Pastor Chris Simmons long worried someone would tear down the old mansion at the corner of South Boulevard and South Ervay Street, just around the corner from his Cornerstone Baptist Church. Simmons fretted that sooner or later, it would become just another vacant lot in South Dallas – prime real estate for gluttonous developers slow-driving the area or, perhaps, an empty patch of overgrown green upon which the South Boulevard homeless encampments near Botham Jean Boulevard might one day encroach.
“Particularly if it fell to someone who did not appreciate the history of the community and the history of the home,” Simmons said a few days ago as we stood inside its expansive and ornate front room.
The house at 2830 S. Ervay was not for sale. But a few months ago, Simmons, with the help of the Rees-Jones Foundation, made its longtime owners, a funeral home based in DeSoto, an offer they could not refuse. That’s how much Simmons wanted the home, whose history is profoundly significant to the city and, more to the point, to the Jewish and Black communities who once crossed paths in South Dallas.
The home has stood at this intersection for 117 years, first as the residence for Simon Linz, the jeweler whose name remains a fixture on this city’s oldest civic honor, the 101-year-old Linz Award, presented annually by this newspaper. Later the house became a funeral home that helped usher more than 5,500 Black Dallasites from this world to the next.
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Cornerstone Baptist Church Pastor Chris Simmons, at left, and Rees-Jones Foundation Senior Program Officer Trey Hill at the former Linz House in South Dallas last week(Robert Wilonsky)
Simmons now envisions its next incarnation as the Linz Cultural Heritage Center, a repository of Black and Jewish history — as museum, performance space, educational center, bridge-builder. All the things. He has prepared a lengthy proposal just now being sent to would-be donors and partners, including the Dallas Jewish Historical Society and the African American Museum of Dallas in Fair Park.
Simmons said he wants “something that gives the community a sense of pride in their neighborhood.” Which has been his goal ever since arriving at Cornerstone in May 1988 to offer hope and salvation in what was then a “community in crisis, a community in despair.”
I’m often reminded of something my father once said of South Dallas, where he was born and raised and ran his father’s auto parts store: “What they have they don’t need, what they need they don’t have.” Cornerstone, St. Philip’s School and Community Center and Forest Forward — South Dallas’ holy trinity — have spent the better part of the last decade proving Dad wrong.
Two Saturday mornings ago I found Simmons carrying fresh fruit and vegetables into Southpoint Community Market across from the Linz House. The grocery is part of The Crossing strip mall that also houses a laundromat and cloud kitchen. Less than a decade ago, this was Ervay Plaza, anchored by one of those beer and liquor stores that used to drown South Dallas.
Cornerstone also owns the former Jesse’s Place, around the corner from the Linz House on South Ervay Street, which Pastor Chris Simmons hopes to turn into an “Eatzi’s on a budget” for South Dallas.(Robert Wilonsky)
A little later that same Saturday, Simmons was farther down Ervay greeting the men and women filing into the community kitchen, which shares a parking lot with a former tumbledown apartment complex serving as a medical and dental clinic. Cornerstone also owns some of the oldest houses on that side of South Dallas, including a century-old stone house on Holmes Street, which serves as transitional housing for women just released from prison, and the former Jesse’s Place (and, before that, Hardeman’s barbecue joint) on South Ervay, which Simmons hopes to turn into “Eatzi’s on a budget.”
The Linz Cultural Heritage Center is, simply, the next step in Cornerstone’s remaking of South Dallas. Something that connects the neighborhood to its past and points toward its future.
“I think a lot of times people have lost an appreciation for South Dallas,” said Simmons. “You hear about the drugs, the gangs, the prostitution, the murder and everything negative being in the community; I think people have lost a sense of dignity and worth of what the community was. And so it was our hope that through this particular project we could restore the home and then restore pride in the neighborhood of what this community was. It was not always a community to be feared. It was once a community to be embraced.”
The first time Simon Linz’s house appeared in the pages of this newspaper was on Jan. 1, 1908. It would not be the last.(Robert Wilonsky)
In a city where historic preservation is more of a vague suggestion, the house’s survival is miraculous enough. This is the unprotected stretch of Park Row and South Boulevard that withered and died after South Central Expressway carved up the neighborhood in the mid-1950s. Most of this neighborhood is pockmarked with vacant lots. And what little of its history remains, including the first Dallas Home for the Jewish Aged on South, belongs to Cornerstone.
“It’s just accidental, part of trying to be the presence of the kingdom in this particular community, to bring shalom to the neighborhood,” Simmons said. “And we just happened to be in a neighborhood that has so much rich Jewish history that we really want to capture and maintain.”
Turns out, a Baptist church has done a far better job of preserving South Dallas’ Jewish footprint than my own people.
“Some of that, I believe, is that feeling of always moving forward, and, sometimes, for reasons good and bad, not wanting to look back,” said Beri Kaplan Schwitzer, executive director of the Dallas Jewish Historical Society. She’s scheduled to tour the Linz house this week, as Simmons and the foundation begin raising the $700,000 they estimate it will cost to restore it.
Cornerstone Baptist Church’s Chris Simmons in the front room of the former Linz House, which he hopes to turn into a South Dallas cultural center showcasing the neighborhood’s history.(Robert Wilonsky)
Simon Linz was among the five Linz brothers who founded their namesake jewelry store in 1877. They also built Dallas’ first skyscraper — or what passed for one then — seven stories of sophistication in the center of downtown, which helped transform the nascent city.
The house, which cost $15,000 to build, followed a few years later. It was heralded by a May 13, 1906, announcement in the pages of this newspaper. A detailed description of the proposed residence was accompanied by a rendering that looks just like the finished manse photographed for the Jan. 1, 1908, edition of The News and for this column.
Since 1957, the mansion has been a funeral home — McGowan Funeral Home, first, so named for its founder Alto McGowan and his wife, Georgia, who operated it until 1995. Eventually, the house was reincarnated as the Eternal Rest Funeral Home, whose name remains on the faded red awning stretching from the porch toward the sidewalk.
The house should be considered historic if only for its connection to the McGowans, who kept voluminous records that still give a glimpse into the city’s past. A group from the Dallas Genealogical Society spent 13 years cataloging and digitizing the couple’s documents, chronicling the histories of those who passed through its doors. Those men and women include a veteran of the Spanish-American War and four people born during slavery.
Pastor Simmons is a mensch. And what he’s doing here is a mitzvah.