When you hear the word “Kansas” what first comes to mind? Flat? Dorothy? What about stone, as in native stone?
Native stone is the essential Kansas. Once an inland ocean, the shallow soils of much of Kansas are underlain with limestone strata. Pioneers soon discovered that while lacking in trees (think lumber) Kansas did not lack building materials. These pioneers soon found ways of using stone in place of lumber, as in native stone fence posts, fences, jails, churches, buildings, and the like.
Stone is now out of fashion, but the native stone structures remain. Efforts are underway in parts of Kansas (such as the Native Stone Scenic Byway) to not only restore native stone structures but to resurrect its use as a building material.
I have collected a gallery of my favorite Kansas native stone images on Pinterest for display. Native stone is (or certainly should be) a cherished Kansas tradition, and an elemental part of the Kansas heritage. Enjoy.
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
Austin at night from Auditorium Shores, by Ted Lee Eubanks
Austin has no Burnham Plan. Austin has no Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Austin has no Wissahickon. We improve our spaces on an ad hoc, piecemeal basis. Yet to become a great city, Austin will need great spaces like those designed by Daniel Burnham and Frederick Law Olmsted, fashioned with a Jacobsian sensitivity for the people.
The Colorado River courses across farm lands, prairies, paddyfields, and by small towns, golf courses, nuclear power plants, and oil refineries to Matagorda Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. Shoal Creek meanders south to the Colorado River, an Austin river now an Austin lake. The recent upsurge in residential development along Lady Bird Lake has given Austin a waterfront where none before existed. Shoal Creek laps near the foundations of new high-rise condos and hotels.
Cities along oceans or lakes begin with at least one border defined by water. These borders also help define the perspectives of those who live in the city. Extreme examples include islands such as Galveston where the entire city is circumscribed by water. In all of these instances, the cities, and their residents, were and are defined by water from their nascence.
Not so Austin. Springs such as Barton offered early settlers an abundant supply of drinking water. The Colorado stood more as a barrier than an asset. Austin offered white rocks and cedar trees, and little more. Yet, with the impounding of Town Lake (now Lady Bird Lake), the dirt-stained Colorado became one of Austin’s characteristic landscapes. The Austin skyline reflected in the waters of Lady Bird Lake now defines Austin in the eyes of the world.
Yet, Lady Bird Lake has existed for a little over 50 years, a brief blink of an eye in the history of the city. The lake didn’t begin as a “lake.” The city needed cooling water for the Holly Street Power Plant. Recreational benefits were a byproduct.
By the 1970s Town Lake (the original name of the lake) had become a fetid cesspool. Mayor Roy Butler joined with Lady Bird Johnson to create the Town Lake Beautification Committee. The “beautification” of Town Lake, now Lady Bird Lake, continues to this day.
Austin’s lakeshore consciousness is still evolving. We are only now raising the public’s awareness of Shoal Creek as a public space. Waller Creek and Lady Bird Lake are two additional examples of public spaces that are only now attracting a level of interest and support that is necessary for them, too, to become great public spaces.
Philadelphia’s Love Park, by Ted Lee Eubanks
New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago are examples of great American cities that contain great American spaces. Many of these public spaces arose during the City Beautiful movement in the late 1800s to early 1900s. Newer cities, such as Atlanta, have not shied away from embracing great spaces. Atlanta, for example, recently unveiled a 17-year plan to complete a 22-mile transit-greenway loop with an anticipated $4.4 billion investment.
In the late 1800s we were hard-scrabbled, worried about survival rather than beautification. Yet now, as the city has become one of the most successful in this nation, it is time to return to the City Beautiful concepts first put forward by Omsted, Burnham, and others in the late 1800s.
Chicago is still guided by the principles put forth in the 1909 Plan of Chicago, known as the Burnham Plan. After the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Daniel Burnham presented the city with ideas for improving Chicago’s lakefront. Today, Chicago is blessed with 20 miles of lake shore and great spaces such as Millennium Park. Chicago’s greatness is no accident.
Philadelphia developed the Benjamin Franklin Parkway as a public works project, converting miles of slums and tenements into one of the most prestigious collections of museums in the nation. A visitor to Philadelphia would be hard pressed to believe that the Parkway has not always been the cultural epicenter of the city. Yet, inspired by the City Beautiful movement, Philadelphia invented its future.
Yet great spaces in the 21st Century are a balancing act. The public works projects of the late 1800s, those icons of the City Beautiful movement, also displaced the disadvantaged. It took Jane Jacobs, in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, to remind planners and city leaders that cities are formed of, by, and for the people who live in them.
Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.
Austin has no Burnham Plan. Austin has no Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Austin has no Wissahickon. We improve our spaces on an ad hoc, piecemeal basis. Yet to become a great city, Austin will need great spaces like those designed by Daniel Burnham and Frederick Law Olmsted, fashioned with a Jacobsian sensibility for the people.
Lake Bird Lake Sunset, by Ted Lee Eubanks
After the Rains by Ted Lee Eubanks
Ted is exhibiting some of his Shoal Creek images for the next two weekends in Austin. See more this weekend at Ted’s Austin’s Thin Green Line show at the EAST Studio Tour. The tour is Saturday and Sunday the next two weekends from 11 to 6 at the Austin Parks Foundation office (507 Calles Street).
Custer’s Meadow, Shoal Creek, Austin, Texas by Ted Lee Eubanks
