Wilonsky: A rough road to historic designation for a North Dallas street built by and for Black families

McShann Road is a short, two-block stretch of concrete spanning a section of North Dallas between Preston Road and Montfort Drive. Few cars drove down the street during my recent walks along its blocks, and I saw no one out front of the few dozen ranch-style houses that line this road, where a synagogue sits almost in the middle. From all appearances, this is a quiet street. 

But this week, sitting through a difficult and oft-contentious meeting of the Landmark Commission, I began to wonder if the peace along McShann is only as deep as its pavement.

Before going further, a brief history lesson is warranted. Because no matter how many newspaper stories have been written about McShann — dozens dating back decades — few locals likely know its history. And that history is central to this story, which begins at last Monday’s meeting of the Landmark Commission, where commissioners were scheduled to talk about turning McShann into a historic district, like Swiss Avenue or Park Row/South Boulevard or State Thomas.

They never made it past the speakers, all of them McShann Road residents — those strongly in favor of turning their street into a historic district and those vehemently against. “Contentious,” a commissioner said later of the meeting. Which is bound to happen whenever you ask neighbors on any street what they want for tomorrow, much less what happened yesterday.

This street sits upon land once owned by Black families in the years following the Civil War, and was once part of the the freedman’s town called Alpha, the namesake of Alpha Road. In the 1950s, Dr. Mansell McShann carved into hard-scrabble farmland a neighborhood for other Black doctors, lawyers and university professors who hadn’t been allowed to live elsewhere in the city. And even then, its earliest residents had to fight City Hall just to get sewer lines to their homes.

“We had to wait and wait and wait for city services, the most basic infrastructure,” 93-year-old Marguerite Williams said this week. “We didn’t just buy these homes. We fought for the right to make them liveable.”

There are several residents along McShann for whom its history still lives and breathes. They are the “legacy residents,” as they call themselves, among them 92-year-old Helen Broden, who has lived here since 1967. And Dr. Myron Watkins, who moved to McShann with wife Barbara in 1969. And Jimmie Price. And Rubye Snow. And Ezelle Holley. And others who remember when McShann was the only street in North Dallas where they could find shelter.

As recently as 1974, this newspaper wrote that McShann “has been called the most exclusive ghetto in the city.” By whom, it did not say.

But by the late 1990s, the complexion of McShann began changing with the arrival of white residents, many of them Orthodox Jews. A January 2004 story in the Preston Hollow Advocate wrote, “what people have typically referred to as ‘that black street’ is becoming, according to its residents, a true American ‘melting pot.’” That same month, one Jewish newcomer told this newspaper he was well aware of McShann’s history, and that living among Black residents eager to share their story was akin to “a handshake from one ethnic group to another.”

That estimable past brings us, finally, to a seemingly turbulent present and an uncertain future for McShann.

Only days ago McShann seemed a slam-dunk for landmark designation, one commissioner told me Monday. A council member asked for it. A landmark commissioner requested it. The Black residents supported it. But in recent days, a number of residents have voiced their opposition, both in writing and in presentations to the commission. 

That opposition stings the McShann lifers, who fear that without landmark district designation the stories built into each brick here will soon be forgotten. 

“This is the last piece in that entire area still owned by Blacks,” said the 73-year-old Rev. Willis Broden of New Canaan First Missionary Baptist Church in Oak Cliff. He’d come to City Hall with the aforementioned Helen Broden, his mother, and his 41-year-old daughter, Elizabeth.

“Why would it not be historical?” the reverend told the commission in a tone usually reserved for big sermons in much bigger rooms. “We have gone through so much we can’t even have a little piece of street to call our own?” 

After the meeting, a McShann resident opposing designation told Broden and neighborhood association president Lisa Fletcher not to take this personally. They said that would be difficult to do.

“You live on a historically Black block,” Fletcher told me later. “Why would you fight designation?”

I can think of one reason: It can be hard living in a neighborhood where every exterior alteration and every new construction or would-be demolition must first win the approval of the Landmark Commission. The right to live where you want and do what you want with your property are surely values McShann lifers would support. They are, after all, part of what drove them and their predecessors to build their homes and make their lives here.

“We recognize that some homeowners wish to protect the street from rezoning, overdevelopment, or gentrification,” says a letter signed by 15 McShann residents that was sent Sunday to the commission. “Those are legitimate concerns, and appropriate tools — including zoning protests — are available to address them. Historic landmark designation, however, is not the appropriate remedy.”

But that was not the only reason the opposition offered in that missive.

“McShann Road today is indistinguishable from the parallel neighboring streets to the south — Charlestown, Meletio, Williamstown, Melshire, and Willow,” says their missive. “There is nothing about the nature of McShann Road today — its architecture, its demographics, its cultural continuity, or its community character — that warrants formal landmark designation.”

On Monday, a few opponents also claimed designation will lower their property values. Chair Evelyn Montgomery pushed back against that claim, citing the economic impact study Preserving Dallas released last year. It notes that in 2024, “The average single family home in a historic district was valued around 15% more than a property in the rest of Dallas.”

Tuesday afternoon, I called one of the McShann residents who spoke and signed that letter, Tobi Rothschild. She moved to the street about eight years ago, unfamiliar with McShann’s history. I told her several McShann lifers said after the meeting that it sounded like opponents were trying to deny designation by diminishing their story. She was horrified to hear that.

“If I sounded dismissive, I apologize,” she said. “I am not trying to dismiss anyone. I respect my neighbors. I respect how hard they had to work. My only objection is, I want autonomy on my home. The history is wonderful. No one is denying that. It got heated Monday, and I didn’t want it going there. I am not trying to erase history.”

I also called Rabbi Shaya Fox, the CEO of Dallas Area Torah Association, who also spoke against designation.

DATA, as it’s called, bought a couple of lots on the corner of McShann and Preston in 2016, and has been trying to get the City Plan Commission to approve construction of townhomes there. First it was 12; now it’s three or four, Fox told me. City staff has recommended approving the application. But between a Change.org petition and the Landmark application, CPC has thrice delayed a vote, most recently last month. 

Fox came to Monday’s Landmark meeting with a counterproposal: erecting a monument on the property along Preston, alongside those townhomes if they aren’t delayed or disappeared by a historic designation.

“We are just expressing our viewpoint, and it’s all with the greatest respect,” Fox said. “The nature of their history is obviously very meaningful to them, and it’s good they’re passionate about it. I am all for honoring their history. I am just pushing back on officially naming it as a historical district. But if it moved forward, we would follow whatever rules we’re obligated to follow.”

This process didn’t even start with the legacy residents. Designation was the idea of Gay Donnell Willis, the district’s council member, who said she became aware of McShann’s history during her run for City Council in 2021. I asked about the zoning request on the corner and suggested that maybe designating McShann now was just a good way to short-circuit a controversial case. 

She said, no, she’d simply become enamored of preserving the street, in large part because “District 13 doesn’t have a lot of historic designation opportunities.”

McShann is certainly worthy of consideration. There, the past remains very much present in residents like Marguerite Williams, who stood at the microphone Monday and told a group of people dedicated to preserving the past that she was “the living evidence” of a time not so long ago when this city was so segregated Black folks were lucky enough just to get a street in North Dallas.

“We spent decades as stewards of the soil,” Williams said. And she and some of her neighbors are not yet ready for McShann’s story to be buried beneath it.