Vickery Place – Dallas, Texas
Vickery Place is a historic neighborhood in East Dallas, Texas, bounded on the north by Goodwin Avenue, on the west by North Central Expressway (US 75) and Henderson, on the south by Belmont, and the east by Greenville Avenue. Although Vickery Place is considered by some to be part of the M Streets area, it is strictly speaking not as it is south of the Greenland Hills subdivision.
Vickery Place has seen much improvement and property value growth over the past several years due to its proximity to Downtown Dallas (2–3 miles from Downtown) and Uptown and its location bordering the vibrant Lower Greenville Avenue and Knox-Henderson entertainment and shopping districts.
Platted in 1911, Vickery Place was developed by the Works-Coleman Land Company, a land development firm owned by R. Vickery, J.E. Coleman, Osce Goodwin, J. Houston Miller, and George W. Works. The neighborhood was served by the McMillan Avenue Streetcar which ran from Ross Avenue to Vickery Boulevard. As manager of the Dallas Street Railway, Works used his position to promote Vickery Place by printing advertisements on the back of streetcar tickets. Lots were sold by Works-Coleman in the neighborhood until the early 1940s.
Today, Vickery Place boasts one of the largest collections of early 20th-century houses in Dallas. Popular architectural styles of the early 1900s are all represented in the neighborhood, including Craftsman, Tudor, Spanish, Colonial Revival, and Prairie. Most houses are one- or two-story, constructed of brick or wood. Two-story brick duplexes, four-plexes, and eight-plexes built in Mediterranean, Tudor, and Prairie styles are also seen throughout the neighborhood. Many of the houses in the neighborhood were constructed during the postwar housing boom. Concentrated to the north of the original streets, these houses are more traditional in style but are compatible in size and scale with the neighborhood’s earliest houses.
Education
Vickery Place is within the Dallas Independent School District. The neighborhood is zoned to Geneva Heights Elementary School (formerly Robert E. Lee Elementary School) in Lower Greenville, J. L. Long Middle School, and Woodrow Wilson High School. There is a K-8 magnet school in the Vickery Place area, Solar Preparatory School for Girls at James B. Bonham.
Previously most of the community was served by James B. Bonham Elementary School (Closed in 2012) with a portion in the northeast zoned to Lee. Bonham opened in 1923 as the Vickery Place School. Designed by C.D. Hill, the building’s price was about $121,000. The school received its current name in December 1939. The Vickery Meadow Association wrote, “We believe this was done to avoid confusion with the town of Vickery, which was annexed into DISD soon afterward.”
Bonham Elementary won the National Excellence in Urban Education Award in 2009 and the Blue Ribbon School Award in 2010, and the Texas Education Agency (TEA) ranked the campus as exemplary for several years. The school had more than 200 students in the 2011-2012 school year, leading Eric Nicholson of the Dallas Observer to write that the school was “badly underused”. There were 22 students per teacher at that time, which was lower than the common one of 27.
The underpopulation was a stated reason to close the school. The student population sharply declined as gentrification occurred, as the inflation-adjusted median income increased by 80% from 1990 to 2010, and fewer children lived in the area, as in the same period the number of residents 18 or younger went was 580 in 2010 when it was 1,187 in 1990. The husband of the president of the Bonham parent-teacher association, Dave Walkington, stated that the district may have additionally selected Bonham as a way of telling the Texas Legislature that it needed additional funds and that high-performing schools were in jeopardy.
Additionally, articles from local publications stated that DISD would have had reductions in federal funding if it closed campuses with poor academic performance. DISD board members stated that deciding to close a small school regardless of its academic performance would be a fair decision.