9 -20-1988
By: BUD KENNEDY’S CITY BEAT – of the Fort Worth Star Telegram
Sawdust is flying on the South Side, where two brave new owners will return beautiful turn-of-the-century Hemphill Street homes to their former glory.
Well, sort of.
The stately Zapata Funeral Home at 2200 Hemphill St. is being restored, whether the ghosts living there like it or not. Across the street, Guerter-Harris house has a new paint job, but maybe “restored” isn’t the word.
Joseph Hedary bought maybe the oldest house on Hemphill and decided to paint it – pink….
House beautiful: Hemphill Street is a strange and, uh, colorful strip. Prostitutes work one end, nuns pray at the other.
Between them are bars, doctors, Paris Coffee Shop cream pies, more bars, taquerias and the Edna Gladney Home.
None of it was there in 1905, when real state agent Arnold Guerter built a stone house at 2257 Hemphill St. His grandson, Red Guertler, remembers it in the ’20s.
“Horses and mules grazed out back,” he said. “it was definitely country. Beyond that, down at Berry Street, we called that Ignorant Hill.” (Now, it’s Travis Avenue Parking Hill.)
A neighbor said the pink palace “looks like a whorehouse.” Guertler, 67, chose other words.
“It’s pitiful,” he said. “It’s awful. It’s disgraceful.”…
…Or …: ”It’s different,’” Hedary said.
“That’s what they say to my face, anyway,” said the oldest son of Fort Worth’s Hedary restaurant family, standing inside his pink house.
“Evebody unloads on me,” Hedary said. “Only two or three say it’s no good. The rest just frown and say, ‘Well, it’s certainly different.’ ”
It’s smart for Hedary, who wants to rent the house as a law office. Hot pink, bright blue and green trim should bring in lots of green in the predominantly Hispanic neighborhood.
“I think pink stone loooks good, ” he said. “The light color makes it look bigger. … Maybe this will help me get a tenant.”…
Burying the ghosts: Behind the fence on the corner, lawyer Jim Stanley and his wife, Christi, are challenging ghosts. They bought the 1908-vintage funeral home, will restore it (in original colors) for this law practice.
“I never saw ghosts,” former owner Jeri Harper explained, “But we used to run ambulances, and one of the dispatchers heard somebody playing the organ one night.”
The huge yellow-and-red brick house was among “haunted houses” we wrote about one Halloween. But we’ll problably have to leave it out this year.
Now, it’s not even the scariest house on Hemphill.
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