"It kept the police hoppin' and busy," says Straughan. In 1973, he and his partner were called to a drugstore where a man robbing the pharmacy for drugs started pistol-whipping patrons at the counter for extra money. Straughan and his partner got there while the man was still inside; a chase and gunfight ensued. Police cornered the robber at a nearby gas station and shot him to death. "He made a last stand and he lost. Poor people on the Loop had to see it all," he says sadly.
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Burger Park started out differently as well. Founded in 1968, it was originally called Bonus Burger. It sold cheeseburgers for 25 cents and was owned and run by an older white man named Harry Reesby. It was more than 20 years before Reesby put burglar bars on its windows for the first time — the neighborhood violence in the '80s prompted the change.
Troy Fields
The Kims turn out 400 to 500 burgers a day.
Groovehouse
Burger Park offers a $4.32 cheeseburger combo with fries and a slush.
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The Kims bought Burger Park in 1995, after Reesby had passed away. The Kims had originally run a cafeteria in the Heights, but were looking for a busier restaurant that would allow them to support their college-aged kids. Although the parking lot wasn't as large as Oak would have liked — "We have a small parking lot — five or six cars and it's full — so sometimes they park double. We try to buy next-door property, but they don't want to sell it." — they settled in and quickly became fixtures in the South Park neighborhood.
They didn't make too many changes to the existing operation.
"I add on chicken nuggets and chicken sandwich [to the menu]," Oak says. "When I took it over, they don't have anything else, just hamburger and French fry. Slushes were there, but only one machine. Right now I have two machines." They churn endlessly throughout the day, dispensing a drink that can best be described as a slightly softer New Orleans-style snowball in a cup. Strawberry is the best-selling flavor.
Their other two changes involved the burger recipe: Reesby used 75/25 beef. Oak uses 85/15; less fat, but without sacrificing flavor. And, more important, the meat is never frozen. "They used frozen meat, but I use fresh meat. I pay more," she says, "but they deliver it every morning."
Inside, the quarters remain cramped, the ordering line snakes around a single metal bar mounted to the floor. Three successive layers of floor have been worn down over the last 42 years, back to bare concrete in places. Paint on the metal bar and the metal grate that separates customers from the cashier has worn away, too.
It's a cash-only place where almost everyone gets the cheeseburger.
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By the late 1980s, South Park was no longer considered a suburb, as neighborhoods that close to the Loop had more or less become consumed by the larger urban cityscape. Instead, it was dominated by drive-by shootings and drug dealers, especially along Burger Park's street: Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.
Gonzales, who retired as a Houston Police Department sergeant after 30 years on the force, describes a very different South Park during that time from the neighborhood he knew as a child.
"In the '80s and '90s, it was bad. HPD was chasing guys up and down Bellfort and MLK. Folks were knocking over liquor stores, hijacking people," he says. Neighborhood Nights Out, organized to help residents prevent crime by getting to know one another, were rarely attended as people were too afraid of leaving their homes at night. Violence pervaded the entire community. Deaths grew increasingly random and senseless.
Three days before Christmas in 1989, Howard Garrett Jr., not yet 19 years old, was shot to death after a fight at a car wash on MLK. He was just blocks from his home on Pershing. Barely a year earlier, another 18-year-old had been found beaten to death in his very own home, just off MLK. Kenneth James Moore had laid undiscovered in his small apartment until a security guard found him one night during rounds. A year prior, a 36-year-old nurse named Barbara Jean Johnson and her 63-year-old mother were shot to death in their car on the South Loop that forms South Park's northern border, as Johnson's children — only ten and 16 years old — watched from the back seat. The violence was everywhere, rampant.
In the late 1980s, a Houston Chronicle article looked at reasons why blacks chose to remain in increasingly dangerous neighborhoods like South Park. One resident, Ernest Blackmon, told the reporter how he felt more comfortable in a "mixed environment" with both whites and blacks — which South Park still had to some degree back in 1987 — but that "the primary advantage of living among whites is that such an area is less likely to fall into poverty and disrepair."
Blackmon further stated, "The chances are better that your children won't be eaten up by rats and roaches. If you live in an all-black neighborhood, the people downtown want to do very little for you, even in this which is an historical area." He had no idea how right his statement would turn out to be only six years later.
