingly spectacular skyline.

But restaurants clustered in the Trinity Groves development at the foot of the bridge lie outside that zone. The same is true for new apartments sprouting south with nearly $2,000 monthly rents - a price most natives can’t afford.

Artists near there are rooting in old buildings, converting them to studios. But most disappear at nightfall, back to their homes across the river.

The developers behind Trinity Groves hold title to about 170 properties through two companies, stretching along both sides of the main Singleton Boulevard drag and hopscotching into neighborhoods south and north.

Lozada won many victories: There’s a clinic that drove down infant mortality rates, a housing nonprofit that offered low-interest mortgages, and the ordinance blocking high-rises.

Now, Lozada is getting a plaza in his name.

It’s at the intersection to a pedestrian bridge across the river to downtown. The river is lined with levees marked by fresh bike paths that will eventually link to trails in other parts of the city.

Politicos elbow each other to get a photo with the feisty old man.

But his 48-year-old daughter, Maria Garcia, is worried. The cancer eating her father’s stomach has stooped his once-athletic form.

Her father’s just been praised for victory against gentrification. “They are really wanting to move into our neighborhood,” she says. “My feeling is they will.”

On their terms.

Every two weeks, a letter or postcard arrives from someone asking to buy Lozada’s white house, with the porch swing and fluttering red-white-and-blue flag out front.

Who will fight for his neighborhood when he is gone?

“I know sooner or later it is going to go,” says the retired baker and barber. He spits out the enemy’s name several times, shaking his head.

“Moneybags.”

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In the filtered, light blue light of a warm morning, Frank De Leon perks up his ears to nature’s symphony. Deep coos of mourning doves, soprano trills of mockingbirds, rat-a-tat-tats of a woodpecker greet him. A rooster crows in the distance.

Zen, La Bajada-style.

But it hasn’t always been this way. And some worry that the peace will be lost again. Many remain suspicious of outsiders who tout progress.

Dallas’ segregated West Side neighborhoods have long known environmental stress. The biggest hit came from poisons spewed from the old RSR Corp.’s lead smelter plant three miles down Singleton. It shut down in 1984. The federal government designated a wide swath of the barrios here as a Superfund cleanup site, including La Bajada.

The smelter left behind problems with air quality and soil contamination. Crushed battery pieces were spread throughout neighborhoods where residents didn’t know of the hazards. In West Dallas, the waste was used to fill in yards and muddy driveways.

Cleanups in West Dallas in the 1980s and ’90s removed tons of tainted dirt. The cleanup is over, but people do not forget.

Now, there’s stress from all the traffic. At nightfall, pedestrian traffic spills over the Trinity Groves restaurant complex. Traffic snarls Singleton Boulevard.

De Leon likes some of the bustle. He acknowledges that in many ways, “This is a great area to live.”

At 70 years of age, the retiree who spent 30 years working two jobs in manufacturing and security tries to take a long view. His family has spent four generations in La Bajada, and now he has a fifth generation of great-grandchildren playing in the yard during overnight visits.

Singleton’s been widened, levee banks have more walkable trails, the signature bridge of cloud-scraping arches gifts Dallas with an iconic symbol.

“I look at it now, and it is getting better and better,” De Leon says.

“I know developers are coming in. But we need to get along with each other.”

But he still simmers from his initial impressions of the newcomers. “When they came into the community, they were kind of rough. If they had embraced us and talked to us right, it might be different.”

He’s fighting for speed bumps on Herbert Street. Traffic even includes big rigs, he says.

De Leon refused free $50 tickets to a recent benefit in Trinity Groves. “I am a very principled-type guy,” he said.

And he still hasn’t dined at a single restaurant within Trinity Groves.

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Jesus Carmona sweats through 13-hour days as the owner of his dream cafe - a restaurant that sells tacos presented like art with surprising, hard-to-source ingredients.

“I’m very excited to be here,” says Carmona. “I know it’s a small place now. But I see myself owning three or four of these in the future.”

Carmona, 48, grew up in Mexico City and came to the U.S. as a young man. Many others who have long lived in the La Bajada and Los Altos neighborhoods of West Dallas are Mexican immigrants, too.

But Carmona set up shop on Singleton Boulevard only about two years ago. He lives nearby, in an $800-a-month rent house on a street with red-beaked roosters and a miniature horse.

Think of him as an outsider/insider.

He can walk in both worlds - that of the newcomers and that of the old-time Spanish-speaking residents. He understands why some are torn.

Carmona’s Tacos Mariachi sits about two blocks from the neon lights of the Trinity Groves restaurant cluster.

He rents his taqueria’s space from the developers. For a time, rent was free. In exchange, Carmona plowed more than $100,000 into renovations.

He blasted out the kitchen and installed a patio filled with street art by neighborhood teenagers. He paid each one with a laptop computer and free lunches.

Carmona quickly pivots to a customer. A middle-aged blond woman takes a seat at a table made from wood pallets against a wall splashed with a turquoise hue. She surveys a menu that includes familiar meaty tacos as well as those made of portobellos doused with huitlacoche, a Mexican corn-fungus delicacy.

She’s sold on this pitch from Carmona: “You must try the Mazateno, flour tortilla with asadero cheese, sauteed shrimp, chile de arból salsa.”

The crowd ranges from downtown workers to hipsters to some of the most surprising guests. Just as Carmona was opening in October 2015, the taqueria hosted an after-party following a Nasher Sculpture Center opening.

Carmona shows a video of dancing patrons on his patio. Then comes the zinger: “That’s Picasso’s grandson; real nice guy.” More precisely, Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, grandson of the celebrated painter and sculptor.

“He said I must open a restaurant like this in Paris,” Carmona says.

Butch McGregor, one of the three Trinity Groves principals, says Carmona serves “the best tacos in Dallas.” The restaurant sits on a strip of land his group could redevelop. That could mean Tacos Mariachi will eventually have to move.

Already, the Trinity Groves developers have provided the area with about 400 jobs since they opened the restaurant cluster in 2012, McGregor says. Carmona is part of the push west.

Ultimately, it’s going to be “preserve” or “demolish,” McGregor says. A handful of houses have been torn down - a surefire way to stop drug-dealing that took place inside a few, McGregor says. Other properties took wrangling through layers of family members to establish deed titles, he says.

Ultimately, McGregor says, “If you don’t have change and improve, the neighborhood dies.”

Carmona says he’s blessed with a restaurant hopping with business. But he says he understands why some Latinos in West Dallas feel conflicted. Many Latinos may move away, he says.

“As a Hispanic, of course it is sad to see. As a businessperson, the more it gets upscale is good for my business. I look at it two different ways.”

He knows his restaurant could get torn down. So his contract stipulates that he be given a five-year run at the location or be relocated, he said.

Carmona’s now in talks to open a second taqueria.

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Zeke Williams, a chunky, bearded 37-year-old, knows well the artist’s role in gentrification. Artists set up studios in low-rent buildings. Critical mass causes creative combustion. Neighborhoods morph with trendiness, new tenants and, eventually, higher rents.

It causes displacement. Except the West Dallas warehouse where Williams now paints was empty.

Is Williams a change-maker or an interloper?

Developers seek out artists because artists will take “raw spaces” says Williams. “It keeps a place active.”

“We are a small part of gentrification, for better or for worse,” Williams says. “We are a symptom more than a cause.”

But Williams uses the warehouse only as a work studio with four other artists. He lives with his wife in a northern suburb.

All around Fabrication Street, amid warehouses and metal shops and a few old homes, artists paint, create clothing and rehearse theater.

Williams took up a space in West Dallas to be closer to Erin Cluley, 37, the gallery owner who shows his work. Cluley gutted an auto shop to open her gallery about two years ago. Williams’ work and that of dozens of other artists have lined its soaring walls.

Cluley first set her designs on West Dallas in 2012, when she worked at the museum known as Dallas Contemporary.

She helped bring graphic muralist Shepard Fairey to the area to paint outdoor walls on and around property owned by the developers of the Trinity Groves restaurant cluster.

That was timed for the city’s unveiling of the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, stretching over the Trinity River and connecting to Singleton Boulevard.

“We really wanted to do art outside the museum walls,” Cluley now says. “Art for everyone.”

Then Trinity Groves developers donated a warehouse on Fabrication as wall space for street artists in 2013. Murals and street art popped up on other nearby buildings.

One work pays homage to 43 Mexican college students believed to have been massacred in September 2014. Against an indigo blue sky, a masked face peers out under the word Ayotzinapa, the town the college is in.

Remarkably, Ayotzinapa remains untouched since it went up in November of 2015 in what artists call “an epic ride.” That staying power, or salute, illustrates respect among aerosol artists, Williams explains.

Williams is one of the few newcomers who raises the need for affordable housing. His studio sits in a census tract that had a median household income of $28,000 in 2013, about $4,000 above the poverty rate for a family of four.

“The erasure of neighborhoods?” says Williams, shaking his head. It’s clear that bothers him as he stands among his spray cans and art supplies. Before another question is asked, he says, “They should be putting in low-cost housing as part of it.”

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Inside the air-conditioned cocoon of a church, Paula Hutchison leans forward and begins rocking to a bluesy gospel tune.

“I want you to know that,” she pours out in soprano.

“God is keeping me,” comes the chorus.

“I want you to know that He blessed me,” Hutchison sings.

“Ah-Ah-Ah-Ah,” comes the confident chorus, as choir members stand and stomp at the altar of the white-steepled Lone Star Missionary Baptist Church in West Dallas.

You can feel the spirit. The unity and the family.

But outside the walls of the old church, almost nothing is left along West Main Street. Once, this area throbbed with life from a community of African-American janitors and maids, nurses and barbers, furniture repairmen and dairy workers. Now, two-thirds of the houses are gone. The neighborhood is mostly wiped away.

Gentrification has a price.

This neighborhood’s fate may foreshadow the eventual sweep of change through the rest of West Dallas.

Are the Los Altos or La Bajada neighborhoods next? Frustrated by pressure from the city to improve shabby properties, one landlord decided to pull out of the rental market and is evicting hundreds from homes there and elsewhere.

Many of those houses are expected to be demolished for redevelopment.

Here on West Main, where many owners have sold out and the demolition is well underway, only a few boarded-up shotguns line a landscape of grassy fields that inch toward the bridges of the Trinity River. The empty lots are waiting.

Physically, West Main doesn’t connect to Singleton Boulevard, where the heart of gentrification lies at the foot of the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge. But the city is planning to push three roads across the Union Pacific train tracks to connect with the area.

And from the south and west, three-story apartment buildings with pools, bocce ball courts and an outdoor biergarten have recently gone up. Rents there are three times that of a typical West Main rental.

It’s trendy: A monthly night market of artisan crafts beckons outsiders to check out the Commerce Street neighborhood. Buy some $50 succulents or $7 soaps with beer as an essential ingredient.

Some call it progress.

“I am up for a change,” says Eric McGree, a 46-year-old licensed plumber. He’s third-generation West Main Street. He lives in a barn-red rent house with a roommate and his dogs: John Wayne, Tara and 50. At night, the train whistles hiss and hoot.

“You want to see upgrading and beauty and growth. It’s been raggedy for all my 46 years. Why did it take so long?”

Although the old neighborhood has largely slipped away, many hearts are still here. On Wednesdays and Sundays, the aging children who grew up around West Main come back.

Lone Star is their North Star, the place they get their bearings.

Hutchison, a 60-year-old government worker, is one of them.

She wants to save the 77-year-old church, to give it a perch as a historic landmark. It’s her effort to preserve what she sees as the dignity of a community.

Ahead of her, though, is “an unfortunate future.” Taxable values can run from a mere $6,000 to $40,000 on West Main. The few holdouts are tempted to sell.

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Four weeks after the dedication of Felix Lozada’s plaza near the foot of the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge, on the morning of Aug. 2, he took his last breath in his family home on Bataan Street. His head was resting on an elegant satin blue and brown pillowcase he’d picked himself. Until the very end, he was concerned about dignified appearances.

His funeral wake on a Friday night and Catholic church service on a Saturday morning were attended by hundreds, from politicians to golf course buddies, from those who once got trims from the barber to those who knew him for his activism.

The procession of funeral limos and dented sedans promenaded down Singleton Boulevard in sorrow and defiance, taking a deliberate and circuitous route past the Lozada home, around the Trinity Groves restaurants and gliding over the bridge.

In his will, Lozada dedicates his property at 3228 Bataan St. to his five children: Jose, Rosario, Raul, Felix Jr. and Maria. The next generation must decide whether they remain rooted, or sell. It’s the same story repeated up and down the streets here.

Maria says she’ll stay in the family home through May, until her 8-year-old son finishes the school year in a neighborhood charter elementary.

Then, she and her husband and son will move to a suburb. She says she’ll stay active in La Bajada, an easy mission since her husband owns a nearby bike rental shop for those exploring Trinity River trails.

Maria, a fit woman who resembles her father, says, “We have to continue to fight for our little barrio.”

Raul, an older brother, says he’ll move into the family home when his sister leaves, buying out his siblings’ shares. Like many others, he’ll soon be struggling with soaring property taxes. The burly truck driver adds: “I’m going to continue my father’s fights.”

Like the bridge and the plaza, old and new West Dallas will remain side by side.

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Information from: The Dallas Morning News, https://www.dallasnews.com