2 days ago
A nearly forgotten story of a hidden street near TCU, from an era of segregation
One of my favorite Star-Telegram editors kept a slender paperback book at his desk titled 'Who Was Hulen? An Attempt to find the Origin of Street Names in Fort Worth.'
Exactly who was the namesake of Hulen Street, the 11-mile thoroughfare that begins at Crestline Road and travels south, then east, toward the Tarrant County line? He was Maj. Gen. John Augustus Hulen (1871-1941). He supervised the training of doughboys at Camp Bowie — which is how Camp Bowie Boulevard, the popular street partly paved with red bricks, got its name. The World War I military camp, which covered 2,100 acres west of the Trinity River, was named after Jim Bowie, a hero who fell at the Alamo.
Lancaster Avenue was named for John L. Lancaster (1869-1962), president of the Texas & Pacific Railway, which built the tracks that still parallel the roadway.
University Drive, originally a dirt road with trolley tracks, leads to Texas Christian University. Nearby Bellaire Drive was named after the developer's wife, Clarabelle.
Throughout Fort Worth, streets with feminine monikers are rumored to be named for builders' girlfriends and paramours.
Every street sign tells a tale.
Take Simondale Drive, a hidden, half-mile slope nestled below the TCU campus. According to Tarrant County Courthouse records, it was initially part of 136 wooded acres that an ambitious attorney, Uriah Myer Simon (1879-1954), purchased in 1926 for $65,200 — roughly $475 an acre. Today, most houses on the street are appraised at $1 million or more.
Because Simon owned all the platted tracts, 'the city permitted him to name the road ... and it became Simondale Drive,' writes his grandson, James F. 'Jim' Simon, an 86-year-old attorney whose new memoir published by the Briscoe Center of the University of Texas is titled 'Courting History.' The grandson, a former New York Law School dean and author of 10 books, subtitled his memoir, 'A Supreme Court Historian Reflects on his Life and Career.'
Jim Simon's grandfather routinely bought, sold and flipped land for a hefty profit. Uncharacteristically, he held onto Simondale Drive. His family enjoyed the cachet of a street named for them. He ultimately gave his sons, attorneys Richard Sr. and Henry Sr., residential lots on Simondale, where their children grew up across the street from one another.
To ensure that the value of homes on Simondale Drive appreciated, the grandfather drew up deed restrictions requiring that only single-family houses be constructed, each at least 20 feet from the street. Property covenants stipulated that residents, 'except ... servants,' could not be Black or of 'African descent.'
It was 'a lifestyle reminiscent of the Old South,' writes Jim Simon, who grew up within walking distance of the TCU stadium, where he watched the Horned Frogs' afternoon practices. Though he grew up amid a racist culture, he would later question and oppose those practices.
Simon's mother delivered the family's laundry to a Black 'washer woman' named Mary, who lived 'on an unpaved block of crumbling shanties on the west side of town ... I never asked why the city did not pave her street,' he recalled, although he later realized that Black citizens had no political voice or clout.
Although the Supreme Court in 1948 struck down racial covenants in housing and in 1954 ruled segregated schools unconstitutional, the public schools Jim Simon attended — Alice E. Carlson Elementary, McLean Junior High and Paschal High — were not integrated until years after he left Fort Worth for Yale University.
For Simon, the injustice of racial inequality crystallized the summer he worked at a meatpacking house on the North Side. '(T)he highlight of every day was watching two huge Black men seize great slabs of beef hung from hooks ... (W)ielding large knives, (they) furiously and expertly cut the slabs into manageable chunks. The chunks were then thrown onto a conveyor belt' where white men and women cut the beef into marketable sizes.
'The spectacle, which I so enjoyed observing, came to a halt one day,' he writes. 'The two Black men had demanded that they be paid the higher wages earned by the white men and women. It seemed more than fair to me because their skills were indispensable ... After a three-day standoff, the two Black men prevailed and were back at their jobs, presumably at higher wages.'
'I imagined a switch of the skin colors ... and was outraged. What if the two Black men had been white and the men and women on either side of the conveyor belt Black? Was it conceivable .. that Black men and women .. would have been paid more than two white men expertly slashing slabs of beef?'
By the time Simon, the future New York Law School dean, graduated Paschal in 1957, he was challenging 'the racist assumptions' he grew up with on Simondale Drive. 'I was convinced that facts and the law were on my side.' The rest of his meaningful memoir develops from there.
Hollace Weiner, an author, archivist and director of the Fort Worth Jewish Archives, was a full-time Star-Telegram reporter from 1986 to 1997.
