Happy Easter!

Alan J. Brochstein
Apr 20
2 min read

For a Jewish person, I sure said "Happy Easter" to a lot of people today! I went on a nice walk, leaving my house at about 9:10 and getting to Beth Israel Cemetery on West Dallas at about 9:40. I visited with my friend who works there as the watchperson on Sundays for just 20 minutes and then hiked for three hours. My total walk was about 12 miles, and I went down San Jacinto to Elgin to Emancipation and ended up at MacGregor and Riverside Drive by Braes Bayou. I cut across to Almeda and headed home. This was not a new walk for me.

The most interesting part of the walk was that I saw again at what is now a post office (on 4110 Almeda near Cleburne). As you can see from the sign below, it is s historical site:

This is the edge of the 3rd Ward, a part of town that I have found very interesting as a former bicyclist and as a current walker. It's where George Floyd grew up. He graduated from Yates High School. Beyoncé grew up there too!

Emancipation Avenue, which is fascinating, used to be known as Dowling Street (until 2017). Some of the places located on that street still use Dowling on their painted signs. The University of Houston is in the 3rd Ward, and so is Texas Southern University (TSU). Harris Health, which owns and operates Ben Taub, owns Quentin Mease Health Facility and also Martin Luther King Health Center in the Third Ward too.

The sit-in described above was before I was born at what was the 26th Weingarten's . I never knew about it until I walked by it earlier this year. I knew Weingarten's growing up. It was preceded by a general store in Richmond in 1890 that was founded by Harris Weingarten, an immigrant from Austria-Hungary, and it expanded to Houston in 1895. In 1901, they opened their first grocery store in downtown Houston (Congress and Crawford). There were 23 stores in 1949 and 29 in 1951! It expanded outside of Texas in 1954 (Louisiana), and it even made it to Tennessee. You can read more about its history here. Grand Union bought them in 1979, and Safeway ended up owning a lot of the locations. Weingarten Realty, which was ultimately sold to Kimco in 2021, kept all of the real estate.

Kudos to the students at TSU!