America 250 One Nation Under Roofs
This is the title of our new exhibit in Villa Finale Museum & Gardens Mathis Gallery building, which features items from the permanent collection that relate to the history of the United States. As the nation attempts to meet this milestone, our museum, under the direction of Curator Sylvia Gonzalez-Pizaña, has pulled both fine art and patriotic artifacts from the house. Some of my favorites include a collection of memorabilia from the Centennial Exposition held in Philadelphia in 1876. It is nice to view these items – normally arrayed on the second floor of the house – with more room to breathe and be seen.
There are also artifacts from the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis and 19C Stafforshire flatback porcelains that purport to be Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. They look a bit more like Prince Albert and Benjamin Franklin, but hey.
The founder of our museum, Walter Mathis, was a genuine World War 11 hero, flying 65 missions in the European theater – primarily B-25s, and earning a series of medals, some of which are on display in the gallery and some of which are still on display in the house. He also collected Currier prints of the Mexican War 1846-48, some of which are now on display in our America 250 exhibit, along with examples of his excellent collection of early maps of New Spain, Mexico and Texas.
Not all of the artifacts are antique – Among a collection of busts of U S Presidents is one of Abraham Lincoln from the 1970s – manufactured by Avon to contain aftershave!
One item I encouraged Sylvia to include was a signed portrait of William Howard Taft, the only person to serve as both US President and Supreme Court Justice. It is a family heirloom given to Walter Mathis’ grandfather who founded the Coleman Pasture Company along with the Taft family. Taft’s brother had a ranch house called La Quinta where the President stayed in 1909. The photo of Taft was signed in 1924 when Walter Mathis’ aunt was wife of the La Quinta superintendent.
Some of my favorite artworks from the collection are also in the Mathis Gallery for the America 250 show, including the stunning Julian Onderdonk painting of Matagorda Bay, which is my favorite of the several Onderdonks in the collection. My top favorite artist is Mary Bonner, and some of her amazing graphic prints are visible in the show. She had a knack for creating dynamic motion out of line and contour that reminds me of Windsor McCay among others.
You can tour the exhibit for FREE during normal hours (10-4 Tuesday-Saturday) and also of course see “the rest of the story” in the museum for the price of admission. Or, if you are a Friend of Villa Finale, the house is free! While 250 years is no Han Dynasty or Roman Empire, it is still a major achievement, and it might go on even longer!
The Culture of Heritage Conservation
What is the culture of heritage conservation and how has it evolved? I’ve spent over four decades in this field and have studied its earlier history as well, so I have some thoughts. In my current position, I see a lot of the history of this culture. Here I am in a mansion saved by a collector who donated that house and his phenomenal collection of over 12,000 items of fine and decorative art to the National Trust. Arguably that is the heritage conservation culture of the first half of the twentieth century, an antiquarian concern with preserving artistic treasures.
Walter Mathis, who restored Villa Finale, was part of this culture. A collector from childhood, he had an eye for fine and decorative arts and a collectors mentality. But he did more than save one house as a treasure and fill it with other treasures. He saved a whole neighborhood – restored partially or fully another 14 properties and even bought nondescript commercial buildings to help finance the preservation of his museum and the neighborhood writ large. Here are a few of the other houses he preserved:
Famously Walter Mathis found “like-minded” individuals to help him restore and occupy houses throughout the district. “Like-minded” meant they were urban pioneers of the 1960s and 1970s, people who valued a walkable historic neighborhood adjacent to downtown. People who were not enthusiastic about the shopping malls and sprawl housing that characterized the majority culture of that time. They may have been artists or collectors of art, but they were also urban pioneers, an evolution of the preservation culture that came before.
These cultural outliers and upstarts existed in every city, from New York’s Greenwich Village and Brooklyn Heights, to Chicago’s Old Town, Denver’s Larimer Square, Boston’s Beacon Hill and Back Bay, Charleston’s Ansonborough; from the heavenly bungalows of Pasadena and LA to the moss-covered staircases of landmark-laden New Orleans. In addition to residential districts like King William, Brooklyn Heights and Old Town, there were also districts that transformed industrial and commercial buildings into new urban pioneer communities, like the Third Ward in Milwaukee and LoDo in Denver. This was not simply an antiquarian culture. It added something new, but old at the same time.
In a sense, the culture of these historic districts reflected the old-time architecture, because the cultural values of the pioneers and early settlers were urban and urbane – the values of walkability, a life-work balance that emphasized community, and a community that emphasized working together to achieve things no individual or family could. Jane Jacobs commented on this in 1960, and Herbert Gans solidified it two years later. You could argue it was a reaction against the postwar culture’s invention of the nuclear family and its attendant zoning and transportation.
Successful historic neighborhoods are always highly organized, often with permanently staffed organizations. That began in King William in 1947 with the creation of the King William Conservation Association, which sought to save the old Victorian German neighborhood and preserve its original values. By 1967 there was a new King William Association made up of urban pioneers who wanted to raise families, restore houses, enjoy music and the arts and live in beauty and shade just minutes from downtown. The King William Conservation Association faded away in 1975, but the King William Association lives today. The culture has evolved.
They have festivals and promotions and events that cement the community culture and allow it to grow. King William has its King William Fair during Fiesta, but it also has its First Friday art walks. It has Ruby City art museum and the Blue Star arts complex, formerly an industrial site. In a city of parties, it is party central. And here we are and here I am.
When the history of a site includes preservation
The School of Architecture and Planning at UT San Antonio hosted a colloquium last weekend that began with a keynote by Davide Galleri, PhD of the University of Naples, who spoke about Robie House, the epitome of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie Style and a building I have long known. Indeed, the black and white photo he used of the 58th Street face of the house was the view out my dorm window in 1979-80.
This one is from 2008 after they had torn down my Eero Saarinen-designed dorm.
Galleri’s history of Robie House revealed an interesting conundrum. Most of the house’s history is not about a house as much as a site of landmark preservation. The original owners were there less than two years, and the two subsequent homeowners were gone by the time the building was 30 years old. Like every building in history, it was first proposed to be demolished when it was about 30 years old, in 1941. Preservation pressure kept it alive under institutional ownership until it was threatened again in 1957, when Wright himself argued for it. It was purchased and saved by the same guy who was doing the urban renewal of Hyde Park and demolishing 1000 acres of buildings. It then limped along under the ownership of the University of Chicago for a couple decades before becoming a proper house museum. So, of its 115 years of history, arguably 85 of those years are the history of preservation.
And they still haven’t got the dining room set back.
The more I think about it, this is not unusual. Every building faces its first demolition threat or need for a major overhaul at about 30-40 years. That is when a preponderance of building systems from roofs on down will need to be replaced or trashed. It is normal for most of a building’s history to be about preserving, rehabilitating or retrofitting it. Right now the “Thompson Center” in Chicago is being completely redone exactly 40 years after it was built.
I did not realize until Galleri’s lecture that Robie House faced its first demolition threat in 1941. I always knew about the 1957 battle, since it coincided with the beginnings of the battle over Penn Station in New York, which was the exact same age as Robie House. Even though it looked different.
Heck, when you think about it some more, you realize that the inscription on one of the most famous landmarks of the Western world is all about how it was restored by Marcus Agrippa.
I took this photo 43 years ago, so, like, there is even more preservation history now.
My new place of work, Villa Finale Museum and Gardens in King William, follows this pattern as well. Built in 1876, it was expanded until about 1902, and then enjoyed about 20 more years of being a fancy house, a decade as a slightly bawdy house, and then joined its neighbors at the age of about 65 in being chopped up into a bunch of apartments during the postwar housing shortage. When Walter Nold Mathis bought and restored it in 1967, he was kicking off the restoration of many other houses in King William that had also been chopped up. For almost 60 years this has been a preservation story, and for the last 15 that story is being told to the public each day.
2010.
My favorite example is just two doors down from Villa Finale – James Reily Gordon’s stunning Romanesque Kalteyer House.
Go back to the 1970s and it looked like this.
Now, Galleri and some of the other academics there on Friday night started getting into the questions of how things are preserved and how they are changed, and whether something can be considered authentic or original. Galleri got into the discussion of integrity, which in my experience has caused a lot of trouble and provided little advantage. See my take on these issues and how they have excluded important landmarks here. I also scribbled down “Ditch period of significance” because what is the period of significance? The original construction? Or is is one step back and the original design before it was modified during construction? And who did the modification – was it the architect? And exactly how many angels will fit on the head of a pin?
Loading the angels…..
When restoring Colonial Williamsburg in the 1930s, perfectly historic 19th century buildings were scraped because they did not fit into the period of significance. Even 50 years later during the restoration of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Home and Studio they destroyed work Wright actually did in 1911 to convert it into apartments, in order to go back to the 1899 appearance. So which is it?
Rather than get into a scholarly debate about originality, design and execution, and the great chasms of authenticity and integrity, I think we need to consider that preservation or rehabilitation is part of the story of every building that makes it past 30-40 years. In fact, I am working on a book that considers many lost Chicago buildings, and it is kind of amazing to see how many architectural wonders bowed out before they turned 50.
Masonic Temple by Burnham and Root
Marshall Field Wholesale Store by Henry Hobson Richardson
Prentice Women’s Hospital, Bertrand Goldberg, 1975.
Culture is – by definition – the tending of things that change over time.
Fast Track
The demolition of the East wing of the White House suddenly brought historic preservation into the mainstream consciousness this week, with valid recriminations from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, American Institute of Architects and other bastions of civil society. Now, many of those knew that, in fact, the executive does not need to follow the same preservation laws as the rest of the country, and while the Advisory Council for Historic Preservation and others opined on a restraining order, the entire 120-year old wing was gone in a week.
That is because they resorted to mechanical demolition with a (rented) backhoe, which makes for the best visuals. Given the executive predilection for reality-TV-style-theatrics above realpolitik, the choice makes sense. It wastes dollars, though, and contradicts modern practice regarding deconstruction and re-use of valuable materials, a topic I covered recently. Clearly, leadership has their broughams mired in the weird 80 years.
The demolition of the Epstein East Wing is a rare moment when historic preservation spends some brief time at the height of national consciousness, and heck, it could continue next week when some western legislator with a bee in his buckskins is holding a hearing on the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966. We might not wish for that, though, because everything that rises up in this performative administration tends to fall and crash just as fast (except prices).
Yes, it is the People’s House, and yes, the approach drew the appropriate rebukes from the bastions of civil society, and yes, at the end of the day there was precious little anyone could do about it. And yes, it is dumb and artless and clumsy and cowardly. They follow the fast track because they can’t do the actual work. The renderings of the oversized replacement building work in the media, even though they don’t work architecturally, as anyone who looks closely can see. But then again, it’s probably just a pretence for rebuilding the underground bunker…..
Photos by me from March tour of WH – except the featured image – you have to guess where that is.
Remember when the buck stopped here? Good times.
DECEMBER UPDATE:
Kudos to the National Trust for Historic Preservation for filing a lawsuit last week against the demolition of the East Wing. Reality stars reign in media fights, but they fold when evidence is required.
Deconstruction and the weird 80 years
I saw a wonderful presentation by Mae Bowley at the Destination Downtown 2025 conference last week in El Dorado, Arkansas. Deconstruction is the systematic dismantling of older buildings in order to re-use their materials. San Antonio adopted one of the best deconstruction ordinances in the country a couple of years ago and Stephanie Phillips and the rest of Shanon Miller’s team got plenty of kudos.
Opening of the Material Innovation Center at the Kelly Bungalows in November, 2022.
Mae’s presentation was electric for many reasons, but the one that stood out to me was the historical one. Deconstruction is not a new thing – it is what everyone everywhere did until about 1940. Only during the last 80 years did we do something different. That different thing was demolishing buildings and throwing them in the trash. No one did that before.
And Mae provided another historical tidbit I had missed completely. Mechanical demolition with bulldozers and the like was a product of World War II, where those machines were needed to clear jungles for airfields or urban debris for troop advancement. Urban renewal started immediately after World War II, and all of a sudden we had new mechanisms – like bulldozers, which derive from tanks – for reshaping place. Urban renewal continued through the 1960s and the National Historic Preservation Act is traditionally seen as a reaction to urban renewal and interstate highways, which required the bulldozing of many, many buildings.
Now, I was aware of the economic shift that took place during this same weird 80 year period. In the early 20th century and before, buildings were commonly moved and reused. Heck, I have seen a significant building moved in San Antonio every year over the last decade. When that happened in 1900 – and it happened everywhere – the economic rationale was simple. The fixed asset of the building was worth more than the land. Even when places like Euclid Avenue in Cleveland saw demolition of mansions, it was because a new use – industry – was MORE valuable. Same in LA circa 1915.
Moving the 1880 Claudius King house in San Antonio, 2019.
Mae even illustrated the long history of deconstruction when she illustrated the deconstruction she did of a 1920s house. By the time they got under the sheathing and onto the walls themselves, they found evidence of earlier materials that had been reused. In other words, the deconstruction revealed evidence of earlier deconstruction.
Which made me think of buildings around the world built from materials scavenged from other buildings. Like this Jacobean house constructed from the stone of Fountains Abbey (Yorkshire, UK) after the dissolution of the monasteries.
Or this mosque in Delhi (India) composed of the ruins of a couple dozen Hindu and Jain temples.
Or, like, most of Rome. Or even like our San Antonio Missions, whose limestone and sandstone walls migrated over the decades into nearby buildings.
The Sisson House near Mission San Juan – this house was itself a deconstruction project last year.
Deconstruction of the Sisson House at Graf and Presa, October 2024.
Mae also spent a lot of time talking about wood – because deconstruction allows you to get some old-growth wood, which is not something that exists in the market in 2025. Old growth wood is straighter, more disease and rot-resistant and has a tighter grain. It is one of the most notable materials that can be easily recycled (once you pull the nails out). Brick, too. When I started in heritage conservation in 1980s Chicago I saw that even then demolition sites would save the Chicago brick and “send it to the South”. When I got to San Antonio in 2016, I finally saw a building made of Chicago brick. In 2009.
Also it is Ladino one of the best restaurants at the Pearl – where they re-used EVERYTHING.
I looked back and it seems I blogged about Deconstruction in 2009 and was pretty negative – I compared it to the difference between recycling and reusing. Recycling requires a lot of energy and produces a lot of waste compared to reuse. I can reuse a bottle by cleaning it, but to recycle it I have to grind it up and remelt the glass. But what I did not realize at the time was that deconstruction is something we have been doing since we first made cities and towns. And it makes sense – why should the landfill get all of the good wood?
Eatonville MCM
I visited Eatonville, Florida last week as part of a consultancy. Considered the first incorporated African-American town, founded in 1887, it is known as the home of Zora Neale Hurston, the author and anthropologist who set her famous Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) there. It was also the birthplace of NFL Hall of Famer Deacon Jones, who invented the terminology of the quarterback sack. We brought a team to help put together a blockbuster event for August 2027 aiming to raise awareness of the history and culture of Eatonville. That will be the subject of a future blog, but today I would like to simply share some of the lovely Mid Century Modern homes that line the streets of this historic town.
Disappearing original houses
I was always enamored of the story of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Dana-Thomas house in Springfield, Illinois, built in 1903. In what became a familiar scenario, Susan Lawrence Dana had to wait for her father to pass away before she was able to engage the pioneering architectural innovator. Not only that, but she had to promise to keep the original two-story Italianate house her father had built, including his bedroom fireplace. That fireplace is pretty much all that survived Wright’s restless creativity, as the original house vanished into gabled wings of geometric modernism.
Fun fact – AI can not manage to figure out the other FLW examples of this! So here are some remodelings that Wright did in Oak Park in the first decade of the 20th century, from knowledge.
Hills-DeCaro House 1906. The process of modernizing old houses with ribboned windows and continuous stucco finishes became so popular lots of local Oak Park architects and builders did it.
Young House, Wright redesign 1908 – mostly the wraparound porch creating horizontal emphasis with the Tudor gables still sticking up.
Now in my tenth year in Texas, I am surrounded by examples of houses that swallowed up earlier houses, shifting from simple rock houses and cabins into Victorian extravaganzas. Thanks to Professor Kenneth Hafertepe I now understand better how single-pen rock houses grew into double pens and then added upper levels.
You can see the earlier roofline. This is near Bulverde.
The King William Historic District – the oldest in Texas – is rife with big houses that swallowed up little ones. I was recently quoted regarding the Joske House, which is a masterclass in Renaissance Revival, where no pediment is unbroken, no balustrade unbowed and no basket arch unornamented.
But this was a 1900 remodeling by architect Solon McAdoo of a four-room stone house built in 1881. The famous Villa Finale – the only King William house open for tours – also began as a one-story limestone house in 1876. In 1881 a new owner added a two-story brick wing but the big change came in 1896 with the front porch and tower, which is the bulk of what attracts the eye today.
If you look beyond the porch and tower you can see the earlier houses. This actually happened a lot in King William – on Madison Street you can see several houses that began as a single story of stone and had stories of brick or frame added later, like the Elmendorf house, c. 1885 with a 1917 second story.
There are quite a lot of these on Madison Street, including this Wagenfuhr House, of which there were two and each grew a story later. This one was a one-story German rock house in 1870 that had a frame addition perhaps a generation later. Its neighboring Wagenfuhr house added a nice Victorian second story and can be seen in the featured photo for this blog.
Just down the street the Martin/Van Derlip house started as an 1870 limestone one-story and got a brick second story about 1886, smoothed together with a stucco rendering.
The famous Oge house which looks like a Southern plantation was a one story plus basement home built in 1857 and completely made over by architect Alfred Giles in 1881.
On the first block of King William, you have the Ball houses, which were identical in 1868 but one got a second story about 1904.
Heritage Conservation in 2025
In chaotic times, one might think that the preservation of historic sites might be a respite from chaos, but as with all firehoses, the current recrudescence has soaked all sectors. I was in Washington DC last week for our annual Preservation Action Advocacy Week, which seemed like many of the others, despite the steady drumbeat of the 24-hour news cycle trying to make sense of the firehose. We met with six congressional offices and were well received in all, because for a long time historic preservation (heritage conservation) has had bipartisan support. Texas has had a very good state historic tax credit for the last decade, so our pitch to retain the federal one hit home for the Texas congressional delegation.
The firehose of course refers to the huge quantity of executive actions that have affected most domestic and foreign sectors. In terms of “preservation” the obvious initial impacts are loss of staff at historic sites of the National Park Service, overriding of Section 106 review due to a declared energy emergency, and loss of preservation staff in many other federal agencies, including the GSA which oversees real estate, USDA, Transportation and others. Given that the firehose has been on for less than two months, and given that some firings or overridings are reversed, it is very hard to assess the damage at this time. Of greater concern would be any permanent dismantling of federal review processes, most of which are carried out by states and other sovereign entities.
The role of heritage conservation is to preserve the histories of all communities that make up a place. And the act of heritage conservation is a process by which a community determines what elements of its past it wants in its future, and how those elements are preserved. This process can exist at any and all levels but it only really is effective at the community level. And, as one of our speakers (Valerie Grussing of NATHPO) noted: “Community moves faster than government.”
I have worked in the heritage conservation field for 42 years, working for non-profits the whole time. I have occasionally been hired for specific projects by government entities, mostly at the municipal level. So it is at the level of the blessed community that we must continue our efforts to uncover and conserve the history we find in our local places.
How to demolish a MCM landmark, clumsily.
The surprising thing about the impending demolition (they have started on remediation, the most expensive part UNLESS you are keeping the building) of the Texas Pavilion/Institute of Texan Cultures Building is not that the Texas Historical Commission issued a demolition permit without public comment less than two months after listing the building as a State Antiquities Landmark. That was certainly NOT surprising since they had just done the same thing with University Junior High in Austin – landmark it and then six weeks later allow it to be demolished.
It is also not surprising that the demolition permit came just a month after the City finally revealed Project Marvel, a singular rendering centered on a potential Spurs stadium. The Spurs have the superstar of the decade and their current venue is more than 20 years old, which is what, 100 in professional sports years? What IS surprising is the recent revelation that Project Marvel started – and could easily finish – without a Spurs stadium. Or a UTSA hotel program. Turns out those were late additions to the project, according to City Council members at a public meeting this week. And the project could go without them.
That explains why there is only one rendering. The hotel even looks like a late cut-and-paste.
UTSA’s rush to demolish seems a little odd, as does their deal last year to sell, lease or “give” the building to the City. Yes, the city wants it back after giving it to the state in 1967 for a permanent museum. But UTSA kept saying they wanted to “monetize” the site – why would they “give” it to the city? Especially after a really expensive remediation and demolition?
That is 1963 US Gypsum building in Chicago when it was about 10. It was demolished three decades ago, costing $4 million, of which $3 million was for remediation.
Well, one reason is that UTSA as a state agency doesn’t have to bother with demolition permits from the city. If the city owned it, there would be a public hearing, and one thing UTSA has avoided assiduously for the last eight years is any public hearing. I remember going to the public meetings about their master planning six years ago – which included every parcel they owned EXCEPT the Texas Pavilion/ITC.
Since the new President of UTSA arrived, they have wanted to get rid of the building. They pulled back a Request for Proposals that had been issued in 2016 for developers interested in the site. Odd, because “monetization”? Then COVID came to the rescue and within months they cut staff by 80%. The Texas Folklife Festival, which had been the lifeline for the ITC, ended, and soon other events were moved to other locations. They convened task forces and the ULI to study the building so that everyone knew it needed $80 million – except the 2023 engineering report on their website that said $7 million. And last Memorial Day they closed it and moved the collections out. So now it is just a Brutalist hunk.
This is how you demolish a Mid Century Modern landmark. I call it the POLYESTER PANTS method because I first saw it at work in 1980s Chicago with a lovely 1930 building called Hillman’s. Hillman’s had a ground floor “grocery” called Stop and Shop that was the classiest thing in town – the ultimate upscale bodega, a unique experience and a beloved place. If they had announced they were demolishing Stop and Shop there would be an uproar.
So they got rid of that use and put in a place that sold two pairs of polyester pants for $12. Within a year or too, the polyester pants have successfully distanced the building from its fan base and Boom! down it goes.
So, no more Folklife Festival, no more staff, just those pesky Conservation Society folks loading up the old Institute of Texan Cultures building with landmark titles. Sadly, as I explained late last year, those titles only provide a review – nothing guarantees preservation. And when you have one state entity regulating another, well, you can see that there is no independent arbiter here.
Aw heck, transparency and oversight are out of fashion anyway, right? Want some polyester pants?
The Cult of Mithras
When I traveled to Rome thirty Novembers ago I saw many wonderful historic sites and artifacts and artworks but one that made a particular impression was a mithraeum, or “temple” to the cult of Mithras, an early competitor to Christianity. The mithraeum was located beneath a medieval church in Rome. Indeed, many of the hundreds that have been discovered are beneath churches, and while Mithraism and Christianity competed in the realm of eastern-oriented mystery religions from the 1st to 4th centuries, Mithraism was suppressed along with paganism after the 4th century.
Gathering places of the Mithraic mysteries have been found from England to Hungary and the cult was a particular favorite of the Roman military. The basic worship was of Mithras, a sun-god borrowed from Persian mythology, and the key image was Mithras astride and slaying the sacred bull. This bloodletting offered salvation to the participants in the rituals, which included a ceremonial breaking of bread and wine and a promise of resurrection. Mithras is always wearing a Phrygian cap.
So, what was trending in 1st century Rome? Basically, eastern mystery religions, and you had two big choices. The first was Christianity, originally a Jewish sect that had taken a more Catholic approach and had established major centers in Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria and Rome. Part of its appeal was monotheism. One can imagine that the pantheon of traditional Roman gods was becoming a bit outdated in a globalized Mediterranean world. Part of its appeal was its Orientalism. The mysteries of the East were borrowed and reimagined. It also offered eternal salvation thanks to the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, who died for the sins of others.
The second choice was the cult of Mithras. It was also assembled from pieces of eastern mythology, including an adapted Zoroastrian Mithra and an adapted and adopted Osiris, the Egyptian god of resurrection. The rituals included a kind of agape, or ceremonial meal which struck contemporary Christians as a direct copy of their eucharist – complete with bread and wine. They even called the clerical officials “pater” (Father) and their altar illustrated the bloodletting that led to salvation.
So, which to choose? Well, there was one other aspect of Mithraism, and that was that it was male-only. Very popular with the military. In contrast, the early Christian church not only had female martyrs like Perpetua and Felicity, but was often spread – especially among the upper classes – by women. Constantine had his Helen in the 4th century, Augustine his Monica in the 5th and Volodymyr had his Olha in the 10th. Since its founding, more women than men have attended church, While excluded from clerical positions in most cases, women religious have always outnumbered men.
Sta Maria Maggiore, Milano.
One of the biggest challenges that Christianity presented to Roman Mediterranean culture was its focus on mercy and universal salvation. This ran completely counter to Roman ideas of justice, which admitted no humility, no mercy and certainly no forgiveness. In contrast, the message of Christ WAS forgiveness. It made no sense to Romans. For those initiated into the cult of Mithras, your hero and god was depicted literally in the act of killing something. (The technical term is tauroctony)
Mithraea offered resurrection, a full dose of eastern mystery, complete with a Phrygian cap, a ceremonial bloodletting, a meal and best of all – no girls. You could have your eastern mysteries without the kind of radical inclusion the Christians were preaching.
Ironically, once the Roman Empire adopted Christianity, the religion of mercy apparently showed none to the Mithraites and their theology of cruel justice.