For the past 15 months, Fermata and Ted Lee Eubanks have been working on an interpretive plan for Austin’s historic squares and Congress Avenue. Finally, the report has been released! We thank the Downtown Austin Alliance for their willingness to support this effort, and for all of the stakeholders and supporters who helped us through this effort to uncover Austin’s lost histories and to return them to their rightful place in the eye of the public.
Ted Lee Eubanks, Fermata’s founder and president, is one of two certified interpretive planners in Austin, and Fermata is the only certified interpretive planning firm available for these projects in Austin and the surrounding region.
We are making the full report available as a PDF here, so enjoy getting to know the real Austin! For those only interested in reading the executive summary, that document is also available here.
Austin’s Ann Richards Congress Avenue Bridge by Ted Lee Eubanks
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.
Bullock Texas State History Museum by Ted Lee Eubanks
The man for whom history is bunk is almost invariably as obtuse to the future as he is blind to the past…J. Frank Dobie
Austin began with Shoal Creek sitting on the sidelines. Edwin Waller adopted Shoal Creek as the western edge of the new city, and his to-be namesake as the eastern boundary. Congress Avenue became the centerline.
No longer. Austin is upside down, inside out. The city sprawls past these edges into the white-rocked and cedar-treed hinterlands. Shoal Creek neighborhoods like Old Enfield and Pemberton Heights, renewed and revitalized, eject thousands of motorists each morning to wend their ways to downtown employment.
Yet Shoal Creek pumps life in more than one direction. Shoal Creek people connect to the city through the creek, but the life of the city flows north as well. One can peer north from the mouth of Shoal Creek to the central business district, state government, the University of Texas, the Pickle Research Campus, and out to the Domain. Once an extremity, Shoal Creek is now a vital organ.
Shoal Creek is not alone in its transformation. The Colorado River, now Lady Bird Lake, and Waller Creek are evolving as well. Shoal Creek is the only one of the three to retain enough of its original form and character, however, to serve as the standard bearer for the city’s heritage.
Heritage is a squishy word, easy to mold, easy to tape to the refrigerator door. There is an element of heritage in art, in food, in architecture. Eeyore’s birthday is heritage. Wooldridge Square is heritage. Rosewood is heritage. The 1887 West 6th Street Bridge is heritage. The Bullock Texas State History Museum houses some of Austin’s heritage. SXSW is becoming heritage.
Mouth of Shoal Creek by Ted Lee Eubanks
Heritage is more than history, though. Heritage is patrimony. Heritage is legacy. Heritage is birthright. Heritage is that which previous generations left behind, consciously or unconsciously, that gives meaning to the places we live, as well as to how we live.
America is a new country, and Austin is a new city. Institutions and traditions that are well established in many of America’s older cities are either absent or in their nascence here. For example, the tradition of investing in the city through philanthropy is a new-born in Austin.
Consider Chicago, another one of America’s post-colonial metropolises. Our two cities are similar in age. Chicago was founded in 1833, and Austin in 1839. Our trajectories quickly diverged. Austin grew to 34,876 inhabitants by 1920. In the same period of time Chicago exploded to nearly 3 million (2,701,705). According to the Texas State Historical Association, “in 1905 Austin had few sanitary sewers, virtually no public parks or playgrounds, and only one paved street.” Only four years later (1909), Chicago would adopt the Burnham Plan, setting the stage for “new and widened streets, parks, new railroad and harbor facilities, and civic buildings.”
While Chicago raced forward at breakneck speed, Austin idled. While cities such as Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia were investing in great buildings and great spaces (Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia, one of the nation’s first urban renewal projects, began in 1907), Austin remained hard-scrabbled. The election to finally settle the establishment of Austin as the state capital did not take place until 1872, 30 years after the founding of the city for that expressed purpose. The new University of Texas did not hold its first classes until 1883, and the Texas state government did not occupy the new capitol building until 1888.
Austin’s “great leap forward,” ironically, is the Great Depression. Austin is the city built by the New Deal. Initiatives such as the CCC, PWA, and WPA funded many of Austin’s icons. Zilker Park, Deep Eddy, the Lamar Bridge over Lady Bird Lake, the dams on the Colorado River, including Tom Miller, Lamar Boulevard, many of the bridges over Waller and Shoal creeks, House Park, the UT Tower and Hogg Auditorium, Emma Long Metropolitan Park; all were federal relief and stimulus projects brought to Texas by strong local officials such as Mayor Tom Miller and powerful Texas congressional leaders such as John Nance Garner, Lyndon Johnson, and James P. “Buck” Buchanan. These projects did not come from a generous philanthropic community. Much of this infrastructure came from the beneficent federal government.
Even in 1964, the year the nation elected sometimes Austinite Lyndon Johnson president by landslide, Austin’s population had only grown to a little over 200,000. By 1964, Austin had a growth rate of 1.5% and a population 1% of Chicago’s.
Within 50 years, however, the pattern had dramatically changed. The Armadillo World Headquarters had set the stage for Dell Computers. By 2013, Austin topped 875,000, and Chicago hemorrhaged population (in fact, Chicago is smaller today than in 1920). One of the great cities of the twentieth century, Chicago, is moving aside for Austin, a city from the twenty-first.
West 3rd RR Trestle by Ted Lee Eubanks
Chicago shaped its future and its legacy in 1909 with the Burnham Plan. The Burnham Plan carried Chicago for a century. Austin has yet to choose. We have no vision, no plan, and whatever legacy we are leaving is being written for us by outside consultants. A city of emigrants is a city without its own past, its own heritage. We have chosen to import one instead.
I suspect that one of the visions being imported is from Chicago. Some of those leaving Chicago come here. They bring their tastes and cultures with them. With every arrival Austin changes ever so slightly from what it has been to what it may be. Some who come are here to earn the most and to invest the least. Yet there are others for whom Austin is now home, not only a destination but a destiny as well.
Yet consider the possibilities. Austin isn’t hamstrung with preconceptions of what a city should or should not be. Austin can draw upon its native traditions, as well as those of the people who have chosen to emigrate here. This amalgamation may well combine into an entirely novel heritage that guides (and profits) future generations of Austinites. Austin is poised to become one of the great twenty-first century American cities. much like twentieth century Chicago and nineteenth century Philadelphia.
At these crucial moments great cities find the will to trap opportunity and harness it for the betterment of all. Shoal Creek offers the opportunity for us to show how this should be done. These opportunities demand grand plans to accompany grand aspirations. Grand plans dance between the impositions of the past and the insensitivities of the future. At this moment, Austin has no grand plans, no path to walk. Yet the opportunity for greatness remains, waiting on an inspired few to stir men’s blood.
Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood…Daniel Burnham
Ted Lee Eubanks
1 Feb 2014
Austin City Hall by Ted Lee Eubanks
The past several months have been productive. In fact, I can’t recall a period when I have accomplished more. We have ginned out three major reports, organized my images into a major on-line gallery, traveled throughout the Caribbean to gather information for my report on Key Biodiversity Areas, and have spoken at a number of events and conferences including the National Extension Conference on Tourism in Detroit. As I write this quick update I am finishing interpretive plans for the eleven scenic byways in Kansas.
In the next few weeks I will be on the speaking trail again. I will be in Toledo in early November to conduct workshops for the Toledo Metroparks, then I will continue to the Pennsylvania to speak at the Schuylkill Highlands CLI annual breakfast. In January I will join The Conservation Fund and Ed McMahon for the first of two Appalachian Gateway Communities Regional Workshops. The first of the workshops will be held January 14-16, 2014, in Abingdon, VA (southern communities), with the second February 10-12, 2014 in Shepherdstown, WV for northern communities. Here is a link for additional information about these workshops.
Here are links to some of the work that has been produced these past few months.
For those interested in my photography, I have created a new website from my imagery at this link. Check out the new portfolios for our clients and projects. Look for much, much more in the near future.
One last note. Here is a link to a recent article covering our project in the PA Wilds. What a wonderful story! I can’t think of a nicer group of people to be having such success.
Codrington Lagoon, Barbuda, by Ted Lee EUbanksThe Nature Travel Network has published a four-part article by Fermata’s Ted Lee Eubanks on birding and conservation in Antigua & Barbuda. Ted recently developed an avitourism strategy for the islands, and this article is a result of that work. Please enjoy and share!
