DELICIOUS Roasts and toasts

Cultivar Coffee is Jefferson Boulevard’s hip coffee spot

By RACHEL STONE

DID YOU KNOW:

Cultivar also offers its beans by the bag.

Cultivar is a coffee nerd’s paradise.

Here you can take time to enjoy the nuances of coffee the way a wine connoisseur ponders layers of flavors.

But it’s not just for coffee snobs.

“We take it very seriously, but we try to do that as approachably as we can,” says Cultivar co-founder Jonathan Meadows. “Whatever cup of coffee makes you happy, that also makes us happy. Specialty coffee can be fun, and it doesn’t have to be serious.”

Cultivar started roasting beans in East Dallas in 2009, opening a shop on Peavy and Garland roads. Later they opened a shop off the square in Denton.

The Jefferson Boulevard location is their third and most ambitious shop.

It’s the only one that doesn’t share space with another small business. So it’s the first opportunity the company’s had to show a little more personality.

“For a long time people have said, ‘You have really great coffee, but you don’t have that coffee shop vibe that we want.’ ” Meadows says. “This location definitely represents that kind of space.”

Along with coffee, Cultivar also offers beer, wine and food. There are breakfast toasts and sandwiches for lunch, all made with Empire Baking Co. bread and fresh ingredients.

“We try to keep things very approachable and simple,” Meadows says.

Cultivar Coffee

Ambiance: Coffee house

Price range: $5-$12

313 W. Jefferson Blvd.

972.982.0719 cultivarcoffee.com

Our weird and wonderful neighborhood is full of fascinating history, and much of it remains tangible. We set out to map a few of the places that made Oak Cliff and West Dallas what they are. We’ve also put them into a handy interactive map at oakcliff.advocatemag.com/historymap.

Cliff dwellings

MAYOR’S HOUSE

1 635 N. Zang Blvd.

It’s possible Franklin Delano Roosevelt sipped lemonade on the porch of this house.

The first Dallas mayor from Oak Cliff, George Sergeant, built it in 1910.

When the President and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt visited Dallas for the 1936 Texas Centennial celebration, Sergeant was their host. Legend has it that after a tour of Fair Park, they stopped for a beverage in Oak Cliff.

While the “mayor’s house” of Oak Cliff currently looks dilapidated, and cranes and bulldozers are taking over nearby, Jim Lake Cos. has plans to turn the old house into a restaurant space.

EL SIBIL

2 122 E. Fifth St.

One of Texas’ greatest artists made his home in Oak Cliff, and it’s still standing.

Frank Reaugh, who was born in Illinois and moved to Texas in 1876, first ed to the culture of Dallas and Oak Cliff, offering art lessons throughout the 1920s and ’30s. He also brought students along on legendary en plein air painting trips to West Texas, influencing a younger generation of artists. His home has housed several film production companies in recent years, and it has a local owner.

Oswald and outlaws

THE TEXAS THEATRE

3 231 W. Jefferson Blvd.

The Texas Theatre is a survivor.

Built amid the Great Depression in 1931, it once was owned by Texas tycoon Howard Hughes.

Now it’s the home of the Oak Cliff Film Festival, a hub for historic Jefferson Boulevard and a center for art and culture in our neighborhood.

But the Texas Theatre always will be famous as the place where presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald sneaked in without a ticket, leading to his arrest.

After the Kennedy assassination, “an urgency to hide, deny and destroy it tore its way through Dallas,” according to a history of the theater.

The theater’s original “Venetian” interior was covered in stucco, and the façade was covered in a “six-flags-ofTexas theme.”

“The front stairwell was turned 180 degrees, to prevent others from sneaking in without a ticket,” the history states. “The box office was moved inside the theatre — another local first.” lived in a house near where Adamson High School is now. In 1928, he built his home and studio, El Sibil, on the edge of Lake Cliff Park.

The theater closed in 1989. The following year, director Oliver Stone had the façade remodeled for the film “JFK” to look similar to the original.

Reaugh, who is known for his pastels of longhorns and Texas scenes, contribut-

The building sat vacant for years in the late ’90s until the nonprofit Oak Cliff Foundation bought it in 2001 and owns it to this day. A group of filmmakers took over operations in 2010, giving it a whole new life.

Johnson Rooming House

4 1026 N. Beckley

In October 1963, a man identifying himself as O.H. Lee rented a room in this house for $8 a week.

After Oswald was arrested for the assassination of President Kennedy and the murder of Dallas Police officer J.D. Tippit, police turned the house upside down.

Oswald had returned briefly to his room there following the assassination, apparently to retrieve a pistol, which he used to shoot Tippit.

Gladys Johnson, who had purchased the house 20 years previously, was humiliated that the assassin had lived there. The house was the target of unwanted attention from reporters and the curious public immediately following the assassination and for decades after.

Johnson’s granddaughter Pat Hall now owns the house. She tried to sell it around the time of the assassination’s 50th anniversary. But now she runs it as the Rooming House Museum, offering tours of the house, virtually unchanged since 1963, for $20.

The Backyard Photo House

5 214 W. Neely

Conspiracy theorists went wild after the infamous “backyard photo” of Oswald was published in 1964.

Slight discrepancies in how the photo looked in Life magazine and the Detroit Free Press provided fodder that the photo had been “doctored.”

Oswald’s wife, Marina, took the photo of her husband with a pistol in his pocket and holding a rifle and communist newspapers in the backyard of their Oak Cliff duplex.

The house is still standing, and it looks virtually the same, although its condition, proximity to the Bishop Arts District and lack of historic protection could put it at risk for demolition in the future.

The Barrow 6 Filling Station

1221 Singleton Blvd. Henry and Cumie Barrow moved their shotgun house from Muncie Avenue to this site on what was then called Eagle Ford Road.

They added on a filling station with proceeds from an insurance settlement and lived in the attached house.

The Barrows of West Dallas did their share of neighborhood brawling.

In 1938, a “23-year-old Dallas hoodlum” named S.J. “Baldy” Whatley threw a Molotov cocktail onto their roof.

Whatley had been feuding with Clyde’s brothers Jack and L.C. for years. One night, after a barroom fight with them that involved broken chair legs and beer bottles, he drove by firing shotgun blasts into the filling station and injured Clyde’s 65-year-old mother. She lost an eye and almost died. Whatley was given 12 years for aggravated assault.

Western Heights Cemetery

7 Neal Street at Fort Worth Avenue

By the time Baldy Whatley was convicted in the drive-by shooting, Jack Barrow already was in prison for murder in an unrelated case.

The lesser-known Barrow brother shot 25-year-old Otis Jenkins through the heart in broad daylight during a petty argument at the Dreamland Cafe on what is now Singleton. He was given 99 years; he died in 1947 and is buried here.

Clyde and his brother, Buck, a fellow gang member, also are here, along with their parents and one sister, Artie A. Keys.

Visitors have left whiskey and coins for the outlaws. But you could also leave flowers for early West Dallas settlers and veterans of the Civil War, World War I and World War II who are buried here.

School served generations of children from Cement City and Ledbetter, many of whom were Mexican American. There were separate company villages for Anglos and Hispanics, but the schools were mixed.

The Dallas Landmark Commission and the Dallas Mexican American Historical League earlier this year began the two-year process to make the school a designated historic landmark.

Remnants of bygone Dallas

TRINITY PORTLAND CEMENT 9 CO. CEMETERY

5300 Singleton

Cement City is gone, but there are still bones in the ground near where it used to be.

Beginning in 1909, the Trinity Portland Cement Co. was work and home to thousands of laborers. Many of the original workers were immigrants fleeing the Mexican Revolution.

After the flu epidemic hit Texas in 1918, the company donated land for use as a cemetery for Hispanic employees and their families.

The last burial at this cemetery was Eladio R. Martinez, who was killed in action in World War II and buried in the Philippines. His body later was reinterred here.

10

La Reunion Cemetery

3300 block of Fish Trap Road

Imagine: A utopian socialist commune on the banks of the Trinity River in Dallas.

That was the dream of Victor Prosper Considerant’s La Reunion colony, which planted in what is now part of Dallas from 1855-58.

Eagle Ford

8 SCHOOL

1601 Chalk Hill Road

Bonnie Parker is not buried in West Dallas.

Although she wanted to be buried with Clyde, she’d married Roy Thornton in 1926; they were still married at the time of her death. She’s buried at Crown Hill Memorial Park off Webb Chapel Road.

But Bonnie was from Cement City. She and her mother moved there when Bonnie was 4, and she attended the Eagle Ford School.

Built of poured-in-place concrete in the gothic-revival style, the Eagle Ford

Some 300 colonists, from France, Belgium and Switzerland, intended to follow the ideals of what is now called “utopian socialism.” Considerant had hoped to create a network of agrarian socialist colonies throughout the Southwest.

The colony lasted on its socialist ideals only about 18 months and eventually fell apart because of financial struggles. Considerant couldn’t secure enough investors, he spent too much on real estate, and costs in Texas were higher than expected.

Some of the colonists stayed in Dallas, including the Loupots, Remonds, Reverchons and Santerres. There’s nothing tangible left of La Reunion Colony except for this cemetery.

BILBO JITNEY LINE 11 Sylvan Avenue and Seale Street

One descendant of La Reunion settlers, Victor Clifford Bilbo, was born in 1894.

In 1915, Bilbo began operating a jitney line from Downtown to Cement City and other locations west.

Back then streetcars circulated in Oak Cliff, Downtown and Lakewood. But there was no public transportation for West Dallas.

Jitneys were the shared rides that picked up the slack.

The Bilbo Jitney cost 5 cents and consisted of Model T Ford touring cars. Passengers squeezed in and sometimes rode on the running boards.

The line closed in 1927, replaced by city buses. But a Texas State Historical marker was placed near the site of Bilbo’s home in 1989. The marker later was stolen, but it was replaced a few years ago.

Lancaster Avenue

12 Commercial District

Jefferson and Marsalis

This strip of early 1900s retail buildings is a last remnant of the original Oak Cliff commercial district. Most of the original town of Oak Cliff was torn down to build Interstate 35 in 1957. These buildings, which now contain a hive of jam-packed thrift stores, have been listed in the Old Oak Cliff Conservation League’s most-endangered architecture list.

Tenth Street Historic

13 DISTRICT

This is the oldest intact freedman’s town in the nation, and it’s one of the few left.

The neighborhood consists of mostly wood-frame houses that were built by former slaves in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The neighborhood is adjacent to the 1846 Oak Cliff Cemetery. And it’s built into the sloping terrain between Clarendon and East Eighth.

Don’t allow the “historic district” title to ease your preservation worries. The City of Dallas recently demolished several shotgun houses in the district because they were not up to code.

City Council passed an ordinance in 2010 to allow the City Attorney’s office to order demolition of properties 3,000 square feet or less in the district if they are non-code compliant.

The district enjoys no blanket protection from demolition, and none of its buildings is specifically protected.

Old-Time religion

OAK CLIFF UNITED

14 METHODIST CHURCH

549 E. Jefferson Blvd.

Tenth Street in Oak Cliff at one time held the “Ripley’s Believe It Or Not” record for the most churches-per-mile in the world.

There were at least 28 within a 3-mile stretch.

Historically, there were a lot of churches in Oak Cliff.

This one is just off Tenth Street, and it’s one the few properties in our neighborhood that enjoys historical landmark protection from the City of Dallas.

Sanguinet and Staats architects, who also designed the Wilson Building in Dallas and the Flatiron Building in Fort Worth, planned this building in 1910. The classical revival building was completed in 1915.

It was a very popular church. The 1926 membership reached 1,649.

By 2015, it was the home church of only about 200 souls, and the congregation merged with Tyler Street United Methodist Church.

The building currently is for sale.

Trinity Presbyterian

15 CHURCH

901 N. Zang Blvd.

This is the site of John F. Zang’s own home.

It was the highest point in Zang’s Crystal Hill Addition, and he built a two-anda-half story house there in 1906.

He didn’t live there long. By the time Trinity Presbyterian bought it from Zang in 1943, it had been used as an apartment building for decades.

The congregation, initially established in 1890, tore down the Zang house around 1950 to build a modern new church. By 1957, Trinity Presbyterian had the second-largest congregation in Dallas.

A developer who currently is building 70 new apartments on the site agreed to keep and reuse the church’s sanctuary.

Find all of these points on an interactive map at oakcliff.advocatemag.com/ historymap.