 So our last speaker is Ms. Nettie Hinton and she's going to be talking, she's a long time east side activist, civil rights activist nationally. She worked, she's a retired U.S. customs agent. She grew up in this neighborhood in Dignity Hill. Tell me the streets again. All of them centered. All of them centered. So real close by. She's going to be talking about just the history of the bridges restoration, which I think, you know, we were trying to find somebody who could specialize in like the history of the bridges closure and kind of how people used it when it was abandoned. Because I think, you know, how many people here have climbed the bridge, for example? Or jumped off of the, no, nobody has ever done that, nobody has ever done that. It is six minutes after 12, so good afternoon. My name, these things, for people who are just meeting me, it's Nettie Hinton, I was not working. But for those who knew me as a child, growing up on the corner of Central Knowledge Street, Cata Cornercom, what you now know as the Carver Community Cultural Center, but when I was growing up in Jim Crow's segregated San Antonio, this neighborhood, it was the colored library auditorium. Born there, and now live just a couple of blocks up the street on the corner of Burleson and Hackberry in the only residential structure in Historic Dignity Hill that's listed on the Department of Interiors listing of historic places. I live in the Emil Elmendorf House, which was designed by Alfred Giles. And he did many, many, many, many structures in South Texas, particularly in the King William area, lots of the courthouses and a lot of the counties around us, and many other structures as well around San Antonio. As a matter of fact, if you see a limestone structure with, like, Victorian wooden kind of accoutrements, it's probably an Alfred Giles house. So down the street there, I live in Center, born in up the street there, living, and I'm really a child, I guess, of the railroads. For people who knew me growing up, I'm Patty Brooks, because my family name is Brooks. The nitty, I was named for my grandmother nitty. I'm Catholic, so my baptismal name is Patricia, and this community was filled with all kinds of European immigrants, German, Irish, and the nuns where I went to school, and I can do a great Irish bird for you, the sisters of the Holy Ghost and Mary Immaculate, they are the Holy Spirit these days. And they founded St. Peter Cleaver Academy, which is down in the corner of Nolan and Lyfolk, and it was the first school for African American youngsters in the state of Texas. When the Brown decision was implemented here, the nuns could not sustain the school because the number of black Catholics in San Antonio has always been small, and it was a day in boarding school, and it was the boarders who sustained the school, and they came from all around South Texas to board at St. Peter Cleaver and get a Catholic education. You now know it as Healy Murphy, because it was named for the founder of the school, Mary Margaret Healy Murphy. And so the nuns, because I was a little chatty person who went to the same school with my sister and my mother, and was always talking, they called me Patty Brooks, and they say, Patty Brooks, why are you always talking? Go up to the chalk, the blackboard, put your fingers on your lips and stand there, and do not say a word, or else I'm going to give you what Patty gave the drum. So this neighborhood that I grew up with was really a wonderful one, and if you got some time today, go over into the Dignity Park, which is right across the street, and there's an art piece there, the Tree of Life, and there's a plaque, which will have the names of many of the people who are associated with this community over the years. But being a child of the railroad, I come from, well, I'm a fourth generation sanatonian, and since we've just had a year or so ago a great, great, great niece being born, I'm into my eighth generation of folk from the east side of San Antonio. But the story goes that my grandmother was emancipated from a German farm in Fredericksburg, and San Antonio was the widest space in the road for the longest time here in South Texas. She walked the Pinto Trail, braving the Comanches to come to San Antonio and freedom, and she camped out where most people camped out during those days along the San Antonio River, but she eventually moved to what we now know as the Ellis Alley Enclave, which is right there along Center Street and what is now the 281-37 on-ramp, and people will know it as St. Paul Square. But it was little cottages on Ellis Alley because after emancipation, when freed people could buy property, it usually was in alleys, and that area, the end of it was, guess what, Walnut Street, which became the right-of-way for the railroad. So between the railroad and the on-ramp to 281-37, you will find the remnants of the first places where African-Americans were allowed to purchase property post emancipation. So my grandmother, Isabella, found herself married to Edward, and they went and then purchased property in Ellis Alley. So that's where my grandmother, Nettie, for whom I am named, met her future husband, Jefferson Brooks, because Ellis Alley was right there at Sunset Station by this time, and he was an employee of the railroad. He came from St. Landry Parish in Louisiana, near Apalusas, and he was a cook on the train that went from Louisiana out to Oakland, California. So he came right through San Antonio, and one of the major stops was right there where Ellis Alley is across from Sunset Station, and that's where she met and married him. Now, that's my father's side of the family. If we move to my mother's side of the family, my grandfather, Wells Grimes, lived and my mother and my grandmother, Addie, they lived on Dignowitty Street right off Walters in an area that was then called Rattlesnake Hill, and he worked for the railroad, and he would just come right down the embankment from Dignowitty Street down to the roundhouse where he was a railroad car repairman. So my family has always been in this area. By the time my grandmother, remember, Addie, who was the daughter of an emancipated slave, he got a college degree, and like the Jefferson's from the TV thing, moved up from the east side from Ellis Alley right up Center Street until she built three houses right on the corner of Olive and Center Street, and that's where I was born. Into a neighborhood that was truly dominated by the railroads, politically and in terms of where you lived, this portion, the northernmost portion of Olive Street, the people truly did work for the railroad, and this was where they lived, as was my grandfather Wells living up on Rattlesnake Hill. So you had enclaves of people who worked for the railroad, many of them European immigrants, and this is where they lived, and they were little enclaves, and there were little clusters of people who were related to each other who lived in the neighborhoods near the railroad. But those of you who may have heard the name Charlie Bellinger, any hands for people who were in a Charlie Bellinger, still a name that's important in east side African American politics, he came from somewhere else in east Texas, and he gravitated to guess where, the area where the railroad station was right there along Austin and Duval, and that's where he began his gambling enterprises, because the early Bellinger money was from gambling, and he was a good man, and so the Bellingers were here, the Irish, the Czechs, the Germans in particular, and if you can recall from history, much later on, when there was a punitive expedition into Mexico about Pancho Ligia, you had a group of army people who were developed in Mexico, in an area that Chinese farmers, farmers were located, and so they, the Chinese farmers began provisioning the American soldiers, so when they had to leave Mexico, the Chinese families had to leave with them, and so they double whacked near Fort Tham Houston, and then they slowly trickled into what is now Dignity Hill, and what became Denver Heights, or South Hill, so that our grocers in our community early on were the Chinese, and you still see vestiges of the Chinese grocery stores that were often on the corners of major intersections, in later years those corners were repurposed so they became homes, but you can see where the corners, where people would enter probably, they established one on the corner, and right down on the corner of Olive and Houston Street, you've got a little one-story building that has law offices at the moment, and that was where the bull, the old W, Chinese grocery store was for many years, and if you go down Houston, Hackberry, O'Ranzas into Denver Heights, you can still see vestiges of the Chinese population that was so important, so for newcomers to San Antonio who wonder why we have so many, or had at one time so many Chinese Mexican restaurants, now you've got the answer, and if you want to know why Frank Wing has a municipal court building named after him, he was in the administration of Henry Cisneros when he was mayor, now you know it's because the Chinese have a very long history in our community, and it all started right here in this area because of the railroads. My memories of this area are very fond, you're talking about the Nolan Street underpass in Vidok, St. Peter Claver was on the other side of it, and I'm living on this side of it, now we were told that you were never supposed to cross the railroad tracks at Nolan Street, and oftentimes there was some rolling stock that was parked there, so if you went under the parked cars, you really couldn't see if there was someone on the main line chugging charge you, but you weren't supposed to do that anyway because that was a no-no, however, if you do remember that underpass, you walked down, and then there was the sidewalk that was about automobile window level, and then you walked back up the stairs to the other side. Well, it was dark down there and it smelled like pee, and you just didn't want to go down there because there might have been somebody sleeping because there were hobos next to railroad tracks, and so you didn't want to do that, so we would be brave and we would cross the railroad tracks at Nolan Street, now, because back in those days in this community, the village really did take care of the children and raise the children, by the time I would get home, somebody would have called the nuns at St. Peter Claver, and you did not want Reverend Mother and Milda to be on your case, and had called somebody in my neighborhood because my father worked for St. Anthony Hotel, so he probably wasn't at home, but one of my neighbors knew that I had crossed the railroad tracks, and by the time my father got home, I was going to be in serious trouble, and when I got to school the next day, oh lord, it was Reverend Mother and Milda, or Sister Boniface, or Sister Peter, or Sister Louis, or Sister Leo Cadia, lord knows it was a bunch of people who were going to keep me on the street in narrow. Going across the bridge was significant, and people told you that early on, because the railroad came late to San Antonio, that they would stop the trains and block the traffic. Well, not only could regular commercial traffic get across, if you worked for the railroad, and you lived on that side of the track, you couldn't get across either, so the railroad was interested in making sure that their employees could get to work as well, so they were interested in having the bridge built, and I can remember going across that bridge and also the bridge on the Broncos Avenue, and being scared because the sound was so fearsome, and sometimes it had holes in the deck, and I just knew the whole car was going to fall through the hole. Of course it was a small hole, but kids exaggerate everything, but it was an interesting kind of a thing to go across the bridge and figure that you were doing some sort of adventure, that you were taking your life in your hand, of course it wasn't, but it was wonderful in that regard. Early, early, early on, this Dignaviti lived on the corner, but Dr. Dignaviti and the wife had a beautiful mansion that was in Dignaviti Park, and it was called Harmony House, and they ran him out of town for a while. He was a physician, and he was not in favor of slavery, and so they were going to put him in jail and maybe lynch him, and so he left town for a while to escape what was happening at the time. His wife had medical training, and so she sort of backfilled for him in terms of providing medical attention for people who lived in the community. People have mentioned that in the house on the corner of Nolan and Olive, Mr. Frederick lived, and I can remember as a little girl, Mr. Frederick even walking down Olive Street or insisting on driving down Olive Street from his home, but he drove very slowly, and so one of his daughters would be trotting behind him to make sure that he didn't have any difficulties. The Frederick Refrigeration Company was well known all over the country because not only did they do the window air conditioning units, they also did refrigeration projects for hotels, for restaurants, for grocery stores, and things of that nature, and if my memory serves me correctly during World War II, they were one of the industries as well that was asked to do things to support the war effort in fabricating things that would support American forces. So this area is truly significant in the development of San Antonio from its early beginnings in terms of the community and the diversity of it, but also had been involved with military city kind of extensions for a very long time, not just with Fort Sam Houston being the significant place that it is. I was here in San Antonio graduated from St. Peter Claver in 1955, so the Brown decision had not been implemented in time, so schools were still segregated, so you've heard of Emerson and Fanning, Brack and Jeff. In those days, African Americans did not attend those schools. When my father was a child, he attended the high school which was Frederick Douglas High School, which is located on Hackberry Street between Iowa and what is now known as MLK, but for that was Nebraska. But that's where he went to high school. When Wheatley High School was built in the 30s, then Douglas became what was known then as a junior high school, and now it's an academy. But if you lived in this neighborhood, you couldn't go to the neighborhood schools because of segregation, so you had to go a little bit to get to an elementary school, a junior high or a senior high school. Now I graduated from St. Peter in 1955. The University of Texas was not yet integrated because the human sweat painter Supreme Court decision had been argued successfully by Thurgood Marshall, but that desegregated the law school and the graduate school under Plessy versus Ferguson. Some of you may remember had to do with separate but equal so that if you had a separate school, which is why we couldn't go to the Emerson's in the Fanning's, if you had a separate and equal school, then there was a place for black people. But there was no law school and there was no comparable graduate school, so Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP won that court case, but the undergraduate school case was still winding its way through the courts when I graduated from St. Peter Claver. So I went to St. Phillips College, the historically black junior college in the neighborhood, and so when I graduated from there in 57, then I could go to the school of my choice. Now the school of my father's choice was Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he had attended school. Now remember, we're talking about a child of an emancipated slave who herself got a college degree and now her son in the 20s being ready to go to college. He wanted me to go to Howard because that's where he went to school. And I said all of these years, I've been going to a Catholic school and you have paid tax money and tuition and the best school in the state of Texas is UT Austin, so that's where I want to go to school. Well, fortunately in 57 they had desegregated the undergraduate school. Public accommodations hadn't changed yet, so you couldn't stay on campus in a dorm, but you could enroll in school. So that's where I went to university and I graduated in 1960 before some of y'all were even born from the University of Texas in Austin. Came back home. I worked for three years on the west side at the San Antonio Independent School District grant elementary, which was still segregated at the time and it doesn't exist any longer. The changes happened to that school much as changes happened to Emerson. It's now the Ella Austin Community Center and I worked there for three years and it finally dawned on me. My grandmother, Nettie, whom I'm named, lived and was a fixture in this community. As a matter of fact, she taught Reverend Claude Black in the first grade for people who recognized Reverend Black's name. And she taught on the west side in the SAISD School District. What the devil was I doing teaching in San Antonio in the SAISD School District having moved beyond what she had. I couldn't recapitulate her life because it was a different time. So I left and went to Washington and I spent the next 30 years working for the federal government, the Treasury Department, U.S. Custom Service in Washington. Retired at age 55 because of Claude. He had the correct age and I was only 23 when I went there, which is what this t-shirt commemorates because I happened to be in Washington in 1963 when the original March for Freedom and Jobs took place on the mall and Dr. King gave his I Had a Dream speech. I was back there for the 50th commemoration and so this t-shirt says that. So, you know, so I retired, I came back home and moved back into my neighborhood. I did not move to the north side in a gated community. I did not move further east although the African American population steadily moves east. Now we're living in shirts, but I came back to my original neighborhood and I really was appalled because benign neglect and other kinds of things had stymied the growth of what had been a truly wonderful community and one of the first things I discovered was that the city of San Antonio wanted to demolish or at least dismantle the Hay Street Bridge. Now it had been closed in the 80s because of the deterioration of the bridge, but particularly the concrete supports. Just recently, you know, 281 was closed for a while because a truck hit the Henderson Pass overpass and it's because, you know, trucks now are not low profile the way they were back in the day. They're really tall and got extensiony kinds of thingies. Well, the concrete supports had been damaged very badly by the commercial traffic and the bridge itself had begun to deteriorate. So, the city wanted to dismantle the bridge, either put it in a warehouse or reconstructed somewhere else perhaps in Breckenridge Park or over at Sunset Station and I am a historic preservationist and I believe that things should remain in situ. You built it there, it stays there and you spend money to make certain that it stays that wonderful iconic structure that it was meant to be. So, what I did was I started walking the neighborhoods and I got about 150 people to sign a petition that I took to then Council District Person Mario Salas and said, you have to keep the city from dismantling this bridge. It's too important to not only the African-American because this had become the historic east side community, but all of those ethnicities that have made this community wonderful over the years. It is the gateway from downtown to the historic east side and the cemeteries where everybody of significance is buried, even the man who wrote The Eyes of Texas upon you and Ms. Dezavala who stood in the doorway of the Alamo and says, you will not destroy this edifice. She's right up there on the corner of Pine and that very street right next door to The Eyes of Texas so there's a platter there so you can go and see a visit. So, Ms. Dezavala says, at any event they did not dismantle the bridge. So then, because of the publicity and the interest of the engineering community and other, the Center for the Conservation Society of which I'm a member, the restoration group was formed and we took it upon ourselves as Doug mentioned to you, not incorporated in any way just citizens who are activists because that's what democracy requires. An intelligent, informed citizenry that knows the process to get government and anybody else to hear what is correct so that things can be done for the people, doing it by the people, in order for the people's benefit.