"The Loop took away from the area. It stripped it of its innocence and made it a part of the city, with all the traffic coming through. Sure, the Loop was a good thing because you could get around now. But it opened up South Park to a lot of outside influences."
The forced integration of Jones and Sterling high schools in the 1960s hastened the changes as whites scattered to newer suburbs like Pasadena and Pearland.
Katharine Shilcutt
Warnings to would-be troublemakers go unheeded at this abandoned grocery store.
Katharine Shilcutt
Many front yards in South Park are strewn with trash.
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Pam Redd's family moved to South Park in 1967; they were the first black family on the block.
"We had very welcoming neighbors on both sides," she recalled of the neighborhood itself, just down the street from Burger Park. "Not everybody was friendly, of course, but our immediate neighbors were."
The 1973 graduate of Jones High still remembers Burger Park. "They had the best burgers. Ever."
"It took forever for them to make the burgers, but it was so worth it," Redd recalled. "I always got extra onions on mine. You could smell the burgers for blocks." She used to sit outside under the broad awning or on the curb on Dieppe Street, eating and talking with friends.
With a laugh, she remembers cutting class and walking to Burger Park from Jones High School to get her burger fix when it was nice outside. "We would skip school to go there and bring the teachers back a burger. They just looked the other way."
She has some less happy memories as well, as when one of her next-door neighbor's friends came over and accused her of being "an 'N-word' lover," Redd recalled. "We were in the garage playing and this little girl came over, saying these nasty things. My parents had always told us that if someone said something like that, to just walk away, because it's not worth it. They're just ignorant." So Redd and her friends did just that: ignored the little girl. But Redd's little dachshund mix Skippy had other plans.
"Skippy ran out and bit her!" Redd says, still seemingly stunned by her dog's actions. He was on a leash, Redd says, but the tiny dog still managed to bite the girl hard on her upper thigh. "My neighbors defended us," Redd remembers, when the little girl's parents came around later that evening to find out what had happened. "They told her parents that she'd been harassing us, and that was the end of it."
Redd, now 55 and the principal of Tipps Elementary in the Cy-Fair school district, says South Park used to be like a small town where people could walk anywhere, even at night.
The last of her family moved out when her mother sold their old house five years ago and moved to Beaumont. It was the end of an era, and although Redd still has friends in the neighborhood, things just aren't the same. "I was sad," Redd says of the news stories about South Park in the 1980s and 1990s, of the way the neighborhood and the homes deteriorated. "Those were those three-bedroom, one-bathroom little 1950s houses, and they were very nice at the time we moved in." She continues: "But the people who moved in after didn't have those same values. They were renters and maybe qualified when they shouldn't have. Either they didn't know how to keep them up or they just couldn't afford to take care of the houses."
Redd lives in Cy-Fair now, in the same neighborhood where she's the principal of Tipps Elementary School. "I moved out here," she says, "to try to get that same feel we had in South Park, like being in a small town but not really."
Dave Straughan, who retired as a sergeant in the robbery division at the Houston Police Department in 1993, and whose rookie beat included South Park, says that by 1971, the tides had started to shift. Like my stepfather's family, many of the neighborhood's original residents had left. "Integration was still fairly new and there was still a lot of fear," Straughan recalls. "People just picked up and moved."
"There were still some white neighborhoods north of Griggs, but everything south of that had gone black. Professional blacks, you know. Nurses, teachers, city workers, the like. It was a mixture of good, working-class people." But, he says, "it was pretty much the same as all the districts at that time in south Houston."
To Straughan, though, it was more than just white flight that was responsible for the changing face of South Park. "I think it was the age of the neighborhoods by then," he says. "The working folks moved out into the suburbs and the people that moved in were of a lower income. The houses by then were deteriorating; they required a lot of maintenance to keep up."
At the same time, South Park was beginning to get what Straughan calls "interesting."
Just to the east, "Telephone Road was wild and wooly around the Loop," Straughan remembers. "Southeast Houston already had a reputation for being pretty rough, and Telephone Road had a national reputation for being pretty wild. It had good neighborhoods and good people, but it had pockets of people that were known for living on the wild side."
