11. Hamburger Row

Notorious for its vices during the 1920’s oil boom, the Row stretched from the edge of the posh four-story Garrett Hotel (since demolished) on Locust Street to the railroad depot at Hillsboro (Hwy 82-B).  It was infamous for its cheap meal joints, shanties, and prostitution and gambling in “barrelhouses” (unruly customers were rolled away in barrels). 

Just days after the news spread of the Busy-Armstrong No. 1 gusher well, H. L. Hunt – later to become the world’s wealthiest man – first stepped off the train in El Dorado in January of 1921, and noticed a handmade sign that read: ‘AS BRIGHAM YOUNG SAID OF THE UTAH VALLEY – THIS IS THE PLACE.’  At first, Hunt was more interested in seeking his fortune in a gambling hall than on the oil fields, and even opened his own gambling house on this stretch of South Washington.  However, Hunt won a lease, followed his fortune in finding oil, and built a three-story brick house on Euclid Avenue between 8th and 9th Streets (now a vacant block) in El Dorado.  He, his wife Lyda and their children lived there for several years.

Harry Hunt, in his biography of Hunt entitled Texas Rich, describes Hamburger Row:  “There were people everywhere on South Washington Street, pressing around the railroad station, spilling over every sidewalk, lobby, and door jam.  The boomers had long since overflowed every hotel in town.  Now every available hallway, nook, and cranny was packed with sleeping cots.  Tents had been thrown up to shelter still more cots in the vacant lots between the buildings.  The local citizens were renting out spaces in their own homes for $3 a night.  Barber chairs were going for $2 a night…the city council had voted to rent out the town’s recently completed city hall as office space for $1,000 an office.  Then the council voted to rent out the sidewalks.  The result was Hamburger Row, a rickety line of wooden shacks thrown up on the eastern sidewalk of South Washington Street.  In addition to hamburgers, this makeshift shopping center offered everything from hats and shoes to automobiles, oil leases, and fortunetellers.  ‘Cot runners,’ most of them teenage boys, scurried up and down the row shouting, ‘Clean beds one dollar.’”

By August 1921, the El Dorado city council voted to remove the shacks of Hamburger Row and hire new lawmen to clean up the barrelhouses.

A Little Rock journalist at the time summed it up this way, “Hamburger Row is El Dorado’s Broadway, its Rialto and its Bowery.  It is the most cosmopolitan section in the whole state, containing under its dingy roofs, every specimen of humanity possible to conceive.”