In the East End, the past and future collide
Change crept across North Saint Charles Street like a slow tide, rolling inexorably toward Petra Guillen’s shotgun-style home. Longtime neighbors moved away. Houses began to sag in disrepair or fall to a bulldozer’s blade. Weed-choked lots spread over the landscape like a shroud. Guillen remained steadfast. This was her street, her neighborhood, her own small corner of the world. And she had long vowed never to leave.
Nearly all of her 95 years had been spent on the block tucked between Canal and Commerce, in the heart of Second Ward. Guillen moved there as a toddler, settled into No. 31 as a newlywed, and stayed on as the matriarch of an ever-expanding clan.
In the 1,200-square-foot white home, she had raised 13 children, celebrated weddings and baptisms and birthdays, mourned the passing of a mother, a husband, a son and a daughter.
Then, early last January, Guillen heard from Perry Homes.
The developer, one of many steadily buying up space in the East End, had purchased the empty tracts adjacent to her property. Now, the home builder wanted to know if Guillen might be interested in selling.
She considered the tug of countless memories: the rooms crammed with beds in every nook and niche, the wedding photo hanging for decades on the living room wall, the statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe nestled among the rose bushes in her front garden.
›› Get to know the rapidly changing neighborhood even better with more photos, a video and an interactive map at HoustonChronicle. com/EastEnd
Then she remembered how lonely and strange her onceintimate street often felt these days, how clusters of rectangular townhomes, with iron gates and unfamiliar people, crowded closer and closer. Perhaps it was time to let go. Yet, her heart and soul were planted here, in the bedrock of Houston’s earliest Mexican community.
As she wrestled with the decision, Guillen, a devout Catholic and faithful parishioner of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, did what she has always done. She looked to heaven for guidance.
Please, she prayed, what should I do? In a season of flux
Across the breadth of 16 square miles, from the fringes of downtown to the Ship Channel, from Eastwood to Magnolia Park, the East End is in a season of flux.
For decades, this was a hardscrabble enclave where generations of Mexican-Americans put down roots and raised families. Today, it is fast becoming one of Houston’s real estate hot spots — with property coveted by developers and investors, and houses snapped up by affluent young buyers.
Drawn by the area’s proximity to downtown, the convenience of a light rail line running down Harrisburg Boulevard, and the wide swaths of vacant industrial land, the newcomers are eager to remake the East End into a hip, walkable neighborhood. One developer wants to call it the Bayou District.
But, longtime residents worry, at what cost?
Will new development chase them away and erase the East End’s rich Hispanic culture and spirit? Will their community end up like Midtown, formerly known as Fourth Ward, where nearly all vestiges of the historic Freedmen’s Town have been scrubbed away?
The upheaval has already started. Nowhere more pronounced than in Second Ward, the slice of the East End closest to downtown.
Up and down Nagle and Palmer streets, just-built houses with sharp edges and gleaming windows sit next to rundown cottages with peeling paint and bowed porches. Around Settegast Park and along Commerce Street, a phalanx of modern townhomes, sealed off by metal walls and painted in stark shades of blue, gray and green, dwarf well-kept single-family homes.
On block after block, scaffolding rises on land where squat bungalows once stood. Signs boast of an imminent transformation: “New construction coming soon.” “Rooftop terrace.” “For sale: Loft.”
And, just around the corner from Petra Guillen’s house on North Saint Charles, a stretch of shuttered warehouses has been converted into art studios and gallery space. Looking south from her front porch, rows of $400,000 stucco townhouses loom on the horizon.
“How much will they chip away to create a different East End, or whatever they want to call it?” asked Linda Duron, the sixth of Guillen’s children. “Once this dies, we die with it.” Once newcomers themselves
Petra Guillen, a lavender throw framing her tufts of silver hair, rocks in her recliner and reminisces about her life on North Saint Charles.
The stories shimmer and shift like gemstones in a kaleidoscope. Moments and memories tumble through time. Big and small. Joyful and sorrowful. Shared and solitary.
She flashes back to 1920. She is 2 years old, with hair as dark as coal and solemn eyes to match. Her family has been driven from their small village of Matehuela by the Mexican Revolution and lured northward by the promise of jobs. They will become part of the first wave of Mexicans to settle in Houston.
Petra, her grandmother, mother and sister join her uncle in Baytown, where Mexican laborers are clearing land for booming oil refineries. Every Sunday, they board the San Jacinto ferry to attend Mass at Our Lady of Guadalupe, a Second Ward church built to serve the new arrivals.
One day, her grandmother refuses to go back to Baytown. Their church is here, so the family will stay here, she says. And so they do.
They are the newcomers in a working-class district filled with Germans, Irish, Italians and Jews. At first, neighbors rankle at the sight of a banner celebrating Mexico’s history. But then, slowly, unceremoniously, almost organically, Second Ward starts to change.
Older residents disperse. Mexican immigrants filter in. The rhythms and rituals of pueblo life take hold.
Petra plays jacks with her friends, prays the rosary at the homes of the sick and the dying, tends to her grandmother while her mother works at a burlap bag factory. For fun, she and her uncle “walk slowly” to St. Joseph Hospital or the downtown Azteca Theater, munching on taquitos as they dawdle home.
On a June day in 1936, Petra hurries outside Guadalupe Church, craning her neck for a glimpse of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as his motorcade passes down Navigation Boulevard. By then, she has graduated from the school just two blocks from her house on North Saint Charles. Now, she serves as a catechist, traveling across Houston to teach religion to schoolchildren. The catechists dress as novice nuns, so they can ride the streetcar for free.
Our Lady of Guadalupe is at the center of her world. This is where she learns English, chastised by the Catholic school nuns whenever she lapses into Spanish. It is where she plays the organ on Sundays. It is where she meets William Guillen, a “stout” fellow with long arms and the nickname “King Kong.”
The two schoolmates banter and bicker. The handsome lad trails after the raven-haired girl, popping up like a self-appointed bodyguard whenever she talks to another boy. When Petra is 18, William asks her to go steady.
Two months later, he gives her an engagement ring. She accepts, but pins the ring beneath her blouse, hiding it from her mother. Then she makes William promise that he will never take her away from her Guadalupe parish.
Petra walks down the aisle two years later, her face framed by white lace, a bouquet of lilies nestled in her hands. By 1947, they have four children and are buying their first home.
31 North Saint Charles. Just two doors down from her mother’s.
The only house they will ever own. Matrimony and mourning
By 1962, the Guillen brood has grown to 13. “Like Abraham,” Petra says, “we multiplied.”
Beds are wedged into every corner. In the living room. In the dining room. In the hallway. In the two bedrooms.
There isn’t much money, but the kids never know it.
William Guillen, a World War II Air Force veteran who works at a produce warehouse, carts home boxes of fruits and vegetables. The family sits in the shade behind the house and feasts on watermelon and homegrown corn. Petra fries up breaded cauliflower and tells her children it is chicken.
The 10 girls and three boys, each known by the number of their birth order, scamper and squabble and sprint through the cramped house. On warm days, they splash outside in a plastic tub or see-saw on a playground set in the backyard. They play hopscotch and sit on the porch watching the cars go by. They run to the corner grocery for milk and sip drinks at the soda fountain in the Vasquez drugstore across the street.
They know everyone in the neighborhood, and everyone knows them.
For Thanksgiving, Petra pulls out her best china, silver and crystal and sets the dining room table for 15. At Christmas, the girls squeeze into the kitchen to make tamales.
And, on Dec. 12, the feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the traditional Mexican dancers known as matachines stop in front of her garden on their way to church. They bow before her Guadalupe statue, which Petra has adorned with U.S. and Mexican flags.
The night before her wedding in 1963, Diane Garay, the fourth of the Guillen siblings, cooks at her childhood home, preparing mole for her reception. The next day, that is where she dresses for her wedding. As do several of her sisters.
When the girls become mothers, they bring their newborns for Petra’s blessing.
There are birthday parties and anniversaries and holiday gatherings. Children and grandchildren pose for photos on the brick steps by the front door, by the yellow curtains in the living room, on the swing set in the backyard. And there is mourning. On the last day of 2001, a week before his 62nd wedding anniversary, William Guillen passes away with his family at his bedside, softly singing hymns and reciting the rosary. Ailing in the hospital for several months, he had asked to be taken home, to 31 North Saint Charles.
It is not the only time death visits the Guillen house.
In 1969, Patsy, the Guillens’ 11th child, dies of a burst appendix. Just 13, Petra’s “little girl” is buried in her sister Diane’s wedding dress. In 1981, 30-year-old Robert, a Marine veteran, dies
in the living room of a selfinflicted bullet wound.
Petra weathers each loss with faith and stoicism as her mother taught her. Just as she teaches her children.
“One day we are here,” she says. “The next we are gone.”
After her husband’s death, one room in the house was turned into a prayer room, another into sewing space. The paneling William Guillen installed in the dining room remains.
As the memories wash over Petra Guillen, she pauses her reverie to wonder: What does her little house mean to her?
It is, she says, “kind of special.” Where did she belong?
No sign came from heaven. No divine answer to Petra Guillen’s prayer.
But for her, the timing alone was portent enough. It was Jan. 7 — 74 years to the day since she and William had married, a week after the 12th anniversary of his death.
In her heart, she had already known what she would do.
It had been a long time since her street bustled with businesses and echoed with the sound of children’s laughter. It had been a long time since her mother’s house stood a few yards from her front door. Now, just a patch of wild grass grows in its place.
The quiet block, like so many others in Second Ward, was not what it once had been — and Guillen was not sure she belonged anymore.
“After so many years,” Guillen says, “it was time for a move.”
She sold her house, where she had lived for almost 67 years, for $100,000. Her children were stunned and saddened.
It was as if the end of the world was coming in little pieces, said Linda Duron. “For a long time, I cried. That house is the essence of who I am. It’s my grandmother, my aunts from Mexico. It made me who I am.”
Yet, they did what they had been raised to do. They obeyed their mother’s wishes.
By February, Guillen was ensconced in a cozy cottage behind the house owned by her oldest child, Lucy. Diane and Linda live around the corner. So do two grandsons.
The new address is still in Second Ward, but 15 blocks from Our Lady of Guadalupe Church — the farthest from it that Guillen has lived in 93 years.
Her children, left to sort through the artifacts of a lifetime, rescued tokens. Glass doorknobs. A floorboard from one of the rooms. Rose bushes from the front yard. A panel of wood marking the growth of grandchildren.
The Virgin of Guadalupe statue, once the centerpiece of Guillen’s garden, now holds court behind La Familia Meat Market at the corner of North Saint Charles and Canal streets. She belongs in the neighborhood, the family says.
But, they wonder, for how long? More change, every day
Every day, the Guillen children, like other Second Ward homeowners, field calls from investors scouting for property. Every day, old homes are torn down and new construction appears. Every day, the neighborhood loses a little more of its Mexican flavor.
Some residents welcome the changes, pointing to sidewalk improvements, new hike and bike trails and the refurbished esplanade on Navigation Boulevard. Others are circulating petitions and forming committees to stop additional townhome development.
“One day, we will not recognize this area,” predicts Lydia Lopez, the fifth Guillen sibling. “It will be bittersweet, but at least we will have our stories.”
The house, unoccupied since March, has already started to decay.
The wood trim shows signs of rot. Weeds have conquered the garden. Coils of concertina wire top the locked chain-link fence.
But, in front of No. 31, the letter “G” is stamped in the concrete curb. It stands for Guillen. monica.rhor@chron.com twitter.com/monicarhor