ARTISTIC DISOBEDIENCE

Little Forest Hills took speeding into their own hands

By EMILY CHARRIER

Photo By DANNY FULGENCIO

Eustis is a meandering residential street with no sidewalks and houses packed tightly by the roadway, but at certain times a day it feels more like Garland Road as drivers speedily cut through the neighborhood to avoid bottlenecks elsewhere.

“People use it as a cut-through to get around traffic,” says Patrick Blaydes, a Little Forest Hills neighbor. “A lot of people are just focused on where they are going and drive 40 or 45 through 30 m.p.h. neighborhoods — we’ve all done it.”

Blaydes wanted to do something about it. He has a background in urban planning and had studied the traffic calming effects of street murals. Cities all over the country have adopted programs that allow neighbors to paint a mural in the middle of an intersection. When drivers approach, most can’t help but to slow down and take in the unexpected piece of beauty.

Blaydes reached out to neighbor Cary Okano, an art therapist with a background in public installations, including demonstrations at Burning Man. She reveled at the chance to create the foundation of a mural, to which the whole neighborhood would contribute.

“I love anything that brings people together to create,” Okano says.

They decided not to seek city approval, instead going for guerilla art, hoping no one would mind. “Best case scenario, the city says nothing about it,” Blaydes says.

On a hot June day, during the neighborhood’s block party, Okano sketched out the shape of the Hindu god Genesh, seated against a purple tree under a twirling thicket of branches. More than 50 neighbors contributed their own creative touch to the design, adding heart-shaped leaves to the branches. It brought everyone together for a day of fun and working together, which is also an important part of the street mural process.

In other cities, neighbors get to know each other during an annual celebration to touch up the public art, which fades under a year of tire tracks and raindrops. It builds community, supporters say.

“Paint is much prettier than a speed bump,” Blaydes says.

Bessie Keeps It Basic

Bessie is a quintessential droopy-faced man’s best friend. The loveable basset hound was rescued by the Maddux family of Somerville Avenue seven years ago and quickly became a star in the family.

“She’s a quirky, silly, super friendly hound who loves to clown around,” says owner Donna Maddux. “Her favorite things are sunbathing, taking walks, saying hi to neighbors, getting doggy treats and belly rubs.”

I harlie McGuinness’ diner is an anomaly.

The Lower Greenville establishment has thrived for 28 years in a neighborhood where the lifespan of a restaurant is often only a year. The décor, cajun dishes and even the busboy haven’t changed in decades.

But fewer people recognize the longtime seafood joint today. Its sudden name change from Original Dodie’s to Charlie’s Creole Kitchen left many regulars worried that it succumbed to closure.

“We’re still here. We’re still operating,” general manager Laura Kroemer says.

The restaurant’s identity crisis is the product of a legal dispute. McGuinness helped his son, Chris, open a second

Dining Spotlight

Another Broken Egg Cafe

PATISSERIE/BAKERY Haute Sweets Patisserie

It’s our passion to create exceptional dishes for breakfast, brunch and lunch that are “craveably” delicious with an artisanal flair.

Mon-Sun 7:00 -2:00 pm

214.954.7182

THAI Thai Opal

We strive to be the premier Thai restaurant in Dallas!

We have infused the classical Thai cuisine with a modern ambiance. BYOB welcomed.

• Take out • Lunch Specials

• Now Serving Beer & Wine

• Delivery Available (5 mi. radius)

214.856.0166

SMOKED MEATS

One90 Smoked Meats

Offering bbq combo plates, sandwiches, tacos, sides, desserts & a wide variety of locally smoked meats, including Brisket, Bison, Turkey, Chicken, Pork, Salmon, Duck, Lamb & Tenderloins.

Treat yourself and the ones you love with the finest desserts, French Macarons, cookies, cakes & more. Award winning chefs bring premium restaurant quality treats right to our neighborhood. Paleo & Gluten-free available. Mon-Fri: 10:00am-7:00pm Sat: 9:00am-6:00pm Sun: Closed 6300

Hours: Mon. Closed Tues.-Sat. 11am-8pm Sun. 11am-5pm

PHOTO BY MARK DAVIS

Forgotten Recipe

Daddy Jack’s lobster fra diavlo

Longevity is not something you find too often in Lower Greenville restaurants, where “flash in the pan” is much more common. But Daddy Jack’s Lobster and Chowder House had it. Opened in 1993 by East Dallas restaurateurs Jack Chaplin, Cary Ray and Neil Connell, the business lasted a staggering 24 years before it quietly closed in May. The business was built on passion — Chaplin wanted to capture the fresh seafood flavors he loved from New England, which were more unusual to find in Texas at the time. The restaurant was no muss, with simple red-checkered tablecloths and a rich menu of seafood staples.

“I say we’re providing the neighborhood a service: love and lobster,” Ray told the Advocate in 2010.

When neighboring business The Crown and the Harp, owned by the same proprietors, announced its plans to close, it was clear Daddy Jack’s wouldn’t be too far behind. Their closures open up prime real estate at 1916 and 1914 Greenville, which as of press time had not yet been filled. But for those missing the fresh fishy taste of Daddy Jack’s, here is the restaurant’s original lobster fra diavlo, first published in the Advocate in June 1998.

LOBSTER FRA DIAVLO (serves

two)

1 cooked lobster (tail split, claws cracked)

8 clams

10 mussels

10 peeled shrimp

4 cups linguini

3 cups marinara sauce

4 tablespoons garlic butter

2 tablespoons red pepper flakes

3 ounces white wine

2 tablespoons chopped garlic

Place 1 tablespoon of garlic butter, chopped garlic and red pepper flakes in sauté pan.

Cook until garlic is slightly browned. Add all seafood and cook for two minutes. Add marinara sauce, white wine and remaining garlic butter.

Cook until clams and mussels open, and sauce is very hot.

Serve over linguini and garnish with chopped green onions or chopped parsley.

WEBSITES BUILT FOR FREE. $99/MONTH MAINTENANCE. ADVOCATEMOBILEDESIGN.COM t was 1842 when John Beeman first made camp near White Rock Lake, and modern recorded history of East Dallas began to take its shape. Since then, there have been thousands of notable moments, some of them forgotten in the record books, while others are commemorated on plaques dotting the neighborhood. To chart every single one would be all but impossible. Instead, this map highlights the important, odd-ball and just plain intriguing stories of our neighborhood going back to the days before East Dallas was incorporated into the city. It will keep growing as an interactive map on our website, to which we will continue to add the historical happenings that brought us where we are today. Find it at lakewood.advocatemag.com/historymap.

Historic Homes

Swiss Avenue Historic 1 District

Fitzhugh to La Vista

Robert Munger had luxury in his eyes when he looked at Swiss Avenue. His deed restrictions ensured only the finest homes would make their way to these blocks, all of which were required to be two-stories with a 60-foot setback, made from stone or masonry and cost at least $10,000. It worked. By 1908 lots on Swiss Avenue sold for around $3,500, where parcels of a similar size on Junius fetched only $2,400. Numerous noted residents have lived in the neighborhood, including Carrie Marcus Neiman, founder of Neiman-Marcus; Mayor J. Woodall Rogers; model Mary Ellen Bentsen; and Dr. R.W. Baird, founder of Blue Cross & Blue Shield. The historic incidents that have happened on Swiss are too many to name, like when Harry Houdini performed in A.J. Langford’s basement at 5417 Swiss, or when “Dallas” the TV show shot in the dining room at 5020 Swiss. In 1974, the area was added to the National Register of Historic Places.

(Sources: The Dallas Morning News, D Magazine)

2

Home Of Jefferson Peak

Worth and Peak

It was the 1850s when Jefferson Peak brought his family from Kentucky and built Dallas County’s first brick home. He went on to develop much of the neighborhood, which he would name for his children: Junius, Worth, Victor, Carroll, Flora and Juliette Fowler. (Source: Municipal Archivist John Slate)

Caruth Farm

3 Belmont and Greenville

Walter Caruth was looking for the highest point in Dallas when he built his expansive Bosque Bonita (beautiful woods) in 1885, a Victorian style farmhouse where he lived until his death in 1897. Caruth, along with his brother William, arrived in 1848 with $100 and a pony, according to lore, and opened a general store. They bought up expansive tracts of land all over the city, giving Walter Caruth his pick of locations for his personal residence, a country house with city views. When Miss Hockaday’s School for Girls made plans to build a two-story brick facility on the land in 1919, the house was painstakingly moved down the hill, with each section rolled on logs. At its new location, a swimming pool was added and the students used the creaky old residence for parties. When the school relocated to Preston Hollow in the early 1960s, the house was demolished to make room for the luxury apartment complex Hockaday Village. The Caruth farmhouse is not to be confused with the Caruth mansion that still stands today, just west of Central Expressway. (Sources: The Dallas Morning News, The Hockaday School)

McINTOSH HOUSE

4 1518 Abrams

Stained-glass art was a fast-growing field when Roger D. McIntosh was born in 1888. He spent almost his whole life in Dallas, and in 1922 at the age of 32, he purchased the property that would become his studio and home for the rest of his life. His work can be seen in the Adolphus Hotel, Munger Place Methodist Church and the Dallas Power-and-Light Building. But the highest concentration of his designs can be found in his understated house on Abrams. “He made extraordinary use of his first love, glass, personally creating nearly every window, mirror, lamp, and light fixture in the place,” Texas Monthly wrote. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1983. (Source: National Parks Service)

5

Mount Vernon

4009 W. Lawther Dr.

Designed by architect Charles D. Hill, the replica of George Washington’s Mount Vernon home was then and continues to be an iconic lakeside attraction. Oil tycoon H.L. Hunt moved his first of three wives into the property in 1938, where seven of his 15 children were raised. Neighborhood kids who grew up around the Hunt children remember it as the place to be on Halloween, because the family gave out full-sized candy bars.

(Source: The Dallas Morning News)

Find more tales from historic homes, including the story of the tragic death of Everette DeGolyer, at lakewood. advocatemag.com/historymap.

Developing East Dallas

Water Tanks

6 Abrams and Goliad, Gaston and Haskell

Water has always been a big deal in East Dallas. Dallas wanted to annex its neighbor to the east in part because we had the “finest water system in North Texas,” The Dallas Morning News reported in 1966. It began with a standpipe above a well at Gaston and Haskell, which provided proper water pressure to the city’s first 8,000 residents in the 1880s. Cut forward to 1923, when the city built the towering Lakewood Heights standpipes, which stood 100-feet tall with a 60-foot diameter and a capacity of 2 million gallons each. Situated at Abrams and Goliad, they provided water for the neighborhood until 1955, when the city sold one of the water tanks to Tarrant County, which spent a painstaking 40 days taking apart and reassembling the massive structure. (Source: The Dallas Morning News)

East Dallas City Hall

7 AND

School

3202 Gaston

While families began making their homes in our neighborhood around the Civil War, it wasn’t until Sept. 9, 1882 that East Dallas officially incorporated, with Mayor George W. Crutcher at the helm. At the time, many argued the town should be called Gaston for neighborhood settler W.H. Gaston, but the new 1,429-acre city already was well known by the moniker we still use today. Crutcher’s first act was the build a school, which cost $15,000, including $4,500 for the lot where Baylor Hospital sits today. The two-story brick building included a meeting space that acted as City Hall, where the aldermen planned East Dallas’ future. Though only a city for eight short years, our pioneers accomplished a lot, including a state-ofthe-art water system (see above entry), paved streets, a thriving school system and the first two church-supported hos- pitals in the region. East Dallas joined the “big city” on New Year’s Day, 1890. (Sources: Texas Historical Commission, The Dallas Morning News)

Reinhardt Elementary

8 10122 Losa Drive

What is now the Casa Linda area was once the farm of John Chenault, who built a small wooden schoolhouse where neighborhood children could be educated in the early 1880s. Thanks to the Santa Fe Railroad, the area thick with cotton fields soon became a town known as Reinhardt, which boasted a couple of stores, a bank and a cotton gin. Over the years, the building would be replaced several times, including the addition of the brick schoolhouse in

1941. The town was annexed into the city in 1945, at which point Reinhardt Elementary School joined the Dallas school system. (Source: Texas Historical Commission)

DALLAS FIRE STATION #16

9 5501 Columbia Ave.

Noted architect H.A. Overbeck, the man behind the State Fair Building, came up with the Mission Revival design for the fire house in the years after a massive fire decimated much of Oak Cliff in 1908, prompting the entire city to increase its fire protection services. But it nearly wasn’t built; just as Overbeck finished the design, the city’s firefighters walked off the job, protesting their working conditions, which included 24-hour shifts, six days a week. The city settled on 12-hour shifts for firefighters in 1918 and construction was completed for a cost of $20,684. It served citizens until shortly after WWII. In the early 1990s, it was restored and transformed into an arts center. In 1997 it was added to the National Register of Historic Places.

(Source: National Parks Service)

ST. MATTHEW’S CATHEDRAL

10 5100 Ross Ave.

Rev. George Rottenstein brought the Episcopal faith to Dallas, holding the first service on May 25, 1856. The church moved all over Dallas, finally finding its permanent home here in 1929, where it became a Texas Historic Landmark.

(Source: Texas State Historical Association)

WOODROW WILSON

11 HIGH SCHOOL

100 S. Glasgow

President Woodrow Wilson had died just three years before the school opened in

1928, inspiring its name. It was designed in the traditional Elizabethan style by architect Mark Lemmon and, at $700,000, it was the costliest school built in the city up until that point. A piece of wedding cake from President Wilson’s daughter Jessie’s wedding was included in the cornerstone of the building. It is the only public high school in the country to produce two Heisman Trophy winners, Davey O’Brien (class of ’38) and Tim Brown (class of ’87). (Source: Texas Historical Commission)

CIVILIAN CONSERVATION CORPS

12 950 E. Lawther Drive

The U.S. Navy first scouted White Rock Lake as a possible training ground, where it built a boathouse and barracks and began training sailors in the 1920s. Any young men aged 17-35 could join the Naval Reserve and learn to sail. As the Depression ravaged the nation, President Franklin D. Roosevelt fought back with the New Deal and the Civilian Conservation Corps, which provided jobs building public works projects all over the country. From 1935-42, crews of men aged 18-24 built the Flag Pole Hill picnic pavilion, the East Lawther Drive entrance bridge, Big Thicket, Winfrey Point and Sunset Bay recreation building, among others. During WWII, German prisoners of war were housed in the camps, where conditions were so good, it became known as the “Fritz Ritz.” In 1951, the buildings were knocked down and replaced by baseball fields, but a statue was erected to honor the work of the Civilian Conservation Corps. (Source: Texas State Historical Association, The Dallas Morning News)

Lakewood Post Office

13 6324 Prospect Ave.

Opened in 1946, it was the 13th postal substation in Dallas and the headquarters for 16 neighborhood letter carriers. It closed 30 years later although the building still stands, now home to Times Ten Cellars. (Source: The Dallas Morning News)

GUS THOMASSON

14 ROAD

Originally, it was a trail that connected Mesquite with the town of Reinhardt (see entry 8). It officially was changed to Gus Thomasson on Feb. 21, 1938, named for the man who oversaw $100 million in New Deal funded projects all over the city, much of which was spent on paving roads, including Skillman (see entry 18). (Source: The Dallas Morning News)

15 CASA VIEW

It was 1949 when developers Ben Tisinger and Bill Smith bought up cotton farms historically owned by black families and made plans for a new community. They built it around Casa View Village, a modern center with 75 tenants and parking for 1,500 cars. The area swelled to 50,000 residents in its first 15 years. On Feb. 29, 1964, the Casa View library opened to great fanfare, when 9,132 books were checked out, the largest book circulation ever recorded for one day by an American library. (Sources: The Dallas Morning News, Dallas Public Library)

FERGUSON OPENS

16 WITH A BANG Ferguson, between Buckner and Samuell

While it’s one of the county’s oldest roads, in 1962 this swath reopened as a newly paved six-lane thoroughfare in an effort to drive more traffic to the East Grand Shopping Center. The occasion was celebrated in unusual fashion when, instead of cutting the large ribbon that stretched across the roadway, then-Mayor Earle Cabell shot it down in front of a packed crowd using an antique .38 pistol. (Source: The Dallas Morning News)

JUNIUS HEIGHTS COLUMNS

17 Abrams Parkway at Glasgow

Two towering masonry columns sit astride Abrams Parkway where it curves south from the Lakewood Library and

Glasgow Drive. They’ve only been since 1975, however. The 30-foot were built in 1917 at Tremont and Glasgow Drive to mark the between Munger Place and a suburban addition, Junius Heights. time they were erected, this was of the line for the open streetthat era, and automobiles came columns and turned around, as only prairie beyond,” states created for the 1975 bicencelebration in Dallas. By the decrepit columns reflected post-WWII decline of East Dallas. neighborhood activist Fred Longmore found a bulldozer “beardown” on a smaller column that of the original gateway, the says. “It was explained to him columns were in the way of as this was where the new Columbia-Abrams thoroughfare was through.” Longmore was able progress for a month, enough form a Committee to Preserve the Junius Heights Columns and raise $13,000 to dismantle and move them to where they now sit. Every donation counted; a July 29, 1973 Dallas Morning News story notes that “one elderly $6 contributor said she and her sister in their youth used to go to the pillars to tell their innermost secrets.”

(Source: The Dallas Morning News, “Junius Heighs Columns” booklet)

LINDBERGH DRIVE 18 Skillman Street

In the 1920s, the country was enamored of aviation expert Charles Lindbergh. It was 1927, just a few months after Lindbergh made his first solo flight over the Atlantic, when he came to visit Dallas and spread aviation awareness. Shortly thereafter, the city named a newly paved stretch of road between Mockingbird Lane and Swiss Avenue as Lindbergh Drive. But, as WWII brewed, Lindbergh was suspect of being a Nazi sympathizer due to his vocal antiwar views. On Dec. 3, 1941, just before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the city council voted to rename the road and, two days later, every sign had been changed to Skillman Street.

(Source: The Dallas Morning News)

Find more historic development, including the origins of Casa View, the Lakewood Country Club’s big break and the historic latrines, at lakewood. advocatemag.com/historymap.