LAST CALL FOR ALCOHOL: The Grim Ballad of 17th Street...

 

By EDUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ

McALLEN, Texas | You can still find a few bars along the city's once all-Mexican street, but that dream of making 17th Street in the party image of Austin's 6th Street died and nobody cared. Not even Richard Cortez, the current Hidalgo County judge who worked hard for the bar scene while mayor of the City of Palms.

Cortez likely would rather forget all about it.

Forgotten, it is. To drive down 17th is to marvel not at the ritzy, cool bars but at the demoralizing decay. Most of the bar's owners (it was to be the city's red-carpet Entertainment District, btw) have left the scene, this after taking ridiculously huge tax breaks authorized by the daring, gambling McAllen City Commission when the drag opened back sometime about 2008.

Today, 17th is struggling to morph into something else (better?), only you won't hear a peep from the now gun-shy city. Current Mayor Javier Villalobos may have partied there, but why would he wish to publicize that, right?

Right.

The intriguing Pecado Night Club, its front facade shown in photo above, opened...and then...reportedly shutdown when residents complained about the name. It is located on the far-southern end of the street, not more than a block north of old, abandoned Roosevelt Elementary School. A sign on its door alerts the neighborhood of a filing for a liquor license it never needed.

The still-visible alcoholic makeover 17th Street received hangs on by a nail. Some bars are still doing some business on weekends, but it's not what was promised. That heyday ended less than a year after it began, after loud customer complaints of high drink prices and occasional brawls.

Now, it stands as a monument to a failed effort. A street as a theme park did not sell, even as grouchy fans of the stab at greatness remember the hard partying. A one-way, southern-aimed drag, the 17th Street district began just south of Old Business Hiway 83 and went for five/six blocks of wall-too-wall bars and night clubs. You can still see the ragged remains of some bars that shut down long ago but whose facades sort of remain in sunbaked fronts, names seen in falling signs and lettering.

Was it worth it?

Those who backed the doomed entertainment district would likely say, "Yes!" Others would argue that the idea was a joke played on city taxpayers. Former Mayor Cortez rarely said anything about the decision to spark and then surrender such a party street. Neither did any member of the city commission. The deals were struck, the plan sank soon-enough and elected officials opted to look the other way. Not everything we do and back works, they said in their own way.

And so there it is - a once-fabled street often talked about as the Main Street for the Hispanic community used and abused. Gone are the old Mexico Theater, the El Gallo restaurant, the El Pocito eatery - all replaced by newfangled bars that themselves came and went. About all that remains from a  collection of businesses catering to the city's Mexican-American population are the El Rey Theater and El Rex Cafe. Numerous bakeries (La Estrella), barber shops, bridal salons, busy grocery (City Cash Grocery, La Tienda De Ismael Gonzalez) stores and finance companies went the way of the dinosaur. Their memory remains only in photographs and morning conversations by the elderly at, say, El Rex.

Cortez and the city paid no price, other than seeing gaudy projected tax revenues never materialize.

To them, it was just a trade-off.

A trade-off in the same manner as was the abandonment of Main Street a few blocks to the east, where today it is nothing more than a collection of economic stores marketing their cheap wares to a clientele mostly from neighboring Reynosa, Mexico.

McAllen likes to portray itself as the best, most-progressive city in the Rio Grande Valley - and it is in many aspects - but the expensive Entertainment District experiment was a massive, indisputable failure. Not that anyone talks about it. The mess has been nicely hushed-up for years, very much like an adulterous adventure to be kept under wraps.

Storied 17th Street can't talk and heal its own wounds, but those scars are quite-visible to anyone driving the doomed and damned few blocks city officials fucked-up royally...

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