Dallas’ obsession with Oswald homes
Gentrification surrounds 2 places JFK assassin stayed
DALLAS — Patricia Puckett Hall sits alone in her home at 1026 N. Beckley Ave., pondering the future while immersing herself in the past.
Hall is the third generation of women from the same family to have kept her Oak Cliff residence open as a rooming house. Her grandmother and mother are gone, but long after Hall is gone, no one will forget who lived in the house on Nov. 22, 1963, the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.
He was a tenant, a sullen, quiet man, whose name was Lee Harvey Oswald.
Fifty-five years after Oswald was taken into custody on suspicion of killing Kennedy and Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit — who was gunned down less than a mile from the rooming house — curiosity and questions remain.
People still want to know where Oswald lived, so busloads of visitors still flock to Hall’s house, where she leads them on a $40-per-person guided tour. She has restored Oswald’s eerie closet-like bedroom, which contains his same narrow bed and an upright armoire that housed his clothing and his handgun. The house as a whole has a Miss Havisham feel to it, as though it’s frozen in 11/22/63.
But will it always be that way? A while back, Hall tried to sell — for $500,000. No one matched the offer. But her home and a nearby duplex, at 214 W. Neely St., where Oswald and his wife, Marina, lived in the months before the assassination, pose a daunting challenge to the city of Dallas:
What if these houses are sold? Will the buyer be as rigorous in maintaining history as Hall has tried to be?
Nicola Longford, chief executive of the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, says the museum has not been approached in recent years about any “potential collaborative tour concept” shared with owners of the houses where Oswald once lived. Even so, she says, museum officials “help guide any interested guests to visit other historical sites.” And she did not rule out possible partnerships in the future that would explore the “overlapping” relationships between Dealey Plaza and houses linked to Oswald.
Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings also weighed in, saying: “I’m a huge advocate for historic preservation and we’d be happy to talk to any property owner about ways we can further that critical cause anywhere in Dallas. That said, we have not heard from the owners and I’m not aware of any taxpayer funds allocated for programming or preservation related to those properties.”
Part of what puts the Oswald houses at risk is the nature of Oak Cliff itself.
In recent years, developers have invaded Oak Cliff like a gentrification army. They are busily constructing, block after cluttered block, hipster apartment buildings, gourmet coffee shops, chichi shops and restaurants where even gourmands like to eat. The presence of not one but two Oswald houses is, at this point, strangely anachronistic.
David Spence, whose company Good Space has spearheaded much of the redevelopment and preservation in North Oak Cliff, says the house at 214 W. Neely St. can’t be divided into anything more than its existing two units. It is a duplex. It could become a single-family residence but not a triplex, for instance. Zoning restrictions keep its use limited to what it is, and it can’t be commercial.
Hall’s house on North Beckley, however, could be expanded or converted into something else entirely. “That one,” Spence says, “is a candidate for the kind of dense commercial and multifamily development we’re seeing in North Oak Cliff.”
That’s shorthand for saying that Hall’s home, once lived in by Oswald, could easily become a high-rise apartment building, or yes, even a latte-selling Starbucks. Hall prides herself on having striven for years to preserve her chapter of Dallas history, but at 66, she admits she can’t do it forever. At some point, she will have to sell, she says, or her two sons will own the home, and they will most likely sell, even to a developer who has different ideas of what to do with the property than keeping intact where Lee Harvey Oswald once slept.
The owner of the house at 214 W. Neely is listed in Dallas County property records as 1122 Holdings LLC. Officials for 1122 Holdings declined to be interviewed but did permit photographs on the property.
Speaking of, one that was taken in the backyard of 214 W. Neely is forever chiseled into infamy: It is a chilling black and white image of a smirking Oswald, holding his rifle, his handgun strapped to his side, taken by Marina in the spring before Kennedy died. It is one of history’s darkest examples of a grim foreshadowing.
All of this adds up to a delicate issue of historical preservation, but the city of Irving gets kudos for figuring out how to do it and do it tastefully.
In 2009, Irving acquired the former residence of Ruth Paine at 2515 W. Fifth St. The house opened as a museum in 2013, near the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s death. The house is now on the National Register of Historic Places. Visitors have included history buff and talkshow host Conan O’Brien.