Riverside Village
#1
Posted 28 December 2004 - 01:48 PM
Michael Whiteley
Erasing a neighborhood's blight and easing a tragic memory
In their days at Paschal High School in the 1970s, Michael Mallick and Robbie Baker didn't see Interstate 35 as the barrier of politics and race that walled off southeast Fort Worth from prosperity to the west.
The mental bridge for the Paschal students was Berry Street, which transcended race as it plowed east through a triumvirate of colors - white, brown and black - and encompassed a thriving Jewish business community that included Carshon's Delicatessen, the Baker family business.
Baker remembers the nights he gave kids who worked at the deli rides home into the Morningside neighborhood around Berry and Riverside Drive. It had flourished before a twisted Vietnam veteran and Baptist deacon took a knife to five members of the McClendon family in Riverside Village and stabbed the east Berry Street neighborhood in the heart.
It has never recovered.
After two years of negotiations and months of wrangling with local neighborhood groups, Fort Worth agreed Dec. 14 to provide $326,388 in fee waivers and another $2.8 million through an Enhanced Community Facilities Agreement to help Vertex Investments - Mallick and Baker's company - and their associates tear down the 1,014 vacant units in the three complexes known as Riverside Village and replace them with 232 single-family homes.
Players in the project - which City Councilman Ralph McCloud says may involve the largest dilapidated, vacant apartment complex in the nation - include History Maker Homes and American City Vista, the San Antonio-based homebuilder headed by Henry Cisneros, former secretary of the federal government's Department of Housing and Urban Development.
“This is the worst thing I've ever seen. I can't believe it's in Texas,” Mallick remembers Cisneros telling him during a tour.
“We liked it because it's a great location,” Mallick said. “We felt we could do well with it as a business project and do some good at the same time.”
Mallick, who heads the Mallick Group, and Baker, an area car dealer, are rolling the dice on slim margins they are betting will be offset by the redevelopment of a 60,000-square-foot shopping center owned by Southeast Fort Worth Inc. at the southeast corner of Berry and Riverside.
Vertex has a contract to buy the center and hopes to close in January.
The latest plan for the 42.45 acre $24 million project calls for Vertex to demolish the units, located in the southwest quadrant of Riverside and Glen Gardens Drive. Sierra Vista L.P., the Cisneros-History Marker joint venture, will then build and sell homes ranging between $80,000 and $120,000.
Vertex also is negotiating with other developers to buy and resurrect a Montgomery Ward shopping center across Riverside that fell victim to the rigor mortis that set in after the McClendon murders.
Mallick said he hopes to begin demolition in 60 days and see model homes by next September or October. He said the city's infusion of cash was the only way of making it work.
“Our margin for this is slim to none, because it's the catalyst,” Mallick said.
Busting barriers
For others, it's closure - courtesy of a wrecking crew.
McCloud and the Rev. Carl Pointer, who heads the Morningside Neighborhood Association and helped forge a coalition with the Glencrest Civic League and seven other groups, say the project shows city money can be pulled into southeast Fort Worth for economic development.
City tax breaks have gone to help RadioShack Corp. and Pier 1 Imports Inc. to build new campuses along the Trinity River. City dollars have gone to finance - and then rescue - the Mercado project on the north side.
But Pointer said area residents never believed would happen.
“It's like they'd accepted being second-class citizens,” said Pointer, who serves as an assistant pastor at St. Paul's Missionary Baptist Church in Stop Six. “The people I had ministered, the professionals and the truck drivers, said, 'We appreciate what you're doing. But they don't care about us.'”
Vertex negotiated for months to assemble parcels from a Houston trust and an Austin developer and closed the last of the transactions last February, on Friday the 13th.
But the original deal called for offsetting the cost of the homes by making one third of the project low-income apartments.
That drew swift opposition from the neighborhood groups and local developer Ed Briscoe, who's developing 150 single-family homes about a half-mile down Riverside Drive.
The political heat grew so intense that Vertex's initial multi-family partner, Southwestern Affordable Housing, pulled out of the project.
“Those apartments were just trouble from Jump Street,” said Pointer. “We had a public hearing and we let them know in no uncertain terms that we did not want low-income housing.
“I fought this on moral grounds,” he said. “It was not good for our community.”
With city staffers pledging $1 million to help with demolition, the neighborhood groups and Briscoe got 600 signatures on petitions opposing the rezoning.
The city tabled the project and Vertex came through with a new plan.
Pointer and his group say it now sends a loud signal that the area has the city's attention.
He remembers a tour Mallick gave him. Beyond the street-side row of apartments, rats ran rampant and packs of wild dogs patrolled the area.
Counterpoised against that he said, was rolling land, an Olympic-sized swimming pool and three clubhouses underscoring 1960s-era hope that Riverside Village would become home to the area's upwardly mobile.
McCloud, who's been fighting to raze the apartments and replace them for more than seven years, said his sister once lived there. She didn't stay, and she wasn't alone in leaving.
Overnight change
At age 2, Natasha McClendon was the youngest of Kenneth Granviel's known victims. She was stabbed nine times. The machinist later confessed to killing Natasha's mother, Martha McClendon, and three other family members, Linda, Laura and Steven McClendon.
Some of them were raped. It took four months for police to arrest their killer. Then it took two trials, seven stays of execution and 21 years to put Granviel to death.
Greg Pipes, the Tarrant County assistant district attorney who prosecuted Granviel the second time, remembers that the killer punctuated the Riverside Village murders a few hours before he surrendered.
He confessed to raping and stabbing his girlfriend, Vera Hill, and hitting her friend, Betty Williams, in the head with a hammer while Hill lay dead in the bedroom. Pipes said Granviel paused in the process of raping and murdering the unconscious seventh victim and returned a Herb Alpert album to a friend who knocked on the door.
A psychologist who interviewed Granviel as a juvenile predicted that, if released, he would kill multiple people with a knife, Pipes said. Then Granviel became a poster boy for reform in death-row appeals and inmates' ability to use the system to get them transported back to court for post-conviction hearings.
“He ended up giving the Legislature the impetus for habeas corpus reform,” said an appellate prosecutor on the case.
But Pipes and others say the decline of Riverside Village took far less time, as residents exited in droves and were replaced by tenants who'd been kicked out of other apartments.
“When you drove by shortly after the murders, you'd notice it,” Pipes said. “At first, there were segments of apartments closed. And, overnight, they looked like they were looted. It wasn't too long after the Riverside Village murders you could notice the apartments had changed. If anything, it was the beginning of the end.”
Montgomery Ward slid into steady decline, Pointer said, and an adjoining grocery store closed amid rumors that Riverside Village residents had pilfered it into ruin.
“It placed a dark shadow on the whole south side of Fort Worth. It had dried up everything around it,” Pointer said. “That part of Berry Street was vibrant and full of commercial activity and vitality.”
Resurrection
The unusual project is not without opposition and remaining obstacles. City Councilman Donovan Wheatfall cast the lone vote against city funding Dec. 14, saying he wanted a guarantee of 40-percent participation by minority and women contractors instead of the goal of 20 percent established by the city.
But the project is gaining some national attention and unusual support. City Councilman Chuck Silcox, who votes against most taxpayer subsidies for private developments, voted for this one.
“This is a chance for us to take this neighborhood 180 degrees from where it is,” Silcox said. “I don't like city giveaways. But this is needed.”
Mayor Mike Moncrief went for a 30-minute tour and stayed for more than two hours while a security officer recounted his days as a beat cop in the neighborhood.
Mallick said he's in extended talks with a documentary film crew and hopes to make a movie about the project. Demolition calls for extensive removal of asbestos. The removal will be easier than it usually is, Mallick said, because the units of Riverside Village are collapsing in on themselves, which allows a “wet” process that uses fire hoses to douse the buildings and keep the asbestos from contaminating the surrounding air while the debris is carted offsite.
The plan, the developers say, is to market the new homes to single mothers and moderate-income Hispanic families that Vertex hopes will move east from Berry and Seminary Drive. Mallick and Baker say that may help resurrect the psychic bridge over Berry.
But it won't bring closure for Pipes.
“It was just a location. I think Riverside Village was a rough neighborhood before this happened,” Pipes said. “I blame the individual.”
Contact Whiteley at mwhiteley@bizpress.net
#2
Posted 28 December 2004 - 01:52 PM
I lived in Riverside Village around this time as a young boy and I don't ever recall hearing this story.
#3
Posted 28 December 2004 - 04:17 PM
#4
Posted 30 December 2004 - 08:32 AM
#5
Posted 07 March 2023 - 01:12 PM
Vertex also is negotiating with other developers to buy and resurrect a Montgomery Ward shopping center across Riverside that fell victim to the rigor mortis that set in after the McClendon murders.
Mallick said he hopes to begin demolition in 60 days and see model homes by next September or October. He said the city's infusion of cash was the only way of making it work.
“Our margin for this is slim to none, because it's the catalyst,” Mallick said.
#7
Posted 27 March 2023 - 04:44 PM
This is actually a really cool project. Here's some renderings on Bennet Partner's website: https://bennett.part...sforming-lives/
- Dylan likes this
#9
Posted 29 March 2023 - 12:05 PM
Looks to be a pretty cool project. Looking back at maps it appears this was at one time a pretty substantial shopping center that all was demo'd except for the main square building. Would love to see what it looked like back in the day
Courtesy of Hometown by Handlebar: https://hometownbyha...rd-plaza-59.jpg
(Full article: https://hometownbyha...r.com/?p=10966)
#10
Posted 23 June 2023 - 02:55 PM
PROJECT
Project Name: Center for Transforming Lives Riverside Campus
Project Number: TABS2023022109
Facility Name: Center for Transforming Lives Riverside Campus
Location Address: 3001 S Riverside Drive
Fort Worth, TX 76119
Location County: Tarrant
Start Date: 8/24/2023
Completion Date: 6/28/2024
Estimated Cost: $27,000,000
Type of Work: Renovation/Alteration
Type of Funds: This project involves public funds, public land, or is a Federally funded roadway project.
Scope of Work: Adaptive re-use of the 1950s era former Montgomery Ward building for a new headquarters for Center for Transforming Lives - local non-profit provides a range of wrap-around services for at-risk women and children.
Square Footage: 112,097 ft 2
Are the private funds provided by the tenant? No
OWNER
Owner Name: Center for Transforming Lives
Owner Address: 512 W 4th Street
Fort Worth, Texas
- Austin55 likes this
#13
Posted 29 December 2023 - 02:02 PM
It's hard to believe that building is 112K SQFT but it appears to go back more than meets the eye.
1 user(s) are reading this topic
0 members, 1 guests, 0 anonymous users