Mari S. Krueger wrote this article on the various attempts to revive the Brownsville area of Escambia County. It came on the heels of Sheriff Ron McNesby’s highly publicized, month-long sweep of the area – “Operation Brownsville.”
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REVIVING BROWNSVILLE
An article about Brownville’s latest and greatest revitalization efforts comes out every few years. But the place is still kind of a dump.
Randy Youngstroum remembers playing baseball and marbles on the dirt roads and lying in the grass watching the stars as a youth growing up in Brownsville in the 1940s.
Lying in the grass in Brownsville today is more likely to be wasted drug addicts after one too many injections, watching their futures burn out rather than the sparkling heavens.
The area declined as businesses moved out to blossoming neighborhoods and malls in other parts of Pensacola. But Brownsville really nose-dived after 1978, when Interstate 10 replaced Mobile Highway as the thoroughfare to the West.
“Welcome to Brownsville.” The cheery, smart sign is incongruous with the surrounding area.
Today, you’ll find flowering bushes in vivid pinks and purples contrast dramatically with the rot and the decay of seemingly abandoned houses south of Cervantes Street. Piles of broken chairs, mattresses and soggy carpet are scattered alongside the road. The few well-maintained homes that dot the area guard themselves with “No Trespassing” and “Beware of Dog” signs.
There is a road that dead ends at a rundown house. Its yard is sprinkled with debris, a school bus and a dozen cars park at the edge of the yard, yet the house is silent. A dog licks rainwater out of a planter a few blocks away on Shoemaker Street. A broken boat filled with trash like a garbage can parks on the side of the road like a car. At 10:30 a.m. on a recent weekday, one long-haired, middle-aged man, case of beer in hand, saunters down a street in the neighborhood.
The desolate streets include one house wrapped in red “Danger” tape like a beribboned birthday gift. It serves as a reminder that, in the last three decades, an influx of crime ruled out the area as a nice place to raise a family.
The 72-year-old Youngstroum, who now lives in another Pensacola neighborhood, doubts Brownsville will ever be like it was when people felt completely safe with their neighbors and left their homes unlocked. Still, he says, it doesn’t have to be this bad.
For David Thomas, a trip outside his front door is all it takes to remind him of the drug dealer who turned his family-friendly, barbecue-minded block into a street lined with fire-scorched homes and cowering, intimidated neighbors.
Thomas has called Brownsville, which is just a few miles northwest of downtown, his home for the past 15 years.
He remembers the difference and the fear sparked by just one bad, bad neighbor. A dozen cars at a time lined V Street, while people drove through like they were going to McDonald’s, only for drugs, instead of Happy Meals. Fed up, some people living on the block would tell the bad apple to move the cars, then call the police. But the drug dealer got away every time.
The criminal, who lived across the street from Thomas, sent the block a message. Thomas alleges he burnt the home on the corner to the ground and destroyed Thomas’s next door neighbor’s home, too.
“Some people were scared to let their kids play in the yard,” says Thomas, who refuses to have his picture taken by an Independent News photographer because he still fears retribution. “Everyone actually lived in fear of him because he torched these houses.”
Thomas was ready to move two years ago, but one of his neighbors encouraged him to stay. She wanted the area to get better, and she didn’t want the bad guys to force the remaining good families to leave.
The drug dealer was arrested a year ago, and the area has improved, Thomas says.
It has improved even more since Operation Brownsville started a 30-day push by the Escambia County Sheriff’s Office to clean up yards, to lock up drug dealers and prostitutes and to push homeless people to other parts of town.
On the heels of that momentum, Thomas says he and his neighbors are going to start a Neighborhood Watch program. They already watch out for the children on the block, and they’ll start banding together to report illegal activity to the police.
“There was a family atmosphere here,” Thomas recalls. “There was. I gotta feeling it’ll be like that again. If we could just clean it up, we could be OK.”
Youngstroum, who has been a member of the Brownsville Assembly of God since he was a 6-year-old, clearly remembers the church’s revival in the late 1990s. That’s when church services attracted millions and garnered visitors from around the country and the globe.
The old timer says the whole atmosphere around the church changed Brownsville from a bleak place to a thriving area for a few years. Property values went up and houses in the surrounding blocks received facelifts.
Youngstroum says that even his son-in-law, a police officer who he describes as not a church-going man, commented to him about feeling something spiritual when he patrolled the area during the religious revival.
Public officials and the media proclaimed the church would revive the whole Brownsville community, and the area did get better, but only during the revival services, Youngstroum says.
When the Brownsville church’s crowds waned between 1999 and 2000, the neighborhood slipped back to the way it was within a year or two.
“I know it helped,” Youngstroum says. “It had to help. But as far as the degree of it and the lasting of it, I’m not so sure.”
Jonnie Coffee has lived in Brownsville for 55 yearsâ€â€since W Street, now a busy, main thoroughfare, was a dirt roadâ€â€and owns Circle Donuts on Mobile Highway. She’s raised seven children, watched as shops around her went out of business and chased off homeless people pestering and throwing food at her customers.
Brownsville’s downtrodden situation remained tolerable until Hurricane Ivan ripped through, knocking down homes and leaving vacancies for prostitutes and the homeless to live in, she says. Insurance money didn’t provide some people enough to rebuild, so they moved out of the sagging, rotting homes forever. Junkies and dealers just took over, she says.
Last month, someone kicked in her office door and stole $3,000. That, to her, is finally proof that times have changed.
“Used to be you could trust,” says the petite, white haired woman, but now, “the streets are crawling with people you can’t trust.”
Coffee says she used to take a platter of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and a big pitcher of Kool-Aid out to the picnic table in her backyard. She’d play with her kids all afternoon, climbing trees, getting up on the roof and playing games.
“Mrs. Coffee! Come to the fence for some pie!” a neighbor would holler. She’d bring coffee, the neighbor would bring pie, and they’d stand at the fence and talk about their families.
Now, her kids are all grown up and her neighbors have all died or moved away. The three-bedroom, one-bathroom house across the street from her is now empty. Just a few days agoâ€â€for the third time since the elderly couple that lived there moved outâ€â€the realty business that rents it out had to replace the entire interior of the home–carpets, cabinets, even dry wall, Coffee reports.
The deteriorating house’s most recent tenants included four cats, four dogs, two families, two teenage boys and one of the teenager’s mothers. The boys would wake Coffee up sometimes with their fighting, hollering and cursing at each other in the yard in the middle of the night. She’s not surprised the house needed renovating.
Coffee used to make her kids come in around nightfall, but she now sees 10- and 12-year-old children running up and down the street at 3 or 4 a.m. And none of the homes around her, homes that used to be full of families that knew each other, house children anymore, she says.
Sheriff Ron McNesby’s month-long Operation Brownsville has definitely made a difference, she says, but she and her neighbors are asking the hard question others seem afraid to confront: “What’s going to happen when the 30 days are up?”
Brownsville residents are waiting to see if the increased patrols and cleanup started by the operation will make changes that stick. If the neighbors band together, keep their yards clean and stop throwing junk on the side of the road, the area could be nice again, Coffee says. But she recognizes that renters and homeless people don’t have the same deep interest in making Brownsville a nice place to live as homeowners with families do.
Escambia County Sheriff’s Office Sgt. Mike Ward, a spokesman, doesn’t have a solid answer on how frequent Brownsville patrols will be when the operation finishes, but he says the hope is that the community will take a more active role in keeping out crime.
“The good people in Brownsville were intimidated by the criminals,” he says. “They were intimidated and they were scared. They’ll step forward and take a more active role.”
Ward predicts Brownsville residents will maintain the improvements and start crime watch programs, like Thomas described. Now that county deputies have made their presence known again, Ward says he hopes the department has earned homeowners’ trust so they can work together to keep drug dealers and prostitutes away.
Coffee guesses the drifters who beg around her store will probably return, but that won’t keep her from doing what she loves. She knows most of her customers by name and considers them friends, asking one man about his health and chatting with others about what’s going on one recent afternoon.
“I still love it around here,” she says. “It’s my home. You still see good people, but there are so many out there who are just in it for what they can get.”
Celebrating The History of Brownsville?
“Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, 99 bottles of beer! Take one down, pass it around.”
Judging by the looks of its streets, that’s how Brownsville residents have celebrated each year of the community’s existence to date.
Yes, 99 years ago marked the dawn of Brownsville, a glorious light that rose to Pensacola’s west and continues a faint glimmer, thanks to various revitalization efforts throughout its near century of existence.
Brownsville is named after Lucius Screven Brown, who moved to Pensacola in 1906 at the age of 31 from Georgia, where he worked as a bookkeeper for $50 a month. Brown began building wood-frame, shotgun-style homes west of downtown Pensacola in 1908. His Norwegian business accomplice, Haakon Paulsen Sr., called the neighborhood “Brownsville” until the name stuck.
Brown lost lots of money on Brownsville and tried his hand at several other business ventures, starting Fisher-Brown Inc., a local insurance company which he sold after his divorce.
Brown moved around quite a bit, eventually settling in Chicago as a landlord, but lost his two apartment buildings to rent controls during World War II. He moved back to Pensacola in 1940, served on the city council and was an assistant postmaster.
By that time, Brownsville Elementary School had opened (1938).
It’s reported that Brown died poor and happy in 1963.
Early newspaper references to Brownsville include a clip from 1911 regarding Brownsville soldiers being allowed to re-enlist in the 25th infantry after being discharged by the president for alleged participation in shooting up another Brownsvilleâ€â€Brownsville, Texas.
February 1955 brought a resounding defeat of attempts to annex Brownsville into the city of Pensacola (Sound familiar?).
The 1950s saw Brownsville reach its heyday, with businesses thriving on the traffic routed through Pensacola on the only local road to Mobile. Families filled the neighborhoods and shopped in the Laundromats, corner stores and specialty shops. It was the place everyone around Pensacola came to shop for shoes, purses and entertainment.
But in 1956, business owners began being enticed away, drawn to the new shops in Town and Country Plaza, which was north of Brownsville at the corner of Pace and Fairfield streets.
In 1971, Cordova Mall stole more shops and shoppers from the Brownsville strip. And in 1978, Interstate 10 opened up a new, more direct path to Mobile, siphoning off much of the casual through-traffic.
One of those passing through, who was caught driving a stolen vehicle in Brownsville, was serial killer Ted Bundy on Feb. 15, 1978.
Cervantes Street became a four-lane road in 1979, and many business owners complained it left no parking for their customers, who were accustomed to parking out front.
Then, just two years later, Brownsville Elementary closed in 1981.
“It’s dying,” a Brownsville businessman said in a news clipping from that year.
Parts of the area became known as a retirement neighborhood in the 1990s, but others complained about the disruption prostitutes were causing customers, offering tricks in parking lots.
The late 1990s brought the revival movement of the Brownsville Assembly of God and claims of a Brownsville-wide community revival riding on its back.
But in 2001, at the tail end of the movement, Guy Livingston, Sr., a research analyst at the University of West Florida Haas Center for Business Research and Economical Development, found that Brownsville residents had a per capita income of $9,054 and an unemployment rate of 14.7 percentâ€â€three times the state unemployment rate.
Brownsville started a Neighborhood Watch in October 2003, and, of course, Operation Brownsville began in February 2007.
Some compare Brownsville’s history to a man’s. Today, after 99 years of carousing, he is dying. His body is defeated by diseases from prostitutes and drug use.
His relatives and friends are long dead. His lungs are artificially inflated by an oxygen machine and he is fed intravenously. Once in a while, there are signs of life. But his heart and soul fled his crumbling exterior long ago.
Brownsville’s residents, though, hold out hope the area can rise once again. Who knows? Maybe the area’s latest revitalization efforts will lead to headlines like “Revival of the Century” and reasons to truly celebrate Brownsville’s 100th anniversary in style in 2008.