The Bride Wore Crimson and Other Stories (25 page)

That was in the 1950s, he said, not long after he and his older brothers, Harry and George, and their mother had immigrated from Greece.

“Now,” he said. He waved his arms toward the street, half in defiance, it seemed, half in resignation. “Now the newspaper boxes are locked and embedded in concrete. So there is the difference in what the city of Dallas used to be and what it is now.”

The restaurant in which Mr. Sideris and Mr. Foster were sitting is in the basement at 1602A Main St. The Greek who opened it in 1936 and the Greeks who succeeded him called it the Pirate's Cave, and the floor mosaic at its entrance still says that. When the Sideris family bought it in 1958, they renamed it the Town House Deli, and that's what the sign over the doorway says. “But naturally, with three Greeks here and people coming in and saying, ‘How's the Greeks today?' everybody started calling it ‘The Greeks,'” Mr. Sideris said. “That's pretty much what it's been.” So the wind-battered sign over the sidewalk just says: GREEK RESTAUR …

“Main and Akard used to be the heart of downtown Dallas,” Mr. Sideris said. “We used to have customers from 10:45 until two o'clock in the afternoon continuously. Not anymore. The buildings around us are only about 25 percent occupied. The building next door has been vacant since 1968. A nine-story building. We have nothing but bums, hoboes and thieves downtown now. Women are afraid to walk on the street. When you open up in the morning and you find a bum sleeping in your doorway, that's not good news. Right or wrong?”

Mr. Foster, who is retired, said he wouldn't have been downtown on this particular day himself if he hadn't had to pick up some income tax forms.

“Our lease is up in December,” Mr. Sideris said, “and that will be the end of this establishment. After 55 years. But a thousand years from now, when my ancestors and I are sitting around talking, I can tell them that I remember what the city of Dallas used to be.”

What American city hasn't experienced the relocations and dislocations, the ruptures and realignments that Dallas has endured during the past few decades? Construction of freeways and suburban growth, proliferation of shopping malls, white flight from old neighborhoods, the switch from passenger trains and downtown stations to jet planes and outlying airports have changed all our urban landscapes. Many American downtowns simply have been abandoned, slowly, building by building block by block, to rot and poverty and crime.

But Dallas was different, it once seemed. Fifteen years ago, Texans native and naturalized were bragging of the state's “recession-proof” economy. “Land, oil and agriculture,” they used to say. “Texas' biggest businesses, and three things the world can't do without.” They smiled at the problems of the worn-out cities of the so-called “Rust Belt” and boosted Dallas as “the city that works.”

The price of oil would never fall, the common wisdom averred. “They aren't going to make any more land,” the real estate agents said. The boom, presumably, would last forever. So downtown Dallas wasn't abandoned. It was torn down and rebuilt as the skyscraping business capital of an expected new order.

“As they tore down the old buildings, they replaced them with buildings with no space for small businesses,” said Dee Watson, a barber. “Nothing but marble lobbies and potted plants. So the old ma-and-pa businesses disappeared.”

Then the building boom stopped. Overnight, it seemed, the construction cranes disappeared from the downtown skyline. Speculators and developers who were caught owning old structures that hadn't yet been replaced with new glass towers tore them down and paved their lots for parking, or simply left the old hulks vacant, abandoned to rats and cockroaches, to wait out the bust.

Here and there, however, remain small survivors of what downtown Dallas used to be, before the boom, before the vast in-migration from the North, before the knock-down-and-build frenzy of 1976-85, before the financial disaster that followed.

Some are still hearty, some weak and fading, but all are vestiges of a different time, when Dallas was just an ambitious burg on the prairie, a bigger-than-most Texas town, full of businesses that were run by the families who owned them.

The Oriole Barber Shop, where Dee Watson cuts hair, was established by Walt Davis in 1912. As he aged, he hired a second barber, Doyle Watson, and later made him his partner. When Mr. Davis retired—he was in his 80s—Mr. Watson took over the shop. And when
he
retired—also in his 80s—he turned the shop over to his son, Doyle Jr., called Dee.

For decades, the Oriole and its owners had to dodge the wrecking ball. Dee Watson's recital of their odyssey is a history in capsule of the Dallas boom and the bust that followed:

“Mr. Davis had the shop originally where the old First National Bank Building stands on Akard today. That's where it stood from 1912 until ‘56 or ‘57, when they tore that area out and built First National, which was InterFirst and then First Republic and now is NCNB, but not the main one.

“We moved to where Sanger-Harris used to be, which became Foley's, which is empty now. When they tore our building down to build Sanger-Harris, we moved to where ThanksGiving Square is. We were there until ‘72, when they tore down the building to build that. We went over to where Dallas One Center is now, which is where the old Cullum Building used to be, then I moved over on Elm to the 1900 Pacific Building.

“They didn't tear down that building, but they renovated back when they thought everything was going to keep being rosy, and they tripled the rents. They went from $12.50 to $35 a square foot. I said, ‘Bye' and came over here.”

The Oriole Barber Shop proved hardier than most of the banks and corporations that evicted it. It's at 1926 Main St. now, just down from the police department, where, Mr. Watson said, business is good, but not as good as it used to be. He waved his comb toward the square-block-big empty building across the street.

“When the Joske's store closed down, 800 employees disappeared.” He waved toward the empty 32-story Mercantile Bank Building—or is it the MBank Building or the Momentum Bank Building?—in whose shadow he cuts hair and dusts his customers with talcum powder.

“You have to have a reason to come downtown,” he said, “and they've taken it all away. The developers drove out all the stores. Even if you come down here, you have to pay to park, then if the meter runs out, they tow you away or ticket you, and if that doesn't happen, you get mugged before you get wherever you're trying to go.

“Some mornings I come to work and walk down this street, and I kind of wonder why I'm coming down. But the shop will be here as long as I can keep going. My dad worked downtown until he was 80. We've had a connection with downtown Dallas all his life and all mine, too. I tell you, though, it's nothing like it used to be. Not at all.”

A couple of blocks away, at 2206-08 Elm St., Don Cowan, Jr., owner of Wald's Police Supply Co., said he intends to stay on the spot where his business was established by Sol Wald in 1935 because downtown is where his customers—city, county, state and federal law officers—are. “This is a competitive business, supplying police officers and security people,” he said. “Being downtown gives me a little edge, I think.”

But even though his store is full of rifles, shotguns, handguns, ammo, bulletproof vests, gas masks, riot sticks and off-duty cops doing their shopping, Mr. Cowan recently installed a buzzer lock on his front door. “Within the last year, the people who come in off the street, who apparently are living on the street, have gotten more aggressive,” he said. “We felt we needed a way to screen people coming in. It's not a crime thing. They're just homeless folks. If you choose to be downtown, they come with the territory. It's not like it used to be down here.”

“Used to be” is the recurring theme in the talk of those who have worked downtown a long time. Maybe their memories are rosier than the past really was—time fades the bad days first, it seems—but they're vivid and warm and honest. They tell stories—some handed down through generations—of a smaller, safer, more manageable city, where movie stars, generals and presidents used to arrive at Union Station on trains and check into the Adolphus Hotel, of oil and cattle and cotton people who used to come from the boondocks and blow thousands of dollars on whirlwind shopping sprees.

“One cold Christmas, this huge gentleman walked into the store,” said Lewis Novin, whose father founded Novin's Jewelry as a Deep Ellum pawnshop in 1906.

“The gentleman had sold a lot of his cattle to one of the yards that used to be out north of Dallas. His feet were muddy and covered with manure. He had walked into one of the major jewelry stores, and they almost ran him out. So he came into ours, and he was feeling pretty good, and he said, ‘I want to buy myself a
biiiig
diamond.' We happened to have a big yellow one in the window. I showed it to him, and he liked it.

“Well, he wore a size 14 ring! That's four or five sizes bigger than the average man's finger! He growled, ‘If you'll get it ready for me right away, I'll take it.' The price was $3,000. Thirty years ago, $3,000 was a lot of money. I measured his finger with a piece of string and called my repair shop and told them not to close yet. The gentleman started pulling out the checks he had gotten for his cattle, and he endorsed one and said, ‘I think this one here will cover the ring.' It wound up being a beautiful Christmas.”

The store later relocated to Main and St. Paul streets, where the Novins' $200 monthly rent remained the same for 40 years. “I used to walk from our store up to the Mercantile Bank, which is deserted now,” Mr. Novin said. “I knew every little merchant all up and down the street. The tailor shops, the florist shops, the cafes, the barber shops. Today they're not even there. They've closed up whole blocks.”

When the air conditioning went out a few years ago, the new owner of Mr. Novin's building thought it better not to renew the leases of his tenants and closed down, rather than install a new system. Novin's Jewelry moved again, to 1907 Commerce St.

They still repair watches there—the kind with gears and springs and balance wheels. Or, if you're down on your luck or need a few bucks to tide you over until payday, you can hock the watch.

“Since we've been in this new location, our pawn business has increased about 20 percent a month,” Mr. Novin said. “We're close to the post office, we're close to the federal building, we're close to NCNB. You know, these banks won't make small loans anymore, even to their own employees, so when they need $50 or $100, they come in here.”

Novin's is what he calls an “envelope pawnshop.” It accepts only jewelry. “Everything we loan money on goes into an envelope and into the vault,” he said.

If it's a gun or a musical instrument or a set of tools that the bank employee wants to offer, he might try Label's Pawn Shop at 2038 Commerce, where the company motto on the business cards is: “If Not Able See Label.”

Its present address, just west of Central Expressway, is the third for the shop since Lewis and Sylvia Label founded it in 1946. “We used to be on Elm Street,” Mr. Label said. “All the pawnshops were on Elm Street then. We called it Elm Street Row. But it's all gone.”

“Nearly all the buildings at this end of town are empty now,” Mrs. Label said. “And there are 100 pawnshops in Dallas County, out in the suburbs, where people live. Why would they come down here? But we've had our customers for years and years. Some of our customers now are grandchildren of our customers from the old days. They know us. If they call and ask us to hold their pawn a little longer so they can redeem it, we do. Most pawnshops won't. Ninety days and it's gone.”

Everybody knew each other. That's what they all say. “We were on a first-name basis,” said Bernard Hirsh. “In the olden days, we had all those little shops—hat shops, shoe shops, dress shops, drugstores, fruit stands, lunch counters—and I knew everybody. It was exciting to walk down the sidewalk. Now there's nothing left. It's not fun like it used to be. For me, at least.”

Yet, entering the store that Mr. Hirsh owns and runs with his son Robert, you could think that nothing at all had changed. Not in 50 years. Not in 75. Milliners Supply Co. at 911 Elm St. looks much as it did when its founders, Martin and Charlotte Weiss, opened their business at this same spot on or about St. Patrick's Day, 1911.

Rolls of ribbon, packets of beads and sequins, showcases full of cloth flowers and jeweled tiaras, hats of every color, boas and plumes, and feathers of ostriches, turkeys and pheasants line the long, narrow building from end to end. The showcases, built of dark, indestructible wood and topped with thick, beveled glass, were purchased secondhand from A. Harris &. Co.—predecessor of Sanger-Harris, predecessor of Foley's—in 1914. So were the ranks of long, dark, wooden drawers, containing who knows what, that line the walls. The wooden counters near the back are intricately scarred by almost a century of scissors snipping bolts of lace and netting. The wooden floor is worn by 80 years of women's shoes. The huge brass cash register, festooned with molded baroque curlicues, bought new from National Cash Register when the store was opened, is still in use. A computer and a fax machine, incongruous, sit beside it. “I haven't yet found a computer table that works in with our furniture scheme,” Robert Hirsh said. The Hirshes, father and son, work at roll-top desks. On the wall behind the cash register, Martin and Charlotte Weiss—uncle and aunt of Bernard Hirsh's late wife, Johanna—gaze somberly from oil portraits in gilt frames.

The Weisses, who had operated a general store in Beaumont before they moved to Dallas, opened the business to sell supplies to the city's booming hat industry. “Dallas was the fourth largest millinery center in the United States, after New York, Chicago and St. Louis,” Bernard Hirsh said. “We had 33 hat factories when I entered the business in 1945. Now there is one.