Bill DeBrooke’s family referred to him as a “Grandpa Grumpy Pants” with a scruffy appearance and coarse demeanor who was unconventional and yet highly successful in making projects flourish.

DeBrooke’s look and style could be misleading. He possessed a genius for problem solving and built “a Monopoly-like real estate empire from scratch.” The empire in this case refers to Downtown Harlingen. It’s where he and his family acquired dozens of empty buildings and over many years revived a dormant downtown into a success story of antique shops and lively markets rippling with shoppers. 

“Bill often said you could have rolled bowling balls down the street at noon and not hit anyone,” DeBrooke’s family said in an autobiographical account of his life. “It is not easy to restore vitality to a blighted area of empty storefronts. There is no quick fix.”

DeBrooke liked fixing things. His wife of 45 years, Sue, spoke of a man with an analytical mind able to multitask with ease and who didn’t lack confidence in taking on projects that seemed impossible. 

“I still can’t find something I can’t do,” she recalls her husband saying.

DeBrooke’s daughter, Erinn Rhodes, spoke of an admiration in seeing the many projects her father completed in a life full of curiosities and interests.

“It was just fun,” she said of watching her father’s ingenuity.

‘Heart Of Gold’

Sue DeBrooke and Bill’s adult children recently gathered at J&B’s Café in Downtown Harlingen to recount the life of the family patriarch who had a heart of gold and was committed to making his community a better place – and doing it his way. 

DeBrooke passed in late January at the age of 83. The “Mayor of Downtown” took a real-life game board of Monopoly pieces in Harlingen and moved them skillfully and strategically to create “an incubator for budding entrepreneurs” in realizing dreams – his own and those he mentored.

DeBrooke was a child of the World War II era who was born in 1942 in San Antonio and spent his growing up years there and in nearby Floresville. Mid-Century America with thriving downtowns and movie theatres left a lasting impact on DeBrooke. He earned a degree from the University of Texas-Arlington and worked at Bell Helicopter in Fort Worth and in banking and insurance in Michigan. 

The corporate office environment was not to his liking. He yearned “for more freewheeling, entrepreneurial pursuits,” per his family’s written account of DeBrooke’s life. In 1980, he would find what he was looking for in the Rio Grande Valley.

From Movies To Jackson Street

DeBrooke and his wife first came to the Valley in the early 1980s.

DeBrooke’s brother was already in the region and invited his brother to join him in a nursery business near Brownsville. DeBrooke gave it a try but that business venture proved to be “neither lucrative nor fun,” the family account said.

DeBrooke then turned his attention to the beginnings of the video rental business. He loved movies and with the help of his son, Ray, DeBrooke would establish nine highly successful Movieland Video stores in Cameron and Hidalgo counties. When Blockbuster – that once mighty movie rental giant – wanted to enter the RGV market in early 1990s, the company made DeBrooke an offer he couldn’t refuse. 

The sale to Blockbuster gave the DeBrookes “a little money to play with,” Sue said, meaning they could focus their attention on Downtown Harlingen. Bill and Sue counted 28 empty buildings in the downtown area and 18 of them were on the city’s historic main street, Jackson Street. 

“His love of downtowns was a big piece of his life,” Rob DeBrooke said of his father. “He looked at Downtown Harlingen and had a vision that he could recreate it.”

Honoring A Legacy

Sons Rob and Ray joined their father in that effort as Sue DeBrooke worked with like-minded residents to organize the beginnings of what would become Jackson Street Market Days. 

The plan from the beginning, Rob said, was to be strategic in locating a healthy mix of businesses from retail to restaurants and professional offices into the many downtown buildings the DeBrookes were acquiring. Properties were refurbished and renovated along with improving infrastructure and landscaping in working closely with the city.

Slowly but surely improvements in Downtown Harlingen became apparent. “Everybody’s downtown,” as the DeBrookes called it, would have the added element of developing into the antique capital of the Valley. History and antiques had long been a shared interest for Bill and Sue. The reimagined downtown they shaped would become a place for antique shops, coffee shops, delicatessens, clothing stores and offices housing lawyers and architects.

Bill DeBrooke loved art, and he offered studio and gallery space to painters and sculptors and worked to develop arts events in Downtown Harlingen. DeBrooke had put his theories of neighborhood and urban revitalization to the test and kept at it for over four decades in Harlingen. 

The “mayor of downtown” transformed it. There was no better testimonial of it then a recent Friday at J&B’s on Jackson with a deli full of customers and nearly every parking space on Harlingen’s old main street taken. It’s a far cry from rolling a bowling ball down an empty street.

“There’s a huge void,” Rob DeBrooke said of his father’s passing. “We’re going to continue with the principles that he taught us. It’s the best way we can honor that legacy.”