The East End, by Chuck Stinnett
I’ve heard of it for nearly a third of a century, But I’ve never been precisely sure where it is located.
It’s not for lack of trying.
Years ago, wanting to know the precise boundaries of the East End, I asked the late Richard Overby, who I considered to be an East Ender.
Colonel Ove didn’t mind voicing his opinion. But ask him a direct question and he could get squirrely.
He was suspicious of interrogations; he didn’t like being pinned down. If it was worth enough for you to ask, then the answer had some value, and he wasn’t going to just give it away. So he hoarded his answer.
To an outsider, the neighborhoods south of Washington Street are an enigma. Some of its streets run for miles; some are only a half-block long, and they don’t all line up in a decipherable grid.
Once upon time, though, kids in or around the East End knew the boundaries those streets represented and the rules associated with them. They knew everyone who lived on their street and those surrounding them. Those streets formed borders that separated races, defined neighborhoods and even decided the outcome of elections.
Knowledge of the boundaries could be a matter of survival. For a poor, skinny kid like Ronnie Jenkins, who grew up to become editor of this newspaper, it meant knowing when to walk through a neighborhood and when to run. He grew up in the 1940s near the corner of Holloway and Washington streets, which to his mind was in kind of a no-man’s land. So mostly he ran – or avoided foreign neighborhoods altogether.
“I didn’t go to the East End much,” he said.
But doggone it, where does the East End begin and end? The answer depends on how old you are.
Bill Sheffer, 82, has lived in what he calls the East End his whole life. A retired fire-fighter, he is a painter and an artist who creates sculptures out of driftwood. He pens songs and poems, and raises eight-foot-tall tomato plants. He attributes his good health and spry step, in part, to his love of dancing.
He is also a chronicler of the old East End, when Letcher Street and Powell Street were dotted with groceries, barbershops and beauty salons, stores, service stations, lunch counters and far more churches than saloons.
Sheffer defines the East End in some of the narrowest of terms: Washington Street to Madison Street (plus a stretch of Pringle and Mill streets), and Atkinson Street to Meadow Street.
Dutch Herzog, who grew up in the East End a few years later than Sheffer, largely agrees with that description, although he acknowledges that some folks believe the territory extends all the way to today’s U.S. 41-South.
Most respondents to my unscientific survey agreed that Washington Street — or perhaps the north side of Washington Street – constitutes the northern boundary. But former mayor Tom Davis puts it at Center Street, to ensure that the old Bear Brand hosiery mill sits solidly within the East End.
You can quibble here or there, but for East Enders of that generation, one thing rings true.
“In our minds, we always said the East End started at Meadow Street,” Herzog said.
Meadow Street isn’t a major thoroughfare; it’s a modest cross-street on which motorists must stop at several stop signs over its span of about seven blocks. It seems an unlikely borderline.
Indeed, for many younger Hendersonians, the East End extends much closer to the Ohio River than Meadow Street.
Tom Floyd’s uncle Dick in the late 1950s bought a grocery at the corner of Clay and Meadow streets; Floyd now operates Tom’s Market deli and grocery there. He doesn’t hesitate to say that the East End runs all the way west to Green Street.
Neither does Heath Farmer, 34, who grew up in Henderson and who, as campus pastor of One Life Church, hopes to ignite a revitalization of the East End through the Engage Henderson program that he is helping lead. To him, the East End extends to Green Street (though he acknowledges that some residents of the Alves/Alvasia street neighborhood east of Powell Street “don’t consider themselves East Enders”).
But some 50-something Hendersonians aren’t so sure.
Frank Gibson moved with his parents to Countryview subdivision on Old Madisonville Road in 1964, and he attended Weaverton School on the southernmost tip of the East End. Since 1994, he’s owned and operated Thomason’s Barbecue on Atkinson Street. He agrees with Sheffer and Herzog as to three of the four East End boundaries. But what about the western boundary?
“That’s what I was afraid you were going to ask,” Gibson said. “I don’t know whether you go all the way to Holloway Street or not.”
John Marshall is similarly uncertain. His father, Gene, bought T&T Drugs at Powell and Letcher streets in the very heart of the East End in the 1950s.
John, the current owner, has worked as a pharmacist there for 30 years. He doesn’t blink at describing the East End’s boundaries as “Madison Street, Atkinson Street, Washington Street…”
“Then,” Marshall said, “I don’t know. Maybe it’s Alves Street, something like that. It just depends on how far toward Green you want to go.” Jenkins, the 73-year-old former editor, doesn’t think so. “I don’t think Holloway Street was” in the East End, he said.
Asked for the western border of the East End, Jenkins said: “I’m pretty sure it was Meadow Street.” Why Meadow?
Just over a century ago, a little settlement known as Audubon was thriving just east of Henderson.
The area’s first big indus-try, a massive brick cotton mill, opened there on Washington Street in 1883.
Later, a wagon factory opened on Atkinson Street.
Woodworking operations and a Heinz ketchup plant would follow. But Audubon remained a community distinct from Henderson. An 1897 Sanborn fire insurance map shows that the old city limits ran within a stone’s throw of Meadow. Similarly, a 1905 city directory contained separate listings of residents of Henderson and of Audubon – and those listings demonstrate that the dividing line was near Meadow Street.
By then, the industrious little village had caught the eyes of city officials in Henderson, who sought to annex Audubon and its 3,000 residents. Audubon residents were agreeable only if Henderson would build them a new school.
The annexation took place, and in 1908, Audubon Grade School opened at Clay and Letcher streets.
The neighborhood would still be known to many as Audubon. But gradually, the eastern annexation took on a new name.
It became known as the East End, and coming from there became a point of pride for many — even if its arbitrary boundaries would someday spill over into foreign neighborhoods.
