DOWNTOWN BROWNTOWN: A CITY SEARCHING FOR LOST SOUL

By Juan Montoya
Way back when in a previous lifetime, I recall coming into the Market Square area of Brownsville with hundreds, if not thousands, of people who lived and worked in the outskirts of town.
It was the era of King Cotton, when agriculture ruled the local economy. The port was coming on its own and there was always the Mexico trade that has been there since Brownsville was founded.
When we came into town, the ladies would go to La Casa del Nylon, E. Manoutou Dept. Store, Neisner, Kresge's, etc., to buy the sundry dry goods and implements they needed to sew and mend, the groceries, etc.
Even the farmers shopped at these stores and had accounts payable when the crops came in.
On those weekends, local townies would crowd
the sidewalks with the ranch hands and the shoppers and business people from Matamoros.
Olvera's Shoe Repair Store, and Bernie Whitman's Pawn Shop and Army Surplus and gun store would do a land-office business as would the Brownsville Hardware on Washington Street.
After a comida corrida at Guzman's on Market Square, the kids would tag along with the moms and accompany them on their shopping. The men would slink into one of the many lounges and cantinas on Market Square and wait for them to return. In those days, nearly a half dozen or more conjuntos would be kept busy playing old corridos and rancheras. The feats of defiance of Jacinto Treviño, Arnulfo Gonzalez, and Gregorio Cortez against the rurales and rinches would be retold time after time in the old songs.
Most townies, on the other hand, would crowd the Capitol and Majestic theaters for bargain-priced movies and popcorn.
The entire market square rang with music, people gawking, and kids running around.
 Afterward, entire ranching families would take in a Mexican movie at Grande, Mexico or El Iris movie theaters.
The place was a "vibrant and prosperous business district."
Slowly, as agriculture's influence on the local economy lessened, nothing came to replace it. More and more, the downtown district relied on the Mexican commerce to offset agriculture's demise. That trade turned out to be a tenuous one, with peso devaluation after peso devaluation making local merchants offer cheaper and cheaper goods to lure Mexican shoppers or simply closing. One by one the industry leaders like Penny's, Woolworth's, Kresge's, Montgomery Wards, Sears, and even McDonalds, left downtown and headed for greener pastures on the northside of town opened up by the new US 77-83 expressway.
Today, downtown is literally one big dollar store and no shoppers who can get their wares north of Boca Chica Blvd. venture into town. The mainstay of the downtown economy seems to be the resale of recycled clothing from northern Goodwills and Salvation Army thrift stores, a kind of second-hand Big Lots. Most of these clothes end up on the other side of the river or on the backs of street people who salvage through Dumpsters looking for thrown away duds "de marca."
If not, they come downtown to pay their installments on usurious loans at thriving finance companies.
At night, the fashion statement de rigueur are burglar bars.
About the only reason some come is because they have to go to work in the city, county, or the college/university. A handful of live-music venues ply for their business and a half dozen local restaurants and bars compete for the patrons. To their credit, those businesses that cater to the young – Palm Lounge, the Kraken, El Hueso del Fraile, the Haven, etc. – have found their niche and weathered lean times to stay in business. People just don't come downtown if they can get the same elsewhere where they feel safer.
The City of Brownsville has put together a Main Street Advisory Board’s whose chairman says it wants to implement its so-called Four Points Approach to create the necessary connections to revitalize downtown: organization, promotion, design and economic restructuring. Of course, they have to throw some money to the hucksters. There is already a plan to "rebrand" downtown. Can Hahn Communications in the form of Ron Oliveira, cousin of State Rep. Rene Oliveira, be far behind to come and play the role of "native son" from Austin and snag a preferential $150,000 contract to put lipstick on the pig and "ignite" downtown?
The members say they want a business district that offers everything from culture to entertainment to retail.
To accomplish that, however, Main Street Main Street Manager Miriam Suarez told the local daily that the group will have to establish itself as a credible organization that businesses will want to work with.
“It very much requires the involvement of the community and the business owners themselves,” Suarez said. “We are the liaison and bring all the stakeholders, community members and the city together to create the change that’s wanted and needed.”
The board wants to change the perception of Downtown Brownsville through this approach, Suarez said.
Once a committee chair, or any other visionary, starts talking about "stakeholders," "liaisons," and "bringing the players together at the table," you know it's nothing but fluff.
Brownsville will never be what it was during the days of King Cotton and agriculture because – in  contrast to today – people used to live downtown. In fact, there are many accounts of life in the city and of police foot patrols providing security day and night for residents.
To try to bring back the past without the economic base that made it that way is a delusion.
The city, in short, suffers from the same malady that affects those who would transform this border city's downtown into a replica of Austin's Sixth Street. There is really no organic base for it because the the majority of the people visit there during the day. A smattering of housing units in some second-floor apartments serve a few people, but you don't see them walking on the sidewalks taking in the cool, night air.
Instead, after dark, the city becomes the hunting grounds for cheap hustlers and prostitutes (male, female, and now, transgender) who are well-known to the local cops who are tired of picking up the same vagrants and then turning them loose in the morning after they drink their cup of coffee and munch on day-old sweet bread. With the infiltration of cheap crack and retail cocaine, one could mistake some dark corners of the city for some seedy places in downtown Houston.
Unless Brownsville can find a way to get a human base to live downtown – either by offering rental subsidies for low-income dwellers, incentives for property owners to provide it, etc. – the Cyclobia pretense of bringing the mountain to Mohamed in the form of suburbanites pedaling us into revitalization is a mere distraction.
Get real. The economic base that made downtown vibrant is gone. Unless you have people living there, importing warm bodies at public expense to traverse empty streets may make you feel good for an hour or two and cost the city a small fortune. But making a city commissioner and her adherents happy won't mean that it will revitalize your downtown.