Fort Worth Blues

Title is a Steve Earle song that popped into my head as I put this post together. The song, one of my favorite Steve Earle tunes that is a tribute to one of my favorite Texas musicians, conjures fond memories of the time I spent in this fair city.

I spent about four years working in Fort Worth and living in Arlington back in the early 1990s, working out of a shelter and doing some advocacy on homelessness, formative years in my involvement with homelessness. This time was brought back this week by a Substack piece written by Ty Stewart. Ty, a recent transplant to Fort Worth, saw a local news piece on encampment clearance, and went down an time machine on unsheltered homelessness in Fort Worth and landed in 1991. I’ll continue this with an excerpt from an email I sent to Ty:

I started a caseworker job at the Presbyterian Night Shelter in 1991 in what must have been a few months before the Tim Madigan article you featured. Much of the geography of the places mentioned in the articles in your piece were familiar, covering the area south and east of downtown which included the PNS and Salvation Army shelters. The "walk in", as the night shelter was called, was but a few years old when I worked there, essentially a warehouse for up to 400 or so people, most of whom bedded down on a pallet mattress in a large warehouse-like concrete floor. I just looked up the shelter online and see that it is still in operation. I don't remember the Madigan article or the response to it, although Madigan's name rings a bell. Along with the homeless services ghetto that was on East Lancaster Avenue, there was a rooming house district on Hemphill St. and the space between these two main drags featured enough open space to support a good number of camps. I mainly did work in the shelters, but got to know a good number of people who would camp out more than they would come in to shelter. While I was working there I was studying for a masters degree, and for my thesis I organized a count of the homeless population, including unsheltered homeless, in what would prove a prototype for the "Point in Time" counts that most US jurisdictions, including Fort Worth, now undertake annually in late January.

Now, if you read through the old entries on this blog, you’d quickly figure out that I have this weird interest in Skid Row. Not the band (which screws up internet searches on the topic) but the areas of many mid-20th century cities where old white homeless men, and the amenities they needed to survive, lived. It’s a peculiar and arcane topic, but one that fascinates me and one which I’ve researched and written on a bit.

Every once in awhile someone contacts me who read one of the pieces that I wrote on the topic with some connection to Skid Row. A retired police detective once emailed me, and we chatted for awhile, about his dad who ended his days living in one of the flophouse hotels, a woman who, in her twenties, took some photographs of men who would wait on a skid row street corner to get picked up and bussed out to South Jersey to pick crops. Comments on the articles included accounts of people spending time, in their youth, on the margins of skid row, or growing up in nearby Chinatown. Much time has passed since the last of the hotels went down in the mid 70s, and the people who contact me invariably were old and were young at the time of their experiences. This group, with direct connections to skid row, will continue to dwindle.

With that email I sent Ty, the tables turned. I am amused at the irony. I have pursued people with memories about scenes that I thought were of historical interest, and now I had firsthand experience of something that was of interest. Ty emailed me back and hopefully we will chat.

In thinking of my experiences, I’m struck by the challenge of finding things to share beyond my vague, personal experiences. I pose myself the question of “if I had to write about that time, what would I write?” I may still do that (a later entry, perhaps). But I do have my old masters thesis, in which I write up an account of putting together a pre-PIT count enumeration of homelessness (sheltered and unsheltered) of Fort Worth and surrounding Tarrant County, which documents the rise of homelessness in Fort Worth.

I love how Ty’s interest and outrage in an encampment clearance, combined by a desire to connect with his new town through its history, led him down a rabbit hole. I reacted similarly, in my immersion into Philadelphia’s Skid Row when I first came to Philly in 1995. Its a rabbit hole I still find myself in. And now I realize that I now not only research homeless history, but have been around long enough to have experiences that qualify as such. Fort Worth blues.

PS - Ty refers to Fort Worth as the “Panther City.” I had never heard that nickname, and Paper CIty Magazine says the name: “dates back to a time when Fort Worth's city streets were allegedly so lazy that a panther was once spotted sleeping in the middle of the road.” Cool story.