Bill Minutaglio
Oak Cliff
The great Texas author A.C. Greene once wrote that Oak Cliff was one of the easiest sections of Dallas to profile. But, all due respect to the truly wonderful writer, Oak Cliff has always remained so beautifully complicated….and so unlike any other part of Big D . . . or the Lone Star State.
Decades ago, leafy Oak Cliff had been its own city. Then, of course, it was annexed by a rapacious Dallas -- but it was as if fate, poetry, geography and the unpredictable whims of the Trinity River conspired to keep it apart in spirit, mind and day-to-day life.
To remain independent – or, some said, disconnected.
To maybe even become proudly and deliberately inscrutable to those who didn’t live there.
It was all there from the very outset:
Oak Cliff was invented as a fancier alternative to other communities in and around fledgling, 19th Century Dallas.
Then, as living and breathing places in big cities often do, it underwent a rollercoaster of transformations – economic highs and lows, segregation, integration, white flight and gentrification. Until it settled into a complicated mélange of historic homes, working class bungalows, falling down duplexes, mom and pop shops, taquerias and barbecue (before that food became some sort of haute cuisine) joints.
And, miraculously and marvelously, several mini-cities:
Historic zones to the east where Black residents built beautiful churches and traditions. Vibrant Latinx areas in the center of “old Oak Cliff” and well to the west. Pockets along the northern corridors of Oak Cliff where elderly White residents had lingered and were being joined by incoming, younger White singles and families.
Through it all, there has been the hum and evidence of daily humankind – tire shops, venerable cafes, barber shops, burnished houses of worship, faded-brick public schools and vine-covered cemeteries.
And, as always, the muddy, insistent river that often remains out of sight but never out of mind – always the rising and falling entity that one must cross to “get into” Dallas. The greatest blues singer to ever live in Dallas, maybe Texas, was Aaron “T-Bone” Walker – who first recorded under the name “Oak Cliff T-Bone.”
In his earliest recorded work, “Trinity River Blues,” he sang about how the river could rise – and how it was sometimes very hard to overcome.
How it could keep you separated from where you wanted to go.
***
The City of Oak Cliff was officially annexed to Dallas in 1903 but the union, without question, was destined to be rocky and marked by the same human attributes that sometimes lead to divorce: Feelings of neglect, jealousy and frustration.
Though the constantly flooding river was conquered with levees and bridges, an inexorable feeling of separation was already set in place ever since this part of North Texas was conquered by White settlers hellbent on dispensing any indigenous peoples. As long as the river runs, the separation will continue. Railroad tracks in the Deep South long marked “one side of town from another” – often the Black or Brown side from the White side.
The river will always separate Oak Cliff.
Maybe it is why, without much of Dallas really noticing, Oak Cliff spent years in a restless evolution – a sociocultural shift that touched on the biggest concerns in American history: Racism, integration, equality. Parts of Oak Cliff were once “all White.” Parts of Oak Cliff were once rigidly segregated – there were separate drinking fountains at the main Oak Cliff library.
But, arguably, societal changes came to Oak Cliff faster than anywhere else in Dallas. Oak Cliff was a true bellwether for desegregation. An early, often fitful, adopter of diversity. It came with enormous resistance – even violence. But it did eventually come, even if there were heated fits and starts.
The best way to measure some of this is by looking at that beating heart of a street that defines old Oak Cliff’s core -- Jefferson Boulevard.
It is an older commercial area that in the 1950s and early 1960s had been the second most important shopping zone in Dallas behind downtown areas. It was a segregated spot intended for Whites. Now, of course, when you walk the boulevard, you hear immigrants from Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Honduras.
Families push strollers down crowded sidewalks. People angle for parking spots and prepare for an afternoon of walking, bartering and eating. Pushcart vendors sell ice cream. Sometimes there is a man selling roasted ears of corn and offering dabs of butter or spices to ladle on the kernels. There is a vibrant stream of social lubrication, a street-level interaction that is often absent at the sparkling, air-conditioned malls and shopping centers scattered around Dallas.
(In the 1980s the City of Dallas began to promote, in other parts of the city, the same kind of street-life and warmth that has long been in Oak Cliff: The old, mostly abandoned West End warehouse area was reimagined as a “historic” place for locals and tourists. The almost desolate Deep Ellum zone sprouted with clubs and restaurants. And if there is an element that binds these areas, it is something that already existed in Oak Cliff. They became spots where you could walk, mingle and interact in a decidedly “old-fashioned” way. Out on the street, the sidewalk or the alley).
Urban sociologists and anthropologists can sift through all the cultural flotsam and jetsam and figure out exactly what it really means. I would guess it has something to do with Dallas' enormous growth through the 1970s and early 1980s.
The city, like the state, was in such a rush to reimagine itself as a cornerstone of the “New South” – to plow under what seemed like the stale relics of the past. Dallas leaders constantly promoted their town as a new, futuristic, international city and there was endless talk of wanting to be more like . . . take your pick . . . New York, Los Angeles, Paris, etc.
It was single-minded, perhaps fixated, on one thing: New construction. (That fact became painfully obvious in the late 1980s with the awful discovery that good chunks of one of the earliest black cemeteries for freed slaves in Dallas - The Freedmen's Cemetery - was buried under Central Expressway).
Whole neighborhoods around Dallas were eradicated. Including once-thriving communities that had been in place since the turn of the century. Frog Town, Little Mexico and other areas were chipped away by highways, condominiums and office buildings as Dallas hawked its future at the clear expense of its short past.
A good example was the State-Thomas neighborhood, once simply known among Black residents as “North Dallas.” Today, of course, that name applies broadly to many upper income areas that sail toward the far, far north of downtown. But State-Thomas was once the hub of Black commercial, residential and entertainment life in Dallas (with some Italian immigrants “exiled” to live in the neighborhood because, well, some said they were not really White).
It was where the most famous out-of-town Black artists and musicians stayed when they were here for a concert or business. But, of course, State-Thomas was made to disappear over time. The real estate, so close to the downtown towers, was too valuable.
Highways plowed through the heart of State-Thomas, cutting it in half, separating residents from schools and churches and cemeteries - though many of the people who had poured their souls into the zone were quite willing to stay there for the rest of their lives.
Today, buried underneath the hodge-podge of chic eateries, offices and homes for white “urban pioneers,” there are the memories and ghosts of old, original Dallas.
This pattern of erasure has been repeated all over Texas. Every major city in the state has punched highways through the heart of minority communities. Paved over whole swaths of history. So, Dallas is not unique in that respect. But what might set Dallas apart is the haste and single-mindedness revolving around this urban transformation – what critics would call urban destruction.
For such a young city, Dallas often seemed in an utter hurry to reinvent itself and spare no expense to do it. A few hours south, in San Antonio, you can see a city with a different philosophy. And with an almost reflexive commitment to preservation – to keeping the old buildings and neighborhoods intact. A writer in San Antonio once said that the “backyard” was the “office” of that city – where commerce, life, exchanges, interactions really occurred. Some also said that strong sense of “neighborhood” worked against San Antonio. That the drive to preserve meant the city would never lurch into the future. That it would mean San Antonio, unlike Dallas, would never grow, prosper, invite big business.
One thing is clear: The consequences of the path chosen by Dallas and its leaders are very obvious. Thousands of buildings, condos, homes, subdivisions, willed into existence – some seemingly suddenly airlifted and plunked down in unsuspecting areas. For a very long time the Oak Lawn neighborhood was like a chessboard stripped of its pieces. Block after block of empty lots where homes had been knocked down. And then, as the builders finalized their financing and their blueprints, the condominiums and office buildings were plunked in place.
But what exactly was buried under all the dust and mortar?
Some might argue that it was Dallas' old soul – and the time-honored things that add substance and grit to a city. They might also argue that the constant process of knocking down, tearing down, replacement and resurfacing was leading to a kind of collective sense of unsettlement.
Trying to define what Dallas had become, where it was headed, increasingly became an elusive game. Somebody also once opined that Dallas was like Los Angeles but without an ocean. A nomadic kind of city that prizes being mobile, being able to zoom from one end to the other without dropping many anchors. A sense of “permanent impermanence” in a “city on the go.”
A lot of this, in the end, is perfectly evident in the miles of “ring cities” and communities that began to spread out from the city center – all the way to Fort Worth and seemingly straight up to Oklahoma. Those places had to be created, of course, to accommodate the massive surge in population as the city was filled with newcomers from around the country.
But, I suspect, there were a few more things to it:
Greed, of course, put the pedal to the metal - in the form of crooked bankers working hand in hand with crooked real estate dealers into the early 1990s. The unbridled building, fueled by reckless savings-and-loan lenders, became a perverse artform in Dallas and, well, all over Texas. Before it brought the biggest, oldest banks in Dallas to their knees, it ignited a kind of Manifest Destiny sense of conquering and paving over the city with something new…something bigger…maybe better.
But not in Oak Cliff.
The carnival ride never came to linger there.
And in the end, Oak Cliff actually profited, I think, from missing out on what some would call the "golden years" of Dallas' growth in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Its structures, its essential being, were often left untouched.
A lot of that had to do with the simple fact that it really was “across the river”’ – and to the south, and into a part of town where Black and Brown residents were rooted. Builders would no doubt use their coded language: “Oak Cliff was dangerous.” Or…“Oak Cliff was ‘too’ urban.”
The more careful ones would say, instead, that it was just too old, too much a reminder of the simple, worn-down patterns of the past. Too regional, too down-home, too unambitious.
This isn’t to say that Oak Cliff always existed as some sort of unsullied place sitting on a higher moral ground, just because it wasn't bound up in the excesses of the “go-go years.”
It is to say that Oak Cliff simply was never really invited on the Titanic.
And maybe that is why, today, you can stroll down Jefferson Boulevard and see a mini-metropolis.
There are still the occasional street preachers (and stores offering folk religion items from deep South Texas, northern Mexico and even Central America). When I lived in the Cliff from the 1980s into the 1990s, I used to get my hair cut alongside a local city councilman at a barber shop with Latino, Black, White and Native American employees.
There are sometimes parades that look like they have been transported from the Eisenhower days and lowered into the present. Spots where you can get drinks made from fresh mangoes. Embroidered shirts brought up from Nuevo Laredo. Thrift stores with the things that were once precious to the old White residents. The sound of music pumping out of a store, a car, a food stand. The ice cream vendor may stock coconut and papaya flavored treats – and he is a spiritual and physical blood brother to the same ice cream vendors who decades ago used to parade White neighborhoods.
Jefferson, as a metaphor for Oak Cliff at large, is a street lacking in artifice. It is a street that cannot afford the luxury of being introspective and melancholy. It is a street that is integrated because it has to be. (History shows that there were many uncomfortable sweeps of white flight and resistance to the new arrivals when they came through the 1960s). There is that bubbling New York-melting pot sensibility. And, if you are predisposed to be an Oak Cliff advocate, then you would also argue that for decades Oak Cliff has been more worldly than other parts of Dallas – it’s organic in its diversity, its integration, its complexity, its internationalism.
Jefferson Boulevard is often a street of true immigrants. Some of whom wanted to escape whatever the rest of Dallas implies for them. Some of whom wanted to flee the horrible constraints of poverty and war. This street, this place, is where so many gravitate toward.
In the latter stages of the 20th Century, I had visitors to Dallas who wanted to be taken to the distinct pockets they assumed were there – regionally singular neighborhoods, ones bound by history and ethnicity and culture (my very elderly mother, on her first visit to Dallas, wanted me to take her to see where the “cowboys in Dallas lived”). Just like folks who want to visit “Chinatown” in San Francisco. Or “Little Italy” in New York. It was often an easy choice to ask those folks to walk with me down Jefferson Boulevard. And then Illinois Avenue. And then east of Interstate 35, near the Dallas Zoo – where we would aim for a great barbecue place called The Rib Cage. They’d see the diversity, the complexity, spread all over a part of town called Oak Cliff.
There had been, for a while, a place that Dallas wanted to be “Little Asia” – areas in East Dallas where many refugees fleeing the remains of the wars in Southeast Asia had been sent to live. But Dallas, as we’ve suggested, lurches constantly into the future. There is always change afoot, more building, more speculation, more real estate to develop. Little Mexico, as old-timers remember it, is merely a ghost underneath the edifices of so-called progress.
And all of this is another reason for a closer appreciation of life not just along Jefferson Boulevard – but the broader tapestry of Oak Cliff, that collection of zones within Oak Cliff. If you expand your definition of Oak Cliff, and not limit yourself to an upscale “Bishop Arts District” entertainment and shopping pocket, it becomes clear that Oak Cliff has always been an outpost where multiculturalism can be saluted, embraced, replenished.
***
Cities and the people who live in them can have selective memories. They want history to consider them favorably. And many well-intentioned folks sometimes succumb to a kind of self-congratulatory sense of place – they pat themselves on the back for having the “wisdom” to live where they live. (Someone once wrote a letter to an editor in Austin that said they had never, ever, lived in a more self-congratulatory city than Austin – a barbed suggestion that Austin had turned its back on its history of racism, exclusion, gentrification).
Same with Oak Cliff: There are newer arrivals who haven’t seen Oak Cliff through the prism of history. Of course, there’s no law that says you should remember how it was once heavily segregated. How there were spasms of violence against “newcomers.” And, much later, how the poorer, older denizens were routinely displaced by wealthier White arrivals.
The harshest of observers might even say that there is still a bit of intentional smugness afoot in Oak Cliff. That some of the latest residents have settled for saying they live there - but are not making the longer strides of community engagement…by spreading the wealth, opportunities and whatever else can be done. By well, narrowing their definition of Oak Cliff along very strict geographical lines. By not thinking as much about East Oak Cliff or South Oak Cliff.
Like many things, a lot of this is just armchair analysis, long-distance urban ruminations, subjective sociology from someone who lived in Oak Cliff for a long time. It’s just an opinion or two or three from an overly opinionated man who used to dream he was telling the world about Oak Cliff and even defending it for many years against some stereotypes (I used to go to a great blues club in Oak Cliff called “The Classic Club” – and one evening, the Black owner of the club got a phone call from a White person asking if it was “safe” to come to his club).
I loved Oak Cliff so much that I wrote a book, with my wife, about its history. And then I wrote many magazine stories and columns about Oak Cliff for the big city newspaper. I studied saxophone at the second-floor studios of the old Oak Cliff School of Music. Bought my used furniture at the “Troubled Youth” thrift store – and my only suit at the “Disabled American Veteran” thrift store.
I once walked for days, weeks, in the part of Oak Cliff some called “The Bottoms” – close to Elizabeth Chapel, one of the oldest Black churches in the city – searching for anyone who remembered “Oak Cliff T-Bone Walker.”
When I first moved to Dallas, I started out living in a falling down, lopsided 1920 Oak Cliff rental house with pecan trees in the back and a very old persimmon tree on the front lawn. I knew nothing about Oak Cliff other than it was 5-minutes from my place to my job “across the river” in downtown Dallas. Then I moved into an area where South Oak Cliff begins, into a 1936 home built from materials salvaged from nearby railroad lines and the very trains that ran on them.
It was a small house built by an incredibly creative woman who was once the dogged head of the Oak Cliff Garden Club.
It had a yard that would unexpectedly bloom, every year, with the most exotic, diverse, colorful flowers she had planted decades ago.
As if by magic, they emerged every spring in Oak Cliff.
And it always seemed that, with a bit of nurturing, they could endure forever.
[written by Bill Minutaglio in 1990 and updated in 2022 for a book by Richard Doherty]