Down in Deep Ellum, all the street’s a stage; all the walls, a canvas. A historically Black community-turned-haven of hardcore punk-turned-hub of bourgeois peccadillo, it’s always been the locus of the local art scene. The roughly 4-by-9 block grid of gritty, low-slung, brick buildings—bars, restaurants, cafes, trendy retail, the finest music venues in DFW—throbs adjacent to downtown Dallas, just east of the city’s so-called historic, business, and arts districts. Because yeah: The sausage may be made in downtown, but it’s spiced in Deep Ellum, where Dallas’ musical stars rise and shine before they’re expropriated by the city’s more sumptuous and ostentatious neighborhoods. “Deep Ellum is the soul of Dallas,” says Frank Campagna, a visual artist knighted the Godfather of Deep Ellum.
As a Dallasite, describing Deep Ellum to non-Dallasites is terribly daunting. I’ll lean on my own experience growing up 20 minutes north of the neighborhood. As a kid, visiting Deep Ellum is a mildly transgressive act: you’re bopping, all the sudden all cool and all; your parents eyelids are fluttering because Zåtar, a Lebanese tapas bar, plays the music too loud, and the ice cream parlor you found on Yelp turns out to be half an ice cream truck inside Wits End, a grimy and tenebrous bar where a satanic band is set to play. As a teen, visiting Deep Ellum is an edgy adventure: you’re trying to sneak into a dive bar to enjoy some live jazz or hardcore punk; or you’re trying to wash the X off your hands in the bathroom of Club Dada, a popular music venue; or you’re trying to order drinks at Shoals Sound and Service, a speakeasy that serves killer arepas and plays only vinyl; or you’re waiting in line for a goth show at the Bomb Factory, the famed concert hall and event space.
As an adult—as Jonny Auping, a Dallas-based freelancer, writes in his recent history of Deep Ellum-slash-profile of blues artist Charley Crockett—visiting the neighborhood be like: “you just saw a show at Trees [a concert venue] that you’ll talk about for weeks, exaggerating whatever details you still remember. You’re walking out the front door onto Elm Street [a Deep Ellum thoroughfare] with about 400 other people. It’s entirely possible you haven’t been sober since halfway through the set list. It’s 11:30 [p.m.] and the streets are packed with people, some of whom are probably going to manage to find a little trouble to get into, and you haven’t yet determined if you’ll be one of them. Maybe you aren’t ready for the night to be over. You could grab another drink somewhere or find some late-night food. Or you could walk around the area and settle for the first place that’s playing the kind of music you want to hear.”
That’s the idea: tipsy, walk through the streets, the stage, wander by the walls, the canvas, admire the music and the murals. The velvet, cloying air whispers potential; embodies rebirth.
That’s the idea: tipsy, walk through the streets, the stage, wander by the walls, the canvas, admire the music and the murals. The velvet, cloying air whispers potential; embodies rebirth.
* * *
Imagine you’re down in Deep Ellum.
Alcohol everywhere; to experience Deep Ellum is to do shit that your parents—and perhaps the law, too—probably wouldn’t want you to do.
Music everywhere; trends and clubs crop up and drop like pebbles, in this most effervescent and evanescent of neighborhoods.
Murals everywhere; the brick buildings’ sunbaked sides proffer a perfect canvas. It’s February or March, and couples preening in the spring weather pose for the gram in front of the gaudy-painted walls. It’s May, and mothers and graduates hunting the perfect senior pic carom from mural to mural. It’s summer, and teenagers with cameras, extra clothes, entrepreneurial spirits, and patient friends convince their baes and besties to brave the heat and model for their resale or photography Instagrams. It’s late November, and kids pose with out-of-town cousins in town for the holidays. To visit Deep Ellum is to place one’s finger on the pulse of Dallas.
To visit Deep Ellum is to place one’s finger on the pulse of Dallas.
So that you’ll never forget strolling around Deep Ellum at 9 p.m. on Friday, March 20 to report for D Magazine on the total damage caused by the mayor’s order to shut down dining rooms, bars, theaters, and music venues. You’ll never forget the fey stillness—the silence but for the sound of a single thrasher band rehearsing behind a shuttered aluminum garage door. Which you could interpret as a sign of Dallas’ resilience—or as a gallows-humorous symbol of the city’s many conservative residents resisting wearing masks and closing hair salons. To visit Deep Ellum is to place one’s finger on the pulse of Dallas.
* * *
“For over a century, Deep Ellum has been a spot where Dallas has put either the people it didn’t want or didn’t know what to do with,” Auping states. It’s never been a neighborhood, technically. It’s never been residential, really. Its history can be divided into three distinct epochs; the streets run through it all.
In the 1920s, “recently immigrated Jews opened up pawn shops,” Auping recounts, and Blacks opened up vaudeville houses, movie theaters, and live music venues. “Places like the Gypsy Tea Room and Park Theater, managed by Ella B. Moore, offered live jazz, gospel, blues, and vaudeville shows.” Places like the Harlem Theatre showed movies. In the then capital of the Ku Klux Klan—one third of Dallasite men belonged to the KKK—a vibrant “Black and Jewish business and entertainment” district was thriving. It was at this time that blues legends Lead Belly and Blind Lemon Jefferson busked Deep Ellum’s bustling streets.
In the then capital of the Ku Klux Klan—one third of Dallasite men belonged to the KKK—a vibrant “Black and Jewish business and entertainment” district was thriving. It was at this time that blues legends Lead Belly and Blind Lemon Jefferson busked Deep Ellum’s bustling streets.
In the 50s, Elm Street was converted into a one-way road driving away from Deep Ellum, into downtown. In the 60s, an elevated highway was constructed between downtown and Deep Ellum. These changes, following after the Great Depression, combined to kill the community, according to Auping. Deep Ellum lay dormant until the 80s—until Frank Campagna and a covey of creatives, musicians, painters, and punks came along.
Born in New York, and raised around Philadelphia and Chicago, Campagna’s family moved to Dallas right after he graduated from high school. His career, which has not only unfolded in Deep Ellum but has enfolded and informed the area’s development and evolution, took off with an independent publication.
“Dan Hitchcock started a magazine called Dallas Studio, based off of Lower Greenville,” Campagna told me. (Lower Greenville is a popular and artistic dining district 10 minutes northeast of Deep Ellum.) “He put out one issue and it was before the Dallas Observer even existed. It was based on Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine as far as format goes—and I was blown away by it.”
“Hey man, I like what you’re doing,” Campagna said to Hitchcock. “Can I help?”
“Yeah,” Hitchcock said. “Can you do paste up?”
“Sure!” Campagna replied. “I basically sat down right that minute,” he continued telling me, “and we pasted up all night, and took it to press the next day for the second issue.” Campagna’s art-directorial duties extended well beyond design and layout; one time, the duo had to paint a mural to make enough money to print an issue.
Shortly after, around 1982, Hitchcock secured a Main Street, Dallas, Texas, address for their office—“because Dallas, the TV show, was so popular, it didn’t make a difference if you’re from China or Timbuktu or whatever, you can find Main Street, Dallas, Texas,” Campagna laughed. The new Dallas Studio offices, called Studio D, quickly became a multi-purpose art space—and what local publication Art + Seek dubbed “one of the area’s first unlicensed hardcore punk clubs.”
“I kind of get credit for having the first nightclub down there,” Campagna admitted.
Hitchcock didn’t like the live music, so he took off. So Campagna took over the space and continued inviting his friends to play on the weekends; guest artists included the Dead Kennedys, Hüsker Dü, Social Distortion, the Original Misfits, and Agnostic Front.
New clubs, such as Theatre Gallery, Club Clearview, Club Dada, and Trees, opened as the mid-80s rolled by. “By then, live music was jumping,” Campagna said. Dinosaur Jr., the Replacements, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jane’s Addiction, Flaming Lips, Radiohead, a Tribe Called Quest, Cypress Hill, Geto Boys, Pearl Jam, and Nirvana all came to Deep Ellum to perform, according to Auping.
But by then, Campagna wasn’t hosting bands. He was booking them, for a few different venues and making murals.
Around 1993, the Deep Ellum Association commissioned Campagna for the massive, half-mile project of painting the Good-Latimer Tunnel, the north entrance into Deep Ellum. He told the association, “I can’t afford the time, and you can’t afford for me to take the time to do it. So here’s what I propose. Let’s get 35 artists together and we’ll knock it out in a day.” Which they did. “I curated all the artists,” Campagna told me, “got with them and figured out what they were doing, and figured out where they would go, and took all the measurements, and laid out their areas—as far as marking how big of an area it would be—and assigned everybody space.” They did it in 11 hours.
“I can’t afford the time, and you can’t afford for me to take the time to do it. So here’s what I propose. Let’s get 35 artists together and we’ll knock it out in a day.”
Meanwhile, the music scene continued to crescendo, thanks to bands such as the Butthole Surfers, Old 97’s, Tripping Daisy, Toadies, Fugazi, Smashing Pumpkins, the Roots, the Notorious B.I.G., and Erykah Badu. When the Gypsy Tea Room opened up, Campagna told the owners, “Hey, if you guys want to take up this space, personally what I’d do is get rid of that god-awful mural that I did way back when.” He was referring to a 20-by-100-foot mural of Main Street, Dallas, circa 1950, that he’d painted almost a decade earlier.
Campagna ended up doing around 800 murals for the Gypsy Tea Room, advertising their upcoming shows. But it was the Gypsy Tea Room—or, rather, a fight between a father and an alleged skinhead in the Gypsy Tea Room—that killed Deep Ellum the second time, according to Auping. When news got out about the fight, people lost their shit, and it hit the fan. Freaked out about skinheads and crime and danger, people and capital fled. The capitalist gods saw that it was not good. Theaters and music venues shuttered. And the neighborhood went into hibernation, again.
The capitalist gods saw that it was not good. Theaters and music venues shuttered. And the neighborhood went into hibernation, again.
* * *
Wake up. Scott Rohrman, developer, owner of 42 Real Estate, started purchasing buildings in Deep Ellum in 2012.
“We wanted to be in an area that had a grid street system and wasn’t a linear system,” he explained. “Deep Ellum has a lot of history, we liked that, we liked the grid street system, and it had enough buildings that we thought we could get a critical mass.”
When Clint and Whitney Barlow reopened Trees, in 2009, Deep Ellum was a boarded-up, crime-infested, nigh god-forsaken grid; after all, we were still wallowing in the throes of the Great Recession. “When we went down there in 2011, 2012,” Rohrman told me, there was little sign of promise or rebirth. “There was Trees and Anvil Pub, and they lent help to the revitalization.”
Rohrman carefully curated his tenants. He turned down multiple pizza joints and tattoo parlors because the neighborhood already had four of each. Pecan Lodge, a popular barbecue restaurant, moved from the Dallas Farmers Market to Deep Ellum. He also deliberately studied the area’s history and legacy. Which is why he did the 42 Murals project.
The city had filled up the Good-Latimer Tunnel—which Campagna and his army of 35 artists had painted four times since 1993—in 2007, to lay a new public transport train line. “When they tore the tunnel out, they lost some big canvases that artists were painting on,” Rohrman said. But “it was already part of the ethos—of having paint on the walls—in Deep Ellum. “What we tried to do is, we said, ‘OK, let’s try to honor that history and let’s try to give an opportunity for artists to paint legally on walls.’ And that’s what we did”— in 2015 and in 2017. Rohrman invited submissions for the 42 Murals project from local artists and selected his 42 faves. The chosen ones were assigned walls and received $1,000 for artistic and alimentary supplies.
“When they tore the tunnel out, they lost some big canvases that artists were painting on,” Rohrman said. But “it was already part of the ethos—of having paint on the walls—in Deep Ellum.
“The first round did not have a theme to it,” Rohrman said. “We had 250 submission and we just chose the ones that we liked the best. The second round, our theme was portraits. And so the submissions that we got included a lot of portraits for musicians. So there are murals about Blind Lemon Jefferson and Lead Belly and Stevie Ray Vaughn.”
“We didn’t look at any resumes,” he added. “It was zero percent on their status.” But in the end, between the two rounds, the chosen ones included prominent locals, such as Jeremy Biggers (a multidisciplinary artist from South Dallas); Lesli Marshall (an art consultant and designer from the suburbs); Matthew Brinston (a studio painter who’s shown at Miami Art Basel); and Isaac Davies (the muralist who organized the Dallas Army of Artists after the George Floyd riots). The chosen ones also included acclaimed international artists, such as Adrian Torres (a Spanish painter); and Jorge Gutierrez (the Mexican writer, director, and animator of The Book of Life).
The chosen ones also included acclaimed international artists, such as Adrian Torres (a Spanish painter); and Jorge Gutierrez (the Mexican writer, director, and animator of The Book of Life).
Rohrman asked Campagna to participate in the 42 Murals project, but Campagna declined—he was busy elsewhere. (He did participate in the second round.) Lesli Marshall, conversely, asked Rohrman to participate in the project; Rohrman accepted, allowing her to help him coordinate the 42 Mural team’s efforts. (She painted large murals in both rounds.)
A graduate of Brookhaven College and the University of North Texas, Marshall started an art consulting and design firm, Articulation Art, in 2007. The firm primarily focuses on commercial projects (like, decorating hotels) and mural programs (like, the 42 Murals project). Adrian Torres introduced Marshall herself to mural painting in 2015. Torres runs a program called Riding Colors, which coordinates with NGOs around the globe to paint murals in orphanages, schools, and underprivileged communities. He invited Marshall to participate in a project at an orphanage in the Philippines, where she painted her first mural.
Adrian Torres introduced Marshall herself to mural painting in 2015. Torres runs a program called Riding Colors, which coordinates with NGOs around the globe to paint murals in orphanages, schools, and underprivileged communities
“I had always worked really large-scale on canvas, but I had never painted a mural,” Marshall told me. “I loved it. And when I got home, back to Dallas, when I heard about Scott Rohrman and 42 Real Estate wanting to do a mural project in Deep Ellum, I was all about it.’”
The 42 Mural project proved a boon for her business. After she painted the back of Pecan Lodge, Facebook commissioned a mural for their new Fort Worth headquarters. Virgin Hotels hired her to do design installations in their new Dallas location. The Dallas Observer brought her in to do some design work in their new offices. Likewise, new residential developments in Deep Ellum have hired her to curate mural projects and do design installations. She just finished a mural, at one of the larger residential buildings, that incorporates the old design of the Gypsy Tea Room’s neon sign and features historical and local musicians, such as Erykah Badu.
“We did it in a black-and-white and pops of color,” she told me. “I mixed in two different artists that have two different styles. And I think that’s really reflective of how I feel about Deep Ellum. Like, I think we should still showcase the history but then also do some new things.”
“We did it in a black-and-white and pops of color,” she told me. “I mixed in two different artists that have two different styles. And I think that’s really reflective of how I feel about Deep Ellum. Like, I think we should still showcase the history but then also do some new things.”
* * *
“What do you want?” Rohrman asks people who don’t want gentrification.
The reply, he says, is typically, “I want to still pay cheap rent, and I want to be able to hang out and go to my bar.”
“OK,” he counters. “Then you should buy the buildings.”
Rohrman’s point is this: When he purchased 55 properties in Deep Ellum, in 2012, 70 percent of the buildings were boarded up, the utilities didn’t function, and crime was high. He worked with residents to heal those scars and resurrected the neighborhood. So that rents, in general, went up.
“I don’t know that I understand it when people say, ‘Don’t gentrify the area,’” he told me. “I think what they’re saying is, ‘Don’t raise the rental rates.’ And I’m like, ‘That’s OK. I don’t have a problem with that. I just can’t make an investment in the area then.’ If you don’t want people to make an investment in the area, then you’re gonna need to buy it yourself and not fix it up.”
He has another counter: “Everybody gets mad at the developer for raising rates. Why didn’t they get mad at the guy who sold it to the developer at a price that makes the developer raise the rates? They don’t get mad at their neighbors and their compatriots.”
“Everybody gets mad at the developer for raising rates. Why didn’t they get mad at the guy who sold it to the developer at a price that makes the developer raise the rates? They don’t get mad at their neighbors and their compatriots.”
Rohrman (who’s since sold all but 12 of his Deep Ellum properties) says he has no problem keeping rents low. When he first purchased properties in Deep Ellum, he moved Campagna’s Kettle Art Gallery from the club- and bar-heavy one-way Elm Street to the more well-traveled, more family-friendly two-way Main Street. In this new space, which would’ve gone for $5,000 per month, he gave the gallery an offer that they couldn’t refuse for “many, many months” and charged them a small amount for other months—“because Kettle Art is part of the community.” (He helped a few other tenants with rent, too.)
Fears of gentrification have flared since Uber broke ground on their Dallas campus—located in Deep Ellum—in November 2019. But fears of gentrification have been flaring since the 1980s—before Deep Ellum’s gloriously grungy heyday in the 90s. So that Campagna is sanguine about Deep Ellum’s future.
“It’s just evolution,” he said. “Back in ’86 or so, I remember people bitching about, Deep Ellum’s screwed, man, it’s all yuppies and stuff now—and [me] being like, ‘Have fun being a dinosaur!’ You know? Either you evolve or you die, it’s your call. You work with it, you make it work for you.”
Either you evolve or you die, it’s your call. You work with it, you make it work for you
* * *
Jeremy Biggers is sanguine about Deep Ellum’s future, too, albeit more frustrated: “I stopped going to Deep Ellum as much [around 2017 or 2018] when all of the new crop of businesses started arriving, that were trying to push out the hip-hop crowd,” he said. “I was like, I’m not going anywhere where I don’t feel welcome.’”
Biggers grew up in South Dallas, a predominantly Black and abjectly impoverished neighborhood. To put it in perspective, in South Dallas, the median household income is less than $25,000 and the average life expectancy is 68. In Uptown, a predominantly White neighborhood one mile north, the median household income is more than $100,000 and the average life expectancy is 90.
Biggers, who attended Dallas’ elite public arts magnet, Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, has been an artist most of his life. But because of where he grew up, he never saw any art in person—“other than murals around the neighborhood that were done by amateurs or folk-art type people”—until he got to Booker T. Washington. When he started studying there and encountered such and so much art, he dedicated his professional artistic career to giving back to kids who grow up in circumstances similar to his own—to ensuring those kids encounter art. He does at least one pro-bono mural per year in a low-income part of town; his first was in South Dallas, around the corner from where he grew up.
“I think street art is a way for just the average person, the layman, to consume art,” he told me. “I think street art is important in bringing art to people that otherwise wouldn’t go to the art.” Aware of the classist connotations of the gallery scene, Biggers wants to bypass them altogether. Which is why he started doing street art in 2015.
“I think street art is a way for just the average person, the layman, to consume art,” he told me.
“I’ve always wanted to have my work viewed on a grander scale other than just in the galleries or in aristocratic places,” the 20-plus-year veteran artist said. “I didn’t want it to be something that was so classist and, you know, If you’re not in the in-crowd, you don’t get to experience it.”
For the 42 Mural project, Biggers did a double-faced portrait across from Pecan Lodge. In Deep Ellum, he also did a mural inside Serious Pizza—a joint on Elm Street—and a three-dimensional pizza slice above the restaurant’s entrance. He’s about to start work on more murals, including one on Deep Vellum, an independent publisher and bookstore in Deep Ellum; he’s waiting for approvals for a few other pitches.
“Deep Ellum, historically, has always been a creative hub.” he said. “I think between the musicians and the artists that lived there and have lived there, historically, they always bring the culture. And then what happens, as with anywhere, people that aren’t part of that culture, see, Oh, this looks fun, this looks great. They come in and try to, like, leach off of that culture—in the process pushing out what made the culture in the first place.”
“Deep Ellum, historically, has always been a creative hub.” he said. “I think between the musicians and the artists that lived there and have lived there, historically, they always bring the culture.
It’s all cyclical, he concluded. Marshall agreed. “Deep Ellum has had so many lives,” she said.
“In high school, I used to sneak out and go to a couple clubs down in Deep Ellum,” she recounted (she later clarified that she was of legal age to enter the clubs). “And then everything kind of closed down, and then it’s been revamped… It’s changing now. It’s constantly changing and evolving with these developers that come in, and businesses that are coming in… Dallas is one of the hottest markets, right now, of people moving here and infiltrating the city from all over the U.S. So it’s super important, for the art programs and for the artists, to keep the story of Deep Ellum alive, and its rich history. And then I also like the idea of things evolving.”
Down in Deep Ellum, the soul of Dallas, the question of the moment, then, is: How does one achieve progress without creating a brave new world of anodyne gentrification? How does one preserve without being reactionary? The question is for the streets. The answer, perhaps, is on the walls—hand-painted on the walls, to be exact.
