By Robert Wilonsky
02:00 on August 17, 2020 CDT
Here in Northwest Dallas, there has been a credit for staying at home that has nothing to do with a highly contagious pathogen. I didn’t have to drive every day to the intersection of Walnut Hill and Marsh lanes. The northwest corner, in particular, still turns out to be the day after the October 20 tornado that ripped off a piece of Dallas skin. And what’s left of Marsh Lane Plaza smells just as bad.
As a child, this mall passed through the largest and most elegant in town, Tom Thumb. Records from the paper tell me that in 1962, the grocery chain owner Bob Cullum persuaded Dallas City Council to rezon a residential asset for his two-story grocery store, despite the objections of citizens seeking more housing in their rising timber passage.
Much persuasion was needed: the land belonged to a council member. The owners had no chance. Like never before.
Years later, the shopkeeper posed trouble and the old mid-century fashion wonder on the corner took over an informal hardware franchise. The kind of position you went in for a little paint and came out with a pocket full of hard sweet sticks from yesteryear. More recently, it is a Planet Fitness eBook organized through a pawn shop and the Little Caesars franchise of a senior classmate.
There are about 20 neighborhoods here, most of them modest and middle-class. Some, like Midway Hollow, have undergone transformations so immediate and dramatic that I no longer recognize where my most productive companions lived. But many seem soggy in amber and have remained as intact as possible since I was a child.
Residents complained to Councilman Jennifer Gates when lender entered Marsh Lane Plaza. And they stormed after the strong winds shattered it, and the crime and burn spread and rotted in a huge crowded parking lot a long time ago for grocery shoppers.
At every turn, other people who have to live with this mess feel ignored. Like never before.
In recent months, citizens have shaped the Walnut Hill-Marsh Revitalize coalition, which is not easy to say in the long term in the area. This is what happens when you get tired of having enough of your own neighborhood.
Now there are about three hundred members who post on Nextdoor and talk about Slack. There they drafted a project statement, a manifesto, which promises to hold the city and the owners of its properties accountable, and drives the “beautification of the intersection with trees, driveways and green spaces”. They also need “new adapted businesses that are opening up thanks to our efforts.”
No, let’s say, a lender. Or two-dollar retail outlets at the same mall.
“We just have to be respectful of neighborhoods,” said Rachel Deering, one of the coalition’s founders and leaders. “Because our biggest concern is getting what we had before.”
We, those of us who live in Northwest Dallas, have not been satisfied with the way the city does not deal with this component of the city; quite, we’re just a position that most people cross to get to Love Field. A new bank branch behind the wheel is what goes through “development.” We are dismayed by the remains of Marsh and Walnut Hill, and even Stemmons Freeway, but we are not surprised.
I’m convinced the Dallas City Council thinks we’re the farmers’ arm. Someone else’s problem.
A chain link around Marsh Lane Plaza was erected, however, before this month. This only happened after the city corridor, however, sued landowners for refusing to wipe out an asset deemed “ugly” and “offensive” and “harmful” and “unsightly and unsightly for citizens or neighbors.” Which pretty well sums up the situation.
Over time, the tornado feels like it’s happened a lifetime ago. However, echoes of that horrible night abound: each and every Sunday walks the five miles from my community to my parents’ space, and the remains between my space and Preston Hollow, I see many undergrowth-covered grounds decorated with broken canvas roofs.
When I wrote about this intersection last fall and in January, I was sure it would have already been cleaned up, like Preston Royal’s grocery shopping center that had been authorized a long time ago for its renovation.
But this is far from the only visual contaminants and the only danger in our neighborhood. The Northway Church, which I told you in November that it needed to be demolished, still exists; the same goes for apartments along Brockbank Drive that attracted homeless people as tenants in the winter and spring, and my beloved Thomas Jefferson High School, now mired in the controversy of entrepreneurs awaiting its rebuilding.
We don’t ask for much. Only a few places in our community where we can eat, drink, shop, live and spend time in combination, with our hands crossed, without having to walk through someone else’s community. Staying home almost every day made me deeply, desperately regret, my hometown. I don’t go anywhere, I don’t see anybody. But most of all, it’s because there’s no place to spend in my own community.
But, and it’s not in my nature, I hope at least something changes. Looking at the Dallas Central Appraisal District website, I discovered that developer Mehrdad Moayedi, the guy from Statler’s redesign, recently purchased the Dallas County construction at Marsh and Walnut Hill. Your reps will only say you plan to build townhouses on the site across the street from Marsh Lane Plaza.
And a few days ago, Gates included in his survey to electorate a note from Hopkins Commercial, the owners of the mall. She says they have received a lot of interest from major food retailers, fitness groups, places to eat for mothers and fathers, national franchises of places to eat, cafes, etc.
Besides, it sounds good. Because for too long, this component of the city has been content with less.
Robert Wilonsky. Robert Wilonsky, a former city columnist for The Dallas Morning News, is director of communications for Heritage Auctions and a regular contributor to those pages.
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