I am a huge history geek, which is why history was one of my totally practical undergraduate majors.
When I first moved to Miami for high school, I enrolled in a History of South Florida night course at Miami-Dade College. The class allowed me to orient myself in my new city through the stories behind its neighborhoods. (It also turned me into an obnoxious trivia-box for friends and family.)
Michael and I spent the evening learning more about Dallas history by watching documentaries from the Building Community Workshop – a local nonprofit “community design center.”
BC has a “Neighborhood Stories” project, which consists of well-produced short films about Dallas neighborhoods.
Here are the three documentaries that we watched:
Bon Ton + Ideal
The first documentary covers two areas of South Dallas called Bon Ton and Ideal. These adjacent neighborhoods were built on undesirable tracts of land that Dallas reserved for black residents.
The conditions in Bon Ton were shocking bad – we had to keep reminding ourselves that the pictures were from the 1950’s, and not the 1850’s.
Flooding in Dallas’s Bon Ton neighborhood.
The Bon Ton neighborhood was in the flood plain of the Trinity River, and many of the houses lacked plumbing and electricity. In the 1940’s and 1950’s, Bon Ton had the nickname “Bomb Town” because white residents literally blew up the houses of black people who moved too far outside of the neighborhood.
A map of the Bombings which led to naming the neighborhood “Bomb Town.”
New highways left only a single point of entry into the Bon Ton neighborhood and effectively walled it off from the rest of the city.
In the 1970’s, Bon Ton and Ideal became drug-ravaged and largely vacant. The documentary highlights the work of local residents who formed community groups to drive the drug dealers out, and then lobbied the city to rebuild the neighborhood after devastating floods.
News Coverage of Bon Ton residents protesting crime.
It is unclear how much Bon Ton and Ideal have truly recovered. South Dallas still has a reputation for high crime rates and massive packs of killer stray dogs.
You can watch the full documentary on Vimeo.
Out of Deepwood: Dallas’s Flint
The second video that we watched is about Pleasant Grove, a neighborhood in Southeast Dallas.
The majority of this documentary focuses on a local scandal: the city of Dallas allowed a massive illegal dump to operate in the neighborhood for years.
The Illegal Deepwood Dump in Southeast Dallas.
More than 2 million cubic yards of trash were dumped into the mining pits near the neighborhood. That’s a lot of trash. The waste dumped into the area could create a block-wide skyscraper as tall as the Empire State Building.
If the Dallas Deepwood dump were a building.
A rendering of what the Deepwood dump would look like if it were a downtown building.
The hazardous waste in the dump inevitably combusted and burned for 6 months in the 1980’s, and then caught fire again in 1997. Toxic fumes blanketed the entire neighborhood and residents got sick.
Pleasant Grove residents finally sued Dallas and forced the city to redevelop the dump site into the Trinity River Audubon Center, a state-of-the-art nature center.
The Trinity River Audubon Center in Dallas on the site of the former illegal dump.
The Pleasant Grove documentary covers a common problem throughout the United States
The City of Dallas appeared to be indifferent to the illegal dumping problem and pollution because the complaining residents were primarily black. (Pleasant Grove started as a white neighborhood, but the white residents quickly moved out once the first black homeowners arrived.)
The disaster + lawsuit arch of this story makes the Pleasant Grove story seem eerily similar to Flint, Michigan. (e.g., minorities are ignored until disaster strikes.)
You can watch Out of Deepwood on Vimeo.
Wynnewood North: Gays to the Rescue!
The final documentary that we watched was about Wynnewood North. This neighborhood is a master-planned community which was predominantly white until a crime wave drove away many of the original residents and businesses. Wynnewood North rebounded with the help of committed long-time residents and, of course, the gays.
The documentary features Silver Poteete, who has lived in the neighborhood for more than 60 years.
Silver Poteete speaking about gay gentrifiers in Dallas.
She gives the cutest description of the gay gentrifiers:
“When we first moved in (in 1957) I don’t think there were many gays that lived in the neighborhood. And then there was an influx of gays coming in the neighborhood. I don’t know anyone who is affected or offended by gays – they are all very good neighbors, and I think they are a real asset to the neighborhood!”
That’s right!
This documentary is also available on Vimeo.
There were many common threads in all of these documentaries:
- The City of Dallas systematically ignoring the needs of minority communities.
- A lack of enforcement of city code and rules.
- The city and residents allowing problems to fester until a neighborhood completely breaks down.
- Redevelopment spurred by resident action.
I wonder if this will inspire us to be more involved in our neighborhood…
These documentaries allowed us to learn about new places in town and there’s way more on our Dallas to-see list now.
Learn more about Building Community Workshop here.
Thanks to Aaron Kraemer for the head’s up about this documentary series!
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