Thanks to everyone who joined me today for my workshop at the Texas Historical Commission’s 2018 Real Places conference. I could not have asked for a more congenial group. As promised, here is a link to today’s PowerPoint. Thanks again for participating, and I hope that the workshop will serve you well in your future efforts to tell the Texas story.
If Austin would like to be a community of rooted citizens enjoying the fruits of diversity, a soulful city, then she must first recognize and celebrate diversity in all of its manifestations and across the entire span of its admittedly brief history.
The investigation, recognition, and celebration of heritage are among the most effective tools to be used in framing and contextualizing urban planning. Through this process (narrative-based planning) everyone is given a voice, those alive today as well as those who contributed in the past.
I thought that everyone knew this already.
Yet, recently attended a “new urbanism” luncheon where the speaker spent 45 minutes talking about city planning without mentioning the words history, heritage, preservation, or conservation. She was quick with “equity” and “gentrification,” but completely incapable or unwilling to accept that cities are first and foremost about people, not objects (such as public spaces, buildings, or roads).
Heritage comes to us from the Old French, and means “that which may be inherited.” Within heritage, history is only a part. Culture and nature are equally important. But, as the word implies, all of these component parts connect our present condition to the resources and contributions from the past, our heritage.
What matters in urban planning are people. We do not plan for cities; we plan for people. An urban plan is ideally a way in which we plan the greatest good for the greatest number of people living within a particular construct called a city.
To know people, we need to know something about their heritage. I am less interested in our artificial classes of people (black, white, Latino, Anglo, male, female, rich, poor) than I am in individuals. Yet, individuals do exhibit patterns of behavior, and those patterns are helpful in planning. Why? Because the patterns are repeated.
What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun….Ecclesiastes 1:9
My work is in interpreting that which we have inherited (our heritage) so that it can be grasped, shared, and celebrated by the greater population in our city, including urban planners.
Yesterday, Austin’s Mayor Adler challenged those in attendance (predominantly landscape architects, architects, planners, engineers, public servants, nonprofits) to look for ways to democratize Austin, especially in places such as its civic spaces. My response to Mayor Adler is that we should start by democratizing Austin’s history.
Austin’s past is selectively presented. Parts have been erased and expunged from the public arena. My goal is to resurrect these histories, a small step forward in demonstrating that everyone’s contribution to what is now a great city, Austin, mattered in the past and matters now. I am no more interested in the wealthy (white) businessmen who funded our historical buildings downtown than I am in the laborers who actually built them or the tamaleros on Congress Avenue who sold them lunch.
A city without a past is barren and soulless. This is an aimless landscape, inhabited by disconnected, disengaged, hollow-eyed nomads wandering a Kuntslerian nowhere. If we in Austin would like to be a community of rooted citizens enjoying the fruits of diversity, a soulful city, then we must first recognize and celebrate this diversity in all of its manifestations and across the entire span of our admittedly brief history.
What do you know about Austin? How about our history?
Join me on December 2 as I lead a short tour of Austin’s most historic creek – Shoal Creek. We will begin at 10 AM at the new Austin Public Library, and we should be finished by 12 Noon.
If you are interested in Austin’s early history, including the Comanche trail, Austin’s first settlement at Waterloo, the original Mexican community that lined the creek, and Austin’s earliest bridges, then join us for this fascinating tour.
Charles Peveto and Kitty Henderson of the Shoal Creek Conservancy Historic Bridges Committee will join me for this walk. Please register in advance so that we know how many people to expect. As always, there is no charge for this tour.
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/shoal-creek-tour-4-a-linear-history-of-austin-tickets-38547387273
Nothing prepares you for a total eclipse. Then, nothing prepares you for your first volcano, geyser, tornado, hurricane, or earthquake, either. Words fail when forced to describe natural phenomena that engage all of the senses.
Words are enough to relate the science of an eclipse. The moon passes between the earth and sun, and blocks the sun for a brief moment. Even though the moon is 400 times smaller than the sun, it’s also about 400 times closer to Earth than the sun.
From earth’s position, the sun and moon look to be approximately the same size. The moon, therefore, perfectly blocks the sun when it passes between the sun and us. The moon completely darkens the body of the sun, leaving the corona exposed. The moon crosses the face of the sun in what seems like a brief moment. In the most recent eclipse, totality (the moment when the sun is completely blocked by the moon) only lasted about 2 ½ minutes.
Those are the facts, a pitiful left-brain explanation for a right-brain experience. The swift drop in temperature, the silence of the birds, and the gradual dimming of the sun until it blinks out for too brief of a time; none of these things can adequately described. Simply put, the eclipse has to be experienced to be perceived.
I took photographs, several hundred if I am not undercounting. Photographs are inadequate as well. But, they do give me a way of remembering how I felt standing in the elementary school grounds in Ravenna, Nebraska, sharing this brief glimpse of the universe with a few hundreds of my awed kinsmen.
Ted Lee Eubanks
24 Aug 2017
What is it that attracts creative people? Jobs, for sure. But what is needed before the jobs appear? A creative environment is a good place to start.
Austin began its transformation into one of America’s great cities in an inauspicious way. The Austin of today began with the music of yesterday.
On September 29, 1968, local musicians held a benefit at Wooldridge Square. Jim Franklin, a local artist, designed a poster for that event. With the poster, Jim introduced what would become the new Austin’s symbol – the armadillo. With this event, the new Austin, the Austin of Keep Austin Weird, had a birthplace and a brand.
In 1970, Eddie Wilson, inspired by Franklin’s art, named his new music venue the Armadillo World Headquarters (AWH). On August 12, 1972, a newly arrived Willie Nelson first appeared at AWH, and he later invited his Nashville friends to join him. With the AWH, the new Austin found a home.
With this event, the new Austin, the Austin of Keep Austin Weird, had a birthplace and a brand.
Places that succeed in attracting and retaining creative class people prosper; those that fail don’t.”
— Richard Florida
In 1974, Austin City Limits began its lengthy run, and Eeyore’s Birthday moved to Pease Park from its quiet beginning on the University of Texas campus. Cliffton Antone opened Antone’s on East 6th in 1975, accelerating the transformation of Austin into the “Live Music Capital of the World.”
Civil rights progress marched through Austin, as well. On March 9, 1962, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. came to the University of Texas and spoke in front of 1,200 people at the Texas Union Ballroom. “Old Man Segregation is on his deathbed,” King said to the crowd. “The only question is how expensive the South is going to make the funeral.”
In August 1963, nearly 4,000 civil rights activists marched from the Capitol to Wooldridge Square, led by Booker T. Bonner. Austin’s Lyndon Baines Johnson, who announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate in 1948 from Wooldridge Square’s bandstand, as president signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
The Economy Furniture factory strike in 1968 energized the Latino community. By the early 1970s, the creative forces of Austin’s Latino and African-American communities, previously balkanized by Jim Crow, swept into the mainstream.
Musicians, artists, and an eclectic collection of creatives began to relocate to our odd little community. In 1978, twenty-five-year-old college dropout John Mackey opened SaferWay, and two years later a merger led to the first Whole Foods Store. Whole Foods sold natural foods to our growing community of creatives.
Michael Dell began building and selling personal computers from his dorm room at the University of Texas in 1984 at the age of 19. Remember; in the early days computers were countercultural (Steve Jobs named his company after the Beatles’ label). South-by-Southwest started in 1987, and by 2000 we were concerned as to how we might Keep Austin Weird.
The more I study Austin, the more I am convinced that Austin is a textbook example of the creative community. Keep Austin Weird is just another way of saying Keep Austin Creative. Austin’s creative community, that which led us out of a white-rocks-and-cedar-trees, hardscrabble existence, can be traced to places such as Wooldridge Square and the improbable symbol of a pot-smoking armadillo.
