Vick's Lake -- A Popular Park on Buffalo Bayou
by Louis F. Aulbach and Linda C. Gorski
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A century ago, Houston residents escaped the hectic pace and the heat of summer in the city by spending a relaxing day in the park, much as we do today. Picnicking among the shady trees along Buffalo Bayou was popular. So was canoeing the bayou and paddling on Vick's Lake. The bayou swimming hole in Vick's Park was considered to be one of the city's best.
Vick's Park was on the north bank of Buffalo Bayou between the modern Studemont Street and Waugh Drive. It was named for the family that had owned the land.
Three young men of the Vick family in their early twenties left Tennessee about 1880 and came to Texas. By 1900, the three had married, started families of their own and established themselves in the communities that were developing northwest of Houston along the Washington Road. The Vick brothers and their families lived in close proximity to each other near the modern intersection of Washington Avenue and Waugh Drive. Tobe S. Vick raised cattle on his farm lying between Washington Road and the bayou. Andrew Vick, the oldest brother at age 45, was joined by the youngest brother, B. S. Vick, as owners of rental property.
The industrial site that developed near Chaney Junction, the intersection of the Houston and Texas Central Railroad - with the Galveston, Houston and San Antonio Railroad spur - offered opportunities for employment for several hundred men. Both the Fidelity Cotton Oil Company and the Butler Brick Works were major employers. Many of the factory workers and their families lived in the scattering of neighborhoods along Washington Road.
The Vicks lived in this neighborhood and rented houses to these workers who held jobs as oil mill laborers, house carpenters, day laborers, dairy men, farmers, wood cutters and coal burners. The largely working class neighborhood was surprisingly integrated for the time. According to the 1900 census records, the homes around the Vick families were occupied by twenty black families and twenty-one white families who were evenly distributed in the block patterns of the census.
In addition to Tobe Vick's farm, Andrew Vick owned a large tract of land west of the Butler Brick Works on the GH&SA spur which included most of what would become Vick's Park. In a situation that may have been outstanding foresight or it may have been merely fortuitous, the Vicks rode the crest of the boom in housing and residential development that accompanied the growth of Houston in the two decades that spanned the turn of the century.
The Vicks Park Addition, tightly sandwiched between the Hartman Addition to the west and the Riverside Park Addition to the east, consisted of two rows of lots located along Vida Street. Named for Andrew Vick's daughter Vida, Vida Street was the main avenue of the small subdivision. It ran south from Washington Road to the edge of the high bluff overlooking the valley of Buffalo Bayou where, in 1910, the 48 year old Tobe Vick lived on his two acre farm at 47 Vida Street with his wife Zadella and their two young children. Tobe still considered himself a cattle stockman.
Perhaps inspired by the success of his real estate ventures, Andrew Vick moved on to San Antonio to explore the opportunities there. By 1910, Andrew and his son Ivan, living with their extended families at 325 West French Place in San Antonio, describe themselves as real estate speculators.
The forty-four acres of land on the north bank of Buffalo Bayou between the modern Studemont Street and Waugh Drive became Vick's Park by 1917, a city park. Later, the park would be incorporated in the property along the bayou to the west as a part of Cleveland Park. The channelization of Buffalo Bayou in the mid-1950's removed the northward curving bend in the bayou at Waugh Drive. The oxbow that was Vicks Lake was filled and contoured during the construction of Memorial Drive and the Waugh Drive cloverleaf. Today, the former park site is the City of Houston's Spotts Park.
The Vicks Park Addition has been carved up by the widening and extension of Heights Boulevard on the south side of Washington Avenue, as well as by the extension of Yale Street south to connect with Waugh Drive along the route of the former Vida Street. Only two homes of the addition, built about 1926, remain. Lying between commercial tracts on the north and an office building to the south, these remnants of the Vicks Park Addition are soon to be lost to the rapid pace of development occurring along the Washington Avenue corridor. Tobe S. Vick's homestead is, in 2004, an office building and parking garage at 55 Waugh Drive, owned by the Parkway Investments Partners.
By 1920, the Vick brothers no longer appeared in the records of Houston. Their park has been transformed under another name. Their subdivision will soon be renewed into something else. In the fading light of history, Vick Avenue, located across the bayou one block south of Allen Parkway at Rochow Street, will linger as the sole reminder of the Vick family legacy in Houston's "western" suburbs.