Fort Worth Skid Row
A few weeks ago I wrote a blog entry about a correspondence I struck up with Ty Stewart after he wrote a piece in which he looked at a recent encampment clearance in Fort Worth in an historical context. As a follow up, he took an interest in my masters thesis, which documented a (pre-PIT count) homeless enumeration of Fort Worth-Tarrant County that I coordinated in the mid-1990s.
As a follow up, Ty and I had a good phone conversation a few days ago. Its fun to have a conversation with someone over a shared, obscure interest. It struck me that, 28 years after I wrote it, Ty gave my masters thesis a closer read than probably my thesis committee did at the time.
He asked me one question on the thesis that stood out – I had mentioned that Fort Worth had a Skid Row area back in the day but I never mentioned its location. So where was it?
That question intrigued me because I didn’t know the answer. I dusted off my thesis and, sure enough, I did mention a Skid Row that had once thrived (relatively speaking) in Fort Worth, but in retrospect I don’t think knew where it was located when I wrote that. No-one had called me out on it till now.
So I looked to see if I could answer this question.
Skid Row, for the uninitiated, describes sections in most larger US cities in the mid-20th century that were defined by concentrations of homeless men and the places that catered to them. It generated stereotypes of derelicts and winos, featured evangelical Christian missions and seedy flophouse hotels and cheap bars, and became a vivid symbol for individual failure. I have taken an inordinate interest in Skid Row and have spent a good bit of time doing some amateur historical research on Philadelphia’s Skid Row (scroll down my previous blog entries and you’ll see more on this.
To see what I could find out about Skid Row in Fort Worth, I got comfortable in an armchair, cranked up the internet, and did a little urban archaeology. The internet was not a tool that existed yet when I was getting my Masters degree.
I started with the research literature. There definitely was a Skid Row in Fort Worth, as referenced in at least three well-known monographs by the eminent Skid Row scholars Donald Bogue, Howard Bahr, and Barry Lee. While they all mentioned Fort Worth among the cities that had a Skid Row, only Bogue, in a study of Chicago's Skid Row, gave any further info (and not much at that) on Fort Worth. Noteworthy is that he reported that Fort Worth's Skid Row census tracts, in 1950, contained a population of 2,900. By comparison, Philadelphia, a city with a Skid Row I know well and a population back then at least three times the size of Fort Worth, had a Skid Row census population of 3,700.
The location of Fort Worth’s Skid Row revealed itself a bit more obliquely from an article taken from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that about a "Goatman" that terrorized the Lake Worth area over a summer long ago and has now been largely forgotten. Improbably, Goatman had a connection to Skid Row, which is a separate story worth exploring, perhaps in a future blog entry.
But even more improbably, and fortuitous for my purposes, the Goatman story features a graphic from around 1953 that lists the establishments, one by one, on the 1400 block of North Main Street in Fort Worth. I have spent hours putting such inventories together for Philadelphia blocks and, just eyeballing the types of places - hotels, missions, bars, theaters, used clothing shops, etc. that were on this block indicates that, without a doubt, this was the center of Fort Worth's Skid Row.
Finally, this link is to a timeline that is on the Union Gospel Mission's website. UGM, an Christian outfit that has been sheltering and evangelizing the homeless in Fort Worth since the 19th Century, currently runs one of Fort Worth’s three large shelters. The timeline shows that the UGM was originally on Houston and Fifteenth streets (not far from the 1400 block of Main) and moved to E. Lancaster in 1978-79, when the city demolished the old UGM building. This was, almost certainly, when the city would have knocked down the rest of the Skid Row landscape.
And there you have the basic historical facts of Fort Worth’s Skid Row. So much more to do, however. The next steps amount to piecing together its skeleton from whatever fragments of bone can be gathered fifty or so years later. Starting on this:
- Looking on Google maps, 1400 North Main St. is now the site of the Fort Worth Mercado, built in 2005. I'd be curious to know what was there before that structure.
- Marine Park, located near what was Skid Row, still gets numerous mentions as a place where homeless people congregate.
- Modern day Skid Row in Fort Worth seems pretty entrenched along Lancaster Ave. just east of downtown, anchored by three large shelters in close proximity. Was this deliberate?
- And more…
Anyone care to take it on?