Central Track

Central Avenue was a street that had been a railroad, and everyone who used it called it Central Track. When the Houston and Texas Central laid its line north out of Dallas in 1872 the right of way became an address, and the Black district that grew along it ran north from Elm Street into what was then the edge of town. By the 1920s it held cafes, drug stores, barber shops, tailors, domino parlours, movie houses and a row of pawnshops: the Roosevelt Cafe at 201 North Central, the North Pole Domino Parlor at 207, the Park Theater run by Chintz and Ella B. Moore. Blind Lemon Jefferson played for coins along the street from about 1912, years before Paramount recorded him. Huddie Ledbetter, who called himself Lead Belly, said he played alongside him around the Union Depot at Central and Elm. Black owned businesses here served white customers as well as Black ones, and many of the pawnshops and tailors were run by Eastern European Jewish immigrants, which made this one of the few places in a rigidly segregated city where the two worlds did business at all. Then it was taken by a road. North Central Expressway was built along the old right of way, opening in sections from 1949, and a 1969 elevation of the highway removed the 2400 block of Elm, the centre of what was left. Almost nothing of Central Track itself survives above ground. One building nearby did: the Knights of Pythias Temple on Elm, designed in 1916 by William Sidney Pittman, the first commercial building put up by and for Black Dallas, now a hotel.