APPEAL TO HISTORY HALTS TUG OF WAR
City scraps plan to build center near old Sunnyside landfill
Tears welled in Omowale Luthuli-Allen’s eyes as he gazed over the vacant lot overgrown with trees and shrubs near Sunnyside Park.
Now 70, he recalled standing there more than 50 years ago with hundreds of Sunnyside residents as they fought to close a landfill, home to the city of Houston’s largest incinerator and the site where an 11-yearold boy died in 1967.
“I’m thankful that history chose us to be a part of a change that needed to happen,” he said.
Five decades later, however, a contentious tug of war resurfaced between the city and the community over plans to build a new community center next door to the old dump site, where garbage and 3.5 million tires remain buried, in a larger effort to entice development to the area.
Angry residents accused the city of forgetting the south Houston community’s deep-rooted history in fighting for environmental justice — a fight they thought was over. Community leaders and activists worried the city would again expose vulnerable residents to the toxic substances that haunted the community decades earlier.
“It’s infuriating,” said John Henneberger, co-director of Texas Low Income Houston Information Ser-
“It’s nice to come back out here after 50 years to know that we were on the right side of history. It’s sad to think that no one will remember what happened here.” Omowale Luthuli-Allen, Sunnyside resident
vices, or TLIHIS, which has worked to expose discriminatory practices. “The Sunnyside residents deserved to have a voice, and the city needs to do more than listen.”
This year, however, it didn’t take protests, sit-ins, arrests or community upheaval to stop the construction.
On Friday, city officials confirmed they are abandoning plans to build the new Sunnyside Multi-Service Center at the property near the landfill and are working to negotiate terms for a new site that would also be accessible to neighboring underserved communities.
Councilman Dwight Boykins, whose district includes Sunnyside, said the city got a better deal on a nearby property.
“There are always going to be people making noise,” he said, “but as a council member, I have to do what’s best for my district.”
The incinerator has been closed since 1974, when a groundbreaking report from the Environmental Protection Agency warned the plant was sending deadly levels of lead into the air. It was the first environmental report of its kind, then-Mayor Fred Hofheinz said recently.
Today, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, which monitors all decommissioned landfills, said the site is still contaminated with metals, pesticides, solvents and potentially toxic volatile organic compounds.
And though the community center apparently will not be built next to the site, the property still sits amid a community that has struggled for decades to regain the vibrancy it once enjoyed.
Community rises up
The afternoon of May 8, 1967, was hot and muggy.
Eleven-year-old Victor Roy George joined his older brother and two friends on their bicycles after his fifth-grade classes ended that day, riding to a nearby park near the city landfill known as Dump Row to watch a baseball game.
As the mercury topped 94 degrees, they decided to go swimming. Victor’s brother stayed behind, but the rest pedaled off to a ditch on the fenceless dump grounds, a secret swimming spot in the 1960s for Sunnyside children of color.
Victor liked to float on a piece of plastic foam in the murky brown water. He spotted the foam in the water that day and reached for it. The bank crumbled, tossing him into the 15-footdeep water. Unable to swim, he struggled to keep his head above water as he tried to get his footing on the slippery banks.
A friend jumped into the water to save him, and Victor grabbed his leg. But he eventually lost his grip and slipped under the water.
Victor’s death gave community members the jolt they needed to rise up against the landfill and the incinerator that had opened that year, one of four the city had placed in black and Hispanic neighborhoods. The Holmes Road Incinerator was viewed by Sunnyside residents as a dangerous health hazard that spewed ash from its twin smokestacks as it burned old car batteries and plastics across from Sunnyside Elementary School.
“We read in the paper and heard on the radio that the kid had died,” Luthuli-Allen said. “That’s when we knew we had to mobilize.”
Days later, protesters took to the streets, shouting amid the screeching noise of the incinerator. Ash fell on the demonstrators as they rallied with picket signs.
“Dump Row — Hell, no!” they chanted.
Students from Texas Southern University and the University of Houston joined residents for sitins, demanding that the city close the dump. They blocked dump trucks. They chanted. Some were arrested.
“A consciousness began to grow, and we knew things could no longer go as they had been,” Luthuli-Allen said. “Sunnyside had some vibrancy, and it was a resilient community. The dump was a real a blow to the community and an indictment on the city planners for putting a dump next to a community like Sunnyside.”
“Sunnyside had some vibrancy and it was a resilient community. The dump was a real a blow to the community and an indictment on the city planners for putting a dump next to a community like Sunnyside.” Omowale Luthuli-Allen, Sunnyside resident
Rising tensions
Amid rising racial tensions nationally, the demonstrations led to a confrontation between protesters and police a week after Victor’s death. Police broke up the demonstrations as students threw rocks and bottles and set garbage cans on fire before retreating to their dorms. News accounts reported police fired thousands of bullets, and one officer was killed. Five students were charged in the death, but the accusations later were dropped because of insufficient evidence.
Hofheinz remembers the tensions well. He also remembers standing in downtown Houston seeing thick smoke emanating from the Sunnyside incinerator. “It was hard to miss,” he said. Victor’s family filed a lawsuit, claiming the city was at fault for not fencing the landfill. But the Texas Supreme Court ruled in 1972 that the city was not liable for Victor’s death.
By then, protests had drawn the attention of the EPA, which issued a scathing 1974 report concluding the incinerator sent unsafe, deadly lead levels into the air and had left the soil contaminated with lead, cadmium and arsenic.
Hofheinz, who took office as mayor in 1974, closed the $6 million incinerator with his first executive order. The city then began slowly buying parcels of the landfill for its eventual closure. The city still owns the property.
Hofheinz thought the dump’s closure boosted the city’s relations with Sunnyside and restored the community’s pride. It was short-lived, however. In the 1960s, Sunnyside was a self-contained community where unemployment was low and many black residents owned their own homes and businesses. Many went on to college.
Dump Row embodied the city’s rejection of Sunnyside as a vital piece of Houston’s economy and growth, according to Robert Bullard, an urban planning and environmental policy professor at Texas Southern University.
Sunnyside, now a community of about 20,000 residents, remains one of Houston’s most underserved and impoverished areas.
A Houston Chronicle analysis last year found that Sunnyside lost at least 200 businesses between 2008 and 2017. At the same time, the number of economically disadvantaged students at the community’s only high school surged from 65 percent to 95 percent. It still has one of the highest unemployment rates in Houston.
Redevelopment plans
Today, the entrance to the old incinerator site is blocked and gated with barbed wire.
“NO TRESPASSING,” a sign says in bold, red type.
Over the years, the city had planned to develop the property. A municipal golf course. A jogging trail. A solar farm.
But like most projects slated for the area, they never came to fruition.
In 2016, the city established a Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone, known as a TIRZ, to help rebuild the area with public infrastructure in hopes of driving private investment. The planned $25-million Sunnyside MultiService Center center is part of that plan.
City officials insist the proposed site near the ex-landfill is safe, though state environmental officials have required the city to clean up the property before any new construction.
Sunnyside residents, however, have pushed for the city instead to renovate the existing Sunnyside Multi-Service Center on Cullen Boulevard. It was the city’s first community center established under Hofheinz, and residents like the easy accessibility.
City plans call for combining the existing Sunnyside MultiService Center and the existing Sunnyside Health Center into a single 60,000-square-foot facility.
The latest controversy, however, has reopened wounds that went back decades for many Sunnyside families.
Landfill gas probes installed in 2006 found the land was still generating methane gas, which in some areas exceeded the “lower explosive limit,” according to Terracon, a Houston-based environmental consulting service that did testing for the city.
Travis McGee, a community activist, said he would like the city to clean up the area as part of a beautification effort.
“For decades, they have taken from the community and put little back into it,” McGee said. “They have the money to make Sunnyside a better place.”
Alan Bernstein, Mayor Sylvester Turner’s communications director, said that renovating the existing facility would disrupt essential services for years and cost more than building a new one.
‘Right side of history’
Resting on a bench recently at Sunnyside Park, Luthuli-Allen still remembers the events that threw him into the fight so long ago.
“Brother, let me tell you — time goes by in a flash,” he said.
He still retains the lean frame he had at 18, but his hair is sprinkled with gray. His eyesight has faded. He drags his feet a bit, but his mind remains sharp. Many of those he marched with back then are now dead.
“I would hate to look at an old photo,” he said. “It would feel like the Rapture, looking at everyone that’s gone and the few of us still here.”
For Luthuli-Allen and his friends, the battle over Dump Row was about fighting for what they knew was right, no matter the costs.
“We weren’t meant to fight the fight of the generation before us,” he said. “We were supposed to be leaders of business and innovation, but we knew there was a great injustice being done.”
As a city employee, he declined to state his position on where the center should be moved, but said the city should pay attention to its history.
He still laments the local heroes the community seems to have forgotten.
“It’s nice to come back out here after 50 years to know that we were on the right side of history,” he said. “It’s sad to think that no one will remember what happened here.”