Waco’s law enforcement has seen many a hoodlum since the days of the town’s founding in 1849. One of the most notorious was Clyde Barrow—half of the infamous gun-slinging duo Bonnie and Clyde.
On October 16, 1929, Waco police arrested Barrow in the company of two wanted men, William Turner and Frank Hardy, at the Roosevelt Hotel downtown. Barrow had been arrested once before in Waco, for attempted car theft in 1926, as a juvenile delinquent. According to some sources, he spent two days bawling in jail.
He managed to avoid serious jail time then, so he tried the waterworks again. Weeping before the chief of police, Hollis A. Barron, Barrow claimed Turner and Hardy had picked him up while hitchhiking and that he was unaware of their reputations. Turner and Hardy corroborated Barrow’s story of being an innocent bystander and the police released Barrow. Three months later in Dallas, twenty-year-old Barrow met and began a romance with nineteen-year-old Bonnie Parker, a married café waitress. Barrow held down a series of legitimate jobs while committing crimes in the late 1920s, and Chief Barron nabbed Barrow in connection with five car thefts and two burglaries in Waco in March 1930. While awaiting trial, Barrow and two others escaped from the McLennan County Jail, thanks to a gun smuggled in by Bonnie Parker. The prisoners got as far as Ohio before police recaptured them a week later, earning Barrow an additional fourteen-year sentence on top of previous charges.
Following trial, Barrow was sent to Houston County’s Eastham Farm in the Texas Prison System. Desperate to avoid working in the cotton fields as was expected of prisoners, Barrow asked a fellow inmate to chop off two of his toes on his left foot during a work detail. Soon thereafter, Barrow’s mother, Cumie Barrow, started a sympathy campaign, leading Texas Governor Ross Sterling to grant his release in February of 1932.
For another two years, Bonnie and Clyde roamed free but hunted. They met their fate on May 23, 1934, in a hail of bullets from lawmen in an ambush near Sailes, Bienville Parish, Louisiana. In the years following their deaths, popular culture characterized Bonnie and Clyde as latter-day Robin Hoods, although later efforts portrayed the pair as rarely showing any signs of remorse or social conscience. Though the details of the exploits of Barrow and his partners remain hotly contested, it is clear that he faced some of the earliest challenges of his notorious career here in Waco.
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]]>In the mid-twentieth century, Waco underwent major changes through the federally funded Urban Renewal Agency of Waco. Areas impacted included numerous city blocks between LaSalle Avenue and Waco Drive. The project greatly affected the city’s people, businesses, schools, and buildings, including Waco’s most prominent landmark, the ALICO building.
Between 1964 and 1966, the ALICO (American Life Insurance Company) building received major updates. The largest and most significant addition to the structure was the ALICO Inn and its convention facilities. The 22-story ALICO building, originally known as the Amicable building, was completed in 1911, and designed by architects Roy E. Lane and Sanguinet & Staats. It stood as the tallest office building in the southwestern United States at its completion. Once located in the central business district, it served as a vital part of the city’s economy. In order to remain that way, it needed to keep pace with the rapidly changing business climate of Waco in the 1950s and ’60s.
With the closing of the Roosevelt Hotel and its conversion into a retirement facility, more downtown hotels were needed, and the Waco Chamber of Commerce was receptive to ideas such as the creation of the ALICO Center. The city wanted to attract conventions and shoppers to the downtown area. Twenty-nine-year-old architect and owner of Down-Tel Corporation, Jay Frank Powell, initiated the center’s proposal. According to an article in the September 20, 1964, Waco Tribune-Herald, the Waco Chamber, when presented with the ALICO Center plan: “pounced on Powell like a piece of beef dangled before a starving lion.”
When completed in 1966, the ALICO Center Inn contained 115 rooms for overnight guests and a second-floor meeting room that sat 250 in a banquet or 1,000 to 1,200 people auditorium-style. It was described as a “downtown motor hotel with convention facilities, a motor bank, and a five-story parking garage.” The ALICO Center was designed to match its changing surroundings, including part of Austin Avenue’s closure to make it into a pedestrian mall, another part of the Waco Urban Renewal Agency’s planning.
At the 1964 ALICO Center groundbreaking ceremony, the president of Amicable Life Insurance Company, Franklin Smith, stated, “It will be not only a step toward completion of ALICO Center, but mark the beginning of a new atmosphere and a new enthusiasm in downtown Waco.” Additionally, Waco’s mayor Roger Conger compared the event to “the historic groundbreaking for the Amicable building more than fifty years ago.”
The end result, completed in 1966, changed the design of the original 1911 ALICO building, with the new hotel, convention center, parking garage, and motor bank joined directly to it. As a result, the ALICO Center’s additions took up nearly the entire 400 block of Austin Avenue—stretching much of the complex back to Washington Avenue. The entire redesign of the 1966 ALICO Center seemed well balanced in appearance—and represented the mid-century modern architectural style frequently seen during the period.
However, the ALICO Center as it appeared in 1966 is no longer. Like many other downtown businesses, the center struggled as many retailers moved out to the suburbs. The hotel and convention center were demolished in the late nineties, and the space is now used as a parking lot. The main vintage 1911 building and parking garage complex remain and retain most of the later modifications, including much of the 1966 addition’s façade at street level, wrapping around Austin Avenue, the parking garage along Fifth Street, and back to the Washington Avenue side of the complex.
The ALICO building has stood for over a century, remaining a successful combination of old and “new.” Most importantly, it continues to serve as Waco’s most prominent downtown landmark.
]]>Meticulous and exacting, prolific Waco architect Milton W. Scott crafted a legacy throughout the city that has withstood the test of time. Today, his historic buildings stand as hallmark pieces of Waco’s rich history.
Born in New Orleans on August 23, 1872, Milton William Wallace Scott came from a long line of Scottish engineers, inventors, and builders. When his family moved to Waco following his father’s death in 1883, Scott found work as an apprentice carpenter at the age of eleven in order to support his widowed mother and three sisters. Although he never received a formal college education, Scott loved to read and study, and after his mother remarried, he began to work as a draftsman for his stepfather John P. Powers.
Scott left his stepfather’s business in 1906 when he began to collaborate with Glenn Allen on the design of First Baptist Church of Waco. At that same time, the pair also began to draw up plans for the construction of the Artesian Manufacturing and Bottling Plant (now, the Dr Pepper Museum and Free Enterprise Institute). In 1907, he began working with noted Waco architect Roy E. Lane to design various private homes as well as the Rotan Grocery Company and the Brazos Investment Company.
As his reputation throughout the city grew, Scott received additional jobs which would cement his reputation as a Waco icon. In 1910, he partnered with T. Brooks Pearson on the design of Waco High, an elaborate three-storied project costing $140,000 (over $3 million in 2015) at its completion in 1913. During that extensive project, Scott met and married Ivy Eugenia Thompson Haythornwhite. The couple later had two children. By 1916, the couple purchased a family home at 617 North Fourth Street (as indicated on the Waco History map), and Scott designed and built a cluster of cottages and apartments around the home to rent out. Following 1913, Scott left his partners and branched out into his own work, though he sometimes employed associates and draftsmen to help with the workload.
Scott’s meticulous nature produced impressive architectural structures, but also frustrated many contractors. After his death, his son noted that Scott thought it was as his duty, as the on-site representative of the building’s owners, to oversee each detail of the construction process. Although his exacting demands may have produced some irritation, the results were unquestionable, as evidenced by the durability and strength of his designs. For instance, Scott designed many of the surviving multistory buildings of the 1953 tornado which devastated much of downtown Waco.
Scott’s work consumed his life. He took only two vacations during the last fifteen years before his death and worked tirelessly to ensure the quality and craftsmanship of his buildings. He designed buildings for various groups throughout the city, including eighteen public school buildings, portions of the Waco Methodist Home, Temple Rodef Shalom, and various buildings on the campuses of Baylor University and Texas A&M.
Though he had become well known throughout Waco and Central Texas, Scott scrambled for jobs after the Depression hit. He had been working to design an apartment complex as a personal project, but he lost most of his savings in the economic downturn. He struggled to find architecture commissions, and financial hardships compounded upon pre-existing health problems. He passed away in 1933.
Though some of Scott’s iconic work was torn down or destroyed during urban renewal in the 1960s, many of the buildings he designed still stand today. Structures such as Waco High and the Roosevelt Hotel convey this city’s great history while serving as reminders of Scott’s incredible work and lasting legacy.
]]>On May 11, 1953, a destructive force tore through Waco and forever altered the face of the city. The tornado injured 600 people, took 114 lives, and damaged hundreds of businesses. The chaotic aftermath of this deadly storm left an indelible mark upon the Waco community.
On the morning of May 11, the New Orleans Weather Bureau issued a tornado warning for West and Central Texas. Yet life in Waco continued at its normal pace. Some Wacoans placed stock in the old Waco Indian legend that claimed that the hills and bluffs surrounding the city kept it safe from tornados. Others, such as Baylor geologist emeritus O.T. Hayward, argued that Waco was situated atop an an uplift on the Balcones escarpment (or fault line) served to precipitate severe weather along the I-35 corridor, which roughly follows the escarpment. Still, few took heed of the storm warnings issued by the National Weather Service that day, as the weather was the same as it had been for days: warm and muggy.
The weather grew severe as the day progressed. Thunderstorms developed, and many downtown shoppers and businessmen rushed into buildings in order to take cover from the rain. Around 4 p.m. the sky suddenly darkened and hail the size of baseballs fell. It seemed to many as though night had fallen. As the storm worsened, some tried to contact family and loved ones, only to find the phone lines had gone dead.
Around 4:30, a tornado touched down southwest of Waco and tore through residential areas. At 4:36, it struck downtown Waco. The F-5 tornado cut a swath nearly one-third of a mile wide with winds up to 260 miles per hour. After tearing through downtown, it exited the city and continued northeast for several more miles.
Many of the buildings in downtown Waco were not built with such a severe storm in mind. Only buildings with steel-frame structures, such as the Amicable (ALICO) building and the Roosevelt Hotel, were able to withstand the severe winds. Others, such as the R. T. Dennis building, collapsed, killing thirty of the people within and injuring several more. The tornado destroyed 196 buildings, and damaged hundreds of others so badly that they were later torn down. Some, such as the Dr Pepper bottling plant, withstood smaller amounts of damage which the owners later repaired. Outside of downtown, the tornado demolished nearly six hundred homes in East Waco.
The aftermath of the storm was chaotic, and confusion and disorganization characterized initial rescue efforts. The destruction was massive, and the city was entirely unprepared to handle such a disaster. Survivors served as the first responders, and as personnel from James Connelly Air Force Base, local and state law enforcement, Baylor University students, and others joined the work, an organizational system developed. Members of the Red Cross, Salvation Army, National Guard, army, and air force also arrived to aid in the rescue efforts.
Though estimates vary, approximately $51 million of property damages occurred. The city received around $9 million in order to aid recovery, including federal assistance, a grant from the Red Cross, and private donations collected by local civic leaders. Yet even this relief could not counter the serious blow the tornado dealt to the downtown business community. Some areas of the city never fully recovered.
Although this catastrophe, recognized as the deadliest Texas tornado since 1900, devastated downtown, it also brought the Waco community together. Countless hours of volunteer efforts poured into the recovery of the city. The aftermath of the Waco tornado also contributed to the development of an efficient tornado warning system for the entire nation, and promoted greater communication amongst relief agencies to better deal with future disasters.
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