Patricia Puckett Hall sits alone in her home at 1026 N. Beckley Ave., pondering the future while immersing herself in the past.
Hall is the third generation of women from the same family to have kept her Oak Cliff residence open as a rooming house. Her grandmother and mother are gone, but long after Hall is gone, no one will forget who lived in the house on Nov. 22, 1963, the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.
He was a tenant, a sullen, quiet man, whose name was Lee Harvey Oswald.
Fifty-five years after Oswald was taken into custody on suspicion of killing Kennedy and Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit — who was gunned down less than a mile from the rooming house — curiosity and questions remain.
People still want to know where Oswald lived, so busloads of visitors still flock to Hall's house, where she leads them on a $40-per-person guided tour. She has restored Oswald's eerie closetlike bedroom, which contains his same narrow bed and an upright armoire that housed his clothing and his handgun. The house as a whole has a Miss Havisham feel to it, as though it's frozen in 11/22/63.
But will it always be that way? A while back, Hall tried to sell — for $500,000. No one matched the offer. But her home and a nearby duplex, at 214 W. Neely St., where Oswald and his wife, Marina, lived in the months before the assassination, pose a daunting challenge to the City of Dallas:
What if these houses are sold? Will the buyer be as rigorous in maintaining history as Hall has tried to be?
Nicola Longford, chief executive officer of the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, says the museum has not been approached in recent years about any "potential collaborative tour concept" shared with owners of the houses where Oswald once lived. Even so, she says, museum officials "help guide any interested guests to visit other historical sites." And she did not rule out possible partnerships in the future that would explore the "overlapping" relationships between Dealey Plaza and houses linked to Oswald.
Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings also weighed in, saying:
"I'm a huge advocate for historic preservation and we'd be happy to talk to any property owner about ways we can further that critical cause anywhere in Dallas. That said, we have not heard from the owners and I'm not aware of any taxpayer funds allocated for programming or preservation related to those properties."
Part of what puts the Oswald houses at risk is the nature of Oak Cliff itself.
In recent years, developers have invaded Oak Cliff like a gentrification army. They are busily constructing, block after cluttered block, hipster apartment buildings, gourmet coffee shops, chichi shops and restaurants where even gourmands like to eat. The presence of not one but two Oswald houses is, at this point, strangely anachronistic.
David Spence, whose company Good Space has spearheaded much of the redevelopment and preservation in North Oak Cliff, says the house at 214 W. Neely St. can't be divided into anything more than its existing two units. It is a duplex. It could become a single-family residence but not a triplex, for instance. Zoning restrictions keep its use limited to what it is, and it can't be commercial.
Hall's house on North Beckley, however, could be expanded or converted into something else entirely. "That one," Spence says, "is a candidate for the kind of dense commercial and multifamily development we're seeing in North Oak Cliff."
That's shorthand for saying that Hall's home, once lived in by Oswald, could easily become a high-rise apartment building, or yes, even a latte-selling Starbucks. Hall prides herself on having striven for years to preserve her chapter of Dallas history, but at 66, she admits she can't do it forever. At some point, she will have to sell, she says, or her two sons will own the home, and they will most likely sell, even to a developer who has different ideas of what to do with the property than keeping intact where Lee Harvey Oswald once slept.
The owner of the house at 214 W. Neely is listed in Dallas County property records as 1122 Holdings LLC. Officials for 1122 Holdings declined to be interviewed but did permit photographs on the property.
Speaking of, one that was taken in the backyard of 214 W. Neely is forever chiseled into infamy: It is a chilling black and white image of a smirking Oswald, holding his rifle, his handgun strapped to his side, taken by Marina in the spring before Kennedy died. It is one of history's darkest examples of a grim foreshadowing.
All of this adds up to a delicate issue of historical preservation, but the City of Irving gets kudos for figuring out how to do it and do it tastefully.
In 2009, the City of Irving acquired the former residence of Ruth Paine at 2515 W. Fifth St. The house opened as a museum in 2013, near the 50th anniversary of Kennedy's death. The house is now on the National Register of Historic Places. Visitors have included history buff and talk-show host Conan O'Brien.
Paine, who once owned the property, was estranged from her husband, Michael Paine, when she welcomed into her home a pregnant Marina and her 1-year-old daughter, June Lee. Marina and Lee lived apart for months, but on the night before Oswald killed Kennedy, he and Marina slept in the same bed in Paine's home in Irving.
Unbeknownst to their generous host, Oswald had his rifle wrapped in a blanket in Paine's garage, and Marina knew about it, as she told investigators after Kennedy died — in front of a horrified Paine.
Oswald's last night in Paine's house before being arrested was memorable for a slew of reasons. He pleaded with Marina to have sex with him, to take him back. He even promised her a new washing machine. We'll always wonder, what might have happened had Marina agreed to Oswald's requests?
Resigned and dejected, Oswald left almost all his money ($170 in cash) and his wedding ring on a nightstand in the room where Marina was sleeping when he left for work. When the co-worker who gave him a lift downtown asked about the long, cylindrical package he had with him, he told him it was curtain rods for his bedroom on Beckley. It was, of course, the murder weapon.
Author Thomas Mallon wrote a terrific book about this called Mrs. Paine's Garage. In an interview years ago, he said its theme was "no good deed goes unpunished." Paine had not only taken in a pregnant Soviet refugee, estranged from her husband, she even helped Oswald land the job at the Texas School Book Depository, unwittingly making this 24-year-old drifter and loony malcontent a soldier of fate.
For these reasons and more, they did the right thing in Irving. Europeans have long had a wiser, more elegant way of preserving history than Americans, and there is no question that glimpses into Oswald's past, however infamous, will be tarnished forever if something happens to the houses on West Neely and North Beckley.
Would it make sense for the city of Amsterdam to tear down the Anne Frank House? Of course not. Would it make sense for the Polish government to pave over the Auschwitz death camp? Of course not. The same applies to Dallas. History would seem to demand that Dallas at least try to keep these houses intact, as Irving did. So, the question remains: What will Dallas do, and if it chooses to do nothing, how will history be harmed?
This is a video of an interview conducted by KRLD-TV, which is now KDFW-TV (Channel 4), hours after the assassination in 1963. The woman being interviewed is Gladys Johnson, Oswald's landlady, who was also the grandmother of Patricia Puckett Hall, who still lives at 1026 N. Beckley Ave. in Oak Cliff. (KRLD-TV/KDFW-TV Collection/The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza):
