4 December 19 - 25, 2024 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents Living in History Servants quarters in Oak Cliff hint at a way forward for Dallas housing. BY ALYSSA FIELDS W hen Samantha Jackson gets out of bed and makes her morning coffee, the floorboards of her 500-square-foot apart- ment sing a song written by the heavy foot- steps of a hundred years of working Dallasites before her. The creaking melodies of original oak slats cry a tune of racism and refurbishment. Forty years ago, before the building was redone, Jackson’s kitchen nook was a desig- nated sleeping area for the multi-person family that lived there. Forty years before that, the apartment was servant quarters. Mixed-income housing is a small solution to the pervasive housing crisis that has plagued Dallas, but city officials, and the ac- tive property-owning voters who elect them, frequently oppose efforts to bring multi-fam- ily dwellings to single-family developments. But by nature of city evolution, the sordid his- tory of servant quarters is proving coexis- tence is not only possible, but beneficial. “It’s interesting the way that the neigh- borhood attracts people that are apprecia- tive of history,” said Jackson. The small studio, on King’s Highway in Oak Cliff, was built in 1926. The windows don’t seal very well, and the bathroom grout is soiled, but the ceilings are tall and the neighborhood is walkable, a rarity for Dal- las. On the corner of the crossroads is an- other pre-war apartment complex. The street is lined with them, sprinkled in be- tween single-family homes. The area is one of the few mixed-income settings in the city. “Oak Cliff, historically, had stranger devel- opment patterns compared to other parts of the city,” said Jay Firsching, a historic preser- vation consultant. “You did tend to get patchy development, super fancy over here and the next road over, it’s not. It’s still that way.” King’s Highway runs atop the ridgeline of the hills of Kessler Park. The road cuts through the neighborhood at an angle, run- ning catty-corner to Colorado Boulevard, or “Old Millionaire’s Row.” “The reason they called it King’s High- way is because it had to be wide enough for four horse-drawn carriages to go up and down,” said Victor Aves, the owner of Jack- son’s building. The wide road is canopied by the large live oaks from which the neighborhood gets its name. Kessler is a menagerie of architectural styles. Colonial pillars hoist up the balconies of Shakespearean dreams, terracotta tiles beam in the summer glow on the tops of Spanish pa- lacios, and quaint ranch houses, the types that stay in the family for decades, back up to the lots of mid-century glass houses. The neighborhood is 10 minutes from downtown and seven blocks from Bishop Arts District. It’s just far enough south to be quiet at night but too far south for quick po- lice response times. “Apartments were usually built on the fringes to start with,” Firsching said. “Devel- opers saw apartments as bad and lowering the property values of their development.” Before apartments were socially appro- priate, the eight- and four-plexes were built to look like regular homes, hiding dozens of people living inside. On the west side, prai- rie school-style homes were built for tradi- tional nuclear families. On the east side of the six-block strip are some of the city’s orig- inal multi-family dwellings. “There’s very few old historic apart- ments, multi-family, blended in with the houses,” Firsching said. “There’s typically not that much of that going on.” As the neighborhood expanded, the apartments were built as temporary housing for people waiting for their homes on nearby streets to be completed. Wealthy families would hunker down in the small rooms and endure the short weeks it would take for construction to finish. By the ’20s, the apart- ments were used to house the builders themselves. When the majority of the build- ing was done in the ’30s, and construction jobs dried up, the apartments became hous- ing for the servants working in the mansions on Colorado Boulevard. The neighborhood, once a promising, multi-income area actively battling the hous- ing crisis of the ’20s, became an economically starved and neglected community. The Man Who Changed It All W hen Rick Garza moved into his first house in 1989, in the 1300 block of King’s Highway, his neighbors were drug dealers and gang mem- bers. Never one for rules and always one for risk, Garza bought the best house in the worst neighborhood. The 1911 farmhouse was a dream for the architect, who saw good bones and ignored the loud bangs at night. “King’s Highway, at that time, was the bane of everybody’s existence — guns, gangs, drugs, prostitutes,” Garza said. “We were like, well, ‘but what a cool house.’” Oak Cliff, like many cities across the country, was hit hard by massive white flight. Black codes, redlining and racial cov- enants collectively prevented black families from owning property by law, and the apart- ments were purchased by absentee land- lords who did little upkeep. “People moved out and they left these buildings to deteriorate. Slumlords moved in, bought them for nothing, milked them, and they really deteriorated in the ’50s and ’60s and ’70s,” said Garza. By the ’70s, the area became known for a high rate of violence. It wasn’t until the ’90s that Bishop Arts District was revitalized and began to attract an increasingly young, artis- tic audience looking for cheap rent. Garza grew concerned with the constant police presence on his street after the birth of his son. The new parents decided to leave the neighborhood and were boxing up their things, but the day before their big move to Park Cities, the contract fell through and they found themselves unpacking. Stuck, Garza decided that if he couldn’t | UNFAIR PARK | Pre-war apartment complexes in Oak Cliff were built to look like regular homes. Architect Rick Garza fixed up Kings Court multi-unit building; Before (right) is the building in 2005; Above is Kings Court exterior today. courtesy Rick Garza Nathan Hunsinger >> p6