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.