Gary Cartwright
The Terror of Tarrytown
How an animal rights zealot ruined my favorite shopping center.
(Page 2 of 2)
For years the shopping center was owned by Daniels’s mother, Mary Lee Crusemann, a glamorous redhead who drove a vintage yellow sports car (either a Jaguar or a Cord, depending on which old-timer does the recollecting). Mary Lee inherited the property from her husband, Paul Crusemann, a great-grandson of former Texas governor E. M. Pease. Paul’s mother, Margaret Graham Crusemann, and uncle, Niles Graham, developed the shopping center on part of the Pease family estate of Woodlawn and named it for Tarrytown, New York, a favorite family retreat. Mary Lee was a popular presence, a tough but fair businesswoman. “She was very loyal to her tenants,” recalls retired realtor Eden Box, whose company leased office space from her. “If a business wasn’t making money, she’d ride out the tough times with them. Her daughter is just reckless. She has no feeling of compassion or responsibility to the neighborhood.”
Nearly every neighbor, tenant, or former tenant who agreed to talk to me said the same thing: Daniels’s crusade on behalf of animals comes at the expense of the residents of Tarrytown. “She put a lot of businesses under,” says Judy Willcott, the founder of Texas French Bread. Willcott tried to save her Tarrytown franchise by agreeing to drop all meat products, including turkey and tuna sandwiches, from her luncheon menu in return for a one-year lease extension. It was a disaster. “The change in the menu led directly to the closing of that store,” Willcott told me. “It was very costly for us.” It was costly, too, for the neighborhood, where the quality of life has suffered measurably with each business closure. An investment firm now occupies the Grocery’s old space (hawking pork bellies and cattle futures, I suspect). ReForm Pilates has replaced the wedding shop. The Texas French Bread is now a package-shipping operation. The Holiday House’s exit made way for the NuAge vegetarian restaurant, which closed not long ago following a family emergency. “The tenants are terrified to speak up, but all of us think she has hurt business,” a current renter told me privately. “Her response is ‘The entire economy has been down.’ That’s BS. The economy has been thriving except for here.”
If a landlord had shut down this many popular businesses in East Austin, protesters with hayforks would be storming city hall, but demonstrations are considered gauche in Tarrytown. In the ripple of outrage that followed the closing of the Grocery, the leadership of the West Austin Neighborhood Group debated requesting a meeting with Daniels, but even this mild attempt at rebuke failed to get the necessary votes from its members. Daniels still owns and occasionally occupies the Crusemann family home, which is on a cul-de-sac down the street and around the corner. Neighbors say she is as secretive and unapproachable as her mother was gregarious. “She has an attorney represent her at neighborhood meetings,” says one who asked not to be named. When Mary Lee owned the property, the neighbor told me, she permitted kids to cut through her yard on their way to Reed Park. “Now there’s an iron-gated fence across the front and no mailbox.” People who knew Daniels at Austin High remember her as overweight and standoffish, a wallflower who didn’t mix well. Now in her mid-sixties, she is reportedly slim and attractive, though still not much of a socializer. Some speculate that by trashing the shopping center, she’s taking revenge for some perceived slight years ago.
The only person willing to take on Daniels publicly has been Austin American-Statesman columnist John Kelso, who has posed such rhetorical questions as “How can you be cruel to a fish egg?” and once threatened to eat a different animal every day until she agreed to be interviewed (she never did). Kelso was able to flush her out briefly earlier this year when he published a photograph taken in 1975 of Daniels wearing what was identified as silver fox; she sent word that it was a coat trimmed with feathers and that, in any case, she hasn’t purchased or worn fur since 1986, when she had her animal epiphany and joined the board of the Houston Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The organization opened her to a world of information about the treatment of animals, Daniels informed me through her publicist, then proceeded to share that information in excruciating detail.
One doesn’t have to be a vegetarian or vegan to understand the cruelty of the slaughterhouse or the horror of skinning creatures for their fur. As the owner of three (terribly spoiled) dogs, I’m constantly reminded of our responsibilities to creatures great and small. I have written and spoken about corporations that subject animals to unspeakable cruelties, pollute our rivers and air, and cost us billions in subsidies to farmers. I admire and respect Daniels’s passion for animal rights and her generous contributions to the Houston SPCA and PETA. I equally appreciate her right as a property owner to let her ethical perspective drive her business decisions. But what she’s done to Tarrytown strikes me as a crime against nature far worse than eating meat or wearing fur.
Daniels doesn’t see it that way, of course. When I asked if she felt a moral responsibility to her neighbors and tenants, she replied that her moral responsibility was “to stand up against the most egregiously immoral industry of our time, the factory farm.” She dismissed complaints from people who told me they bought a home in Tarrytown partly because they could send their kids across the street for a loaf of bread or a decent turkey sandwich. “To buy a home … with the expectation that nearby retail businesses will never change is unrealistic,” she said, pointing out that such “inconveniences” pale compared with the cruelties of the slaughterhouse.
Besides, she might have added, she’s willing to inconvenience herself too for the greater good. In 2002, for instance, she ripped the leather off the seats of her brand-new, $92,000 Mercedes-Benz CL500 and sent it to PETA, which had activists in cow suits personally deliver the shreds to DaimlerChrysler’s corporate offices in Auburn Hills, Michigan, and Stuttgart, Germany. In a subsequent letter to the automaker, Daniels explained that she had tried repeatedly to buy a Mercedes with cloth seats. In frustration, she had the CL500’s seats recovered with cloth. When I referred to this fit of pique as a “theatrical demonstration,” Daniels replied that, in fact, it was very effective. Because of the publicity her stunt generated, she told me, DaimlerChrysler decided to make leather-free interiors available on all models.
If true, it’s a victory for animals and rich folk alike, and we all owe Daniels an apology. The rich deserve ethical treatment too.
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