Temple Police Chief Gary Smith, who started with the department as a dispatcher in 1979, has been an officer for more than 28 years and chief for three years.

As a lifetime Temple resident, he has seen the changes and blames them, in part, on the growth of giant multi-dimensional stores.

“My parents used to go there to shop and I used to go to Jones Park with my parents,” he said, adding that he grew up around 45th Street and Avenue M.

“The way I saw that area back then was, it was oriented more into what in today’s language we would call neighborhood service,” he said. “There were smaller grocery stores, smaller retail outlets that really served more at the neighborhood level than what you see today.”

With the popularity of stores like Wal-Mart and H-E-B, smaller neighborhood shops found the competition too much to handle.

The movement of businesses from the area left vacant buildings, which were eventually put to other uses.

“You saw those buildings being reused for other services and other situations and over time that whole area seemed to transform to what you see today,” Smith said of the unsavory activity in the area.

Despite a sting that cracked down on prostitution, Cpl. Chuck Borgeson of the Temple Police Department said johns still prowl the streets searching for prostitutes, leaving female residents targets of the solicitors.

“A lot of the ladies living here are asked by men if they’re working,” Borgeson said. “The women are irritated.”

Smith estimated in the summer of 2007 that 98 percent of prostitution in Temple was on Avenue G.

He said that, although the demise of retail in the area contributed to a slow overall decline of the neighborhood, other factors should be considered, including the simple concept of age.

“The challenge that every city faces as neighborhoods age is to prevent them from declining,” he said. “I don’t know of a city that doesn’t face that problem.”

He likened the city to a living thing that must evolve and change as it grows and ages.

“Cities move and change - they’re supposed to. That’s part of a living organism. It will continue to adapt and change,” he said.

Mary Alice Marshall, 99, has seen a lot of those changes in Temple and the reason Avenue G declined is something she says she’s often wondered about.

While she admits she’s not an expert in business, she points out a possibility.

“I think what killed Avenue G was Scott & White leaving,” she said.

Marshall and her husband owned Southside Drugs when Scott & White West Building, which was located in the 600 block of South Seventh, announced it was “moving to the hills.” The hospital relocated in December 1963.

Things worked out for the couple, who sold the business about a year after the move. Still, she says there weren’t a lot of other big businesses in the area, and Scott & White was the reason a lot of the businesses located there.

Police Chief Smith speculated that the transformation took place as a slow, downward spiral that might have even gone unnoticed until it was well under way.

“In Temple and other communities it’s a very slow progression - so slow that you have a great deal of difficulty identifying what you have in police textbooks, described as a neighborhood in decline,” he said.

Ralph Evangelous, former police chief in Temple, said that during his tenure as chief, Avenue G and the surrounding area was an issue for his department.

“There was a lot of history there of drugs and prostitution and that type of activity,” he said.

Evangelous was chief of the department for nine years before leaving Temple to become chief of the Wilmington, N.C., Police Department three years ago.

He said the department had communications with the city council a number of times regarding that area and a need for cleaning it up.

“We dealt with them on that issue and had numerous cleanups and enforcement actions out there on a pretty regular basis,” he said. “It had been languishing for years.”

When asked if more could have been done in Temple, Evangelous weighed his words carefully.

“There’s always more you could do, no matter where you are and what you are doing,” he said. “The bottom line is, are there enough resources and is there enough community support to step up and do things?

“Could we have done more? Sure we could,” he said. “Should we have done more? Maybe we should have as a community,” he said, explaining that often it is up to the people and businesses in the area to sound an alarm when negative things happen in the neighborhood.

“Unfortunately, at times it takes a major incident to grab the attention of the general public,” he added.

“It’s the old saying, ‘it’s not my back yard, it doesn’t affect me.’ That’s pretty consistent no matter where I’ve been around the country.”

Smith said it is difficult to point a finger at a single entity for the downfall of the area.

“It’s hard to be proactive in policing,” Smith said, explaining that police cannot typically react to a problem until it becomes illegal or a violation of city codes, and people call attention to it.

“On Avenue G or wherever else in town … everybody who has either a financial or living interest in that area has a responsibility to see that it doesn’t decline,” he said.

If a person owns a house, he can live in it or rent it to other people, Smith said. “As long as you do everything legally, it’s none of the city’s business.”

He said, though, that foresight on the part of the city might have opened the door for prevention.

Jack Morris, who served on the Temple City Council from 1999 to 2003, said the council then recognized the problem.

“We tried to clean it up back then,” he said, explaining that the council addressed illegal activities taking place in some of the area motels and in front of the old grocery store.

“You can run them off but you couldn’t get rid of them,” he said.

Morris said the city had better luck in other problem areas at the time, including ousting drug users at Hillcrest Cemetery and across the street at Miller Park.

While police may have zeroed in on Avenue G as a hotspot for prostitution, drugs are also prevalent.

The trinity of Temple drugs consists of crack cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine.

“You do get the occasional oddball,” Smith said, mentioning powder cocaine, and date rape and prescription drugs.

Smith estimated during a fall 2007 interview about 20 percent of Temple’s drugs and drug dealing was on Avenue G. Drugs are dispersed across the city, but Smith said drug dealers tend to flock to Avenue G because of its high traffic.

“I think what drug dealing is doing on Avenue G is feeding off the disorder and the reputation that’s there,” he said.

Could something have been done sooner to stop the decline of the area? It’s difficult to assess blame, Morris said.

“As a council we don’t mini-manage the police department, so it’s a problem for them to resolve,” he said. “But they’re understaffed, or were then. They have things that are more urgent, instead of doing those types of things.

“It’s really a pathetic situation,” he said. “There are a lot of good people there.”

Wednesday: Martha’s Kitchen provides shelter, but not always solutions.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the third in a five-part series on the decline of the Avenue G area and efforts that are under way to rehabilitate it.

Over time, slow changes can go unnoticed.