Former hospital, apartment building stands through years of change in South Dallas

South Dallas - The cries of newborns faded away decades ago. Long gone are those babies and the mothers who gave them up for adoption. The last nurses left in 1945, the last tenants in 2006.

The building at 4526 Leland Ave. in South Dallas now stands mostly quiet and empty, with peeling white paint, sagging roof and other scars of time.

For Vanessa Baker it is home again, a nest where she can look back and look ahead, with pride and plans.

Six years ago she began digging into the property’s past as a hospital and an apartment building. “My mother had always told us the stories,” said Vanessa, the youngest of James and Bertha Baker’s five children.

She combed the library, explored newspaper archives, made connections. “I became obsessed,” she said. Local preservationists pitched in.

Now the building at the corner of Leland and Southland Street is a candidate for city landmark designation. A City Council vote is scheduled for Jan. 11.

The landmark application — drawn from interviews, photographs and newspaper accounts — tells of people, a place and years of change.

Unwed mothers

The building opened in 1920 as Good Samaritan Hospital, owned and operated by Martha Schultze, a German immigrant and registered nurse. She, other nurses and doctors served the neighborhood as needed but specialized in maternity care for unwed mothers, some of whom came from Europe, many of whom faced the stigma of immorality.

A 1932 story in The Dallas Morning News reported the hospital’s addition of 15 patient rooms and an operating room, and how “the institution takes a lot of charity patients.” A year later the newspaper told of Good Samaritan’s “completely equipped” laboratory, 35 beds in “well equipped” private rooms and a staff of three registered nurses, two student nurses and helpers. “Mrs. Schultze also provides care for aged and infirm persons,” the story concluded

Her granddaughter, Ernestine “Tina” Smith, romped and roamed through the hospital as a child. She recalls how the pregnant girls would help out in the kitchen and how her grandmother, who lived in the hospital, would deliver big baskets of fruit, ham and chicken to neighbors. She “wanted to give all the time,” Smith said. She was “what you would call a workaholic,” a “very German” manager “who wanted her way.”

Smith said her grandmother closed the hospital in 1945 because of a war-related shortage of nurses and converted it to apartments. (Schultze died in 1966. Her hospital site, not the building, has been designated a state landmark.)

In transition

By the late 1940s, South Dallas was in transition. Black residents were moving into established white neighborhoods, a change that didn’t sit well with some. And in 1951, bombings of black-owned homes in South Dallas gave newspapers plenty to write about.

After reading of the arrest and confession of clothes presser Claude Thomas Wright in connection with three bombings, James and Bertha Baker became curious. They drove from their black neighborhood north of downtown to Wright’s home on Leland Avenue. “We wanted to see what kind of property he had that he didn’t want blacks,” Bertha said.

What the Bakers saw next door was a “For Sale” sign in front of Martha Schultze’s apartment building.

Bertha Baker worked as a nurse’s aide at Parkland Hospital in 1941, built airplane parts during the war and returned to Parkland as a nurse. Hoping to help single mothers find work, she opened the city’s first licensed nursery for African-Americans at her home on Cochran Street.

But word was out that the property and others nearby would be needed for a new highway, what would become Woodall Rodgers Freeway. The Bakers wanted to follow the black migration to South Dallas. And they bought the Schultze place, later securing a city license to operate the Baker Residential Hotel, one of the city’s first apartment buildings for African-Americans.

Their neighbor, Claude Wright, and eight others were indicted in the bombings but never went to trial; one suspect was acquitted. Wright moved away a year or so after the Bakers moved in. But until then “he made the best neighbor,” said Bertha. “He would always ask us if we needed anything. He was precious.”

While working as a physical therapy assistant for the Dallas school district, she raised her children in the apartment house, using the rental income to help make ends meet and pay for their college. She later worked for the Dallas Easter Seal Society and managed the complex until 1977 before hiring others to run it. As the surrounding neighborhood declined, so did the apartments.

Her daughter Vanessa — a teacher, writer, student, former Southwest Airlines flight attendant and ex-Dallas Cowboys cheerleader — moved back home in 2006 and ended the rentals.

Years of changes

The building has undergone numerous additions, conversions and replacements through the years. Gone are the hospital signs, an outside stairway, shrubs that once lined the property and the pond and fountain out front.

“There were beautiful fish there, and the fountain would spew water,” said Bertha, as she walked slowly past what’s left of the pond.

Vanessa, 58, helped her along. Inside and out, they tried to recall what used to be. Bertha, 94, kept the record straight, while Vanessa talked about what could be.

“I love this. I can’t wait to bring it back,” she said. “It’s going to be so beautiful.”

And likely to be so costly, she knows. “It will be done in stages, but I’m going to do it.”

The two-story building is a standout in the neighborhood of modest wood-frame homes. Its condition has caught the attention of city code inspectors, who have given the Bakers a list of needed repairs.

A listing as a city landmark won’t protect the property from code complaints. But as with any such designation, it would be difficult to demolish. And it would require that external changes be historically appropriate and approved by the city.

Vanessa says she will comply with the city’s code concerns, and in time replace windows and restore the wooden siding in line with their original look.

Just as Martha Schultze helped others at 4526 Leland, Vanessa and Bertha want to return the building to community service, perhaps with spaces for meetings, tutoring, play rehearsals, a writing laboratory or a catering kitchen, in addition to Vanessa’s quarters.

“There’s such an opportunity to make this a beacon of hope for the neighborhood,” said Katherine Seale, executive director of Preservation Dallas, who helped with the city landmark application.

Daron Tapscott, chairman of the city’s landmark designation committee, assisted as well. He was struck by the building’s narrative.

“It represents the evolution of society in several ways. There’s the attitude toward unwed mothers, there’s integration,” he said. “It was there during the neighborhood’s heyday, during its decline and perhaps during its renaissance.”

Nonprofit status

To help obtain grants and other funding, Vanessa is seeking nonprofit status for the venture she calls the Good Samaritan at the Baker Estate. She also hopes to secure a full-time job after receiving her doctorate.

“If you’re going to dream, you might as well dream big,” she said.

If approved by the council, the Baker building would become the 140th city-designated landmark. For whatever reasons, the list includes relatively few properties from southern Dallas. Approved sites may receive city tax exemptions, but the nominating process can be time-consuming and costly.

“We just don’t have a lot of people coming forward in South Dallas” to nominate potential sites, Seale said.

“Landmark properties don’t have to be architecturally important,” she said. They can recall historically significant people, places or events.

“This is one of those ‘if those walls could talk’ stories,” she said.

“We’re not through with this story yet.”

Source: Dallas Morning News