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.
Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act
Last week the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation put out a call for review of the Section 106 process. What is Section 106? Well, it is basically the federal review process for properties listed on (or eligible for) the National Register of Historic Places. I have taught this process to public officials for decades, and I have been party to the process in many cases, including several projects here in San Antonio.
Foundations of 1875 St. James AME Church as uncovered in 2020. Below is the result of the Section 106 process, completed 2022.
In a time characterized by assaults on civil institutions small and large, a “review” of this process, which has existed in some form for nearly 60 years, is cause for concern. Section 106 is a type of regulation, and regulations are often categorically opposed by self-styled populist politicians and struggling subpar businesspersons. The nuanced reality is that any consultative process will tend to improve outcomes.
With the notable exception of the Milton Historical Society, a Section 106 review that was a perfect storm of bad outcomes. I was hired by the National Trust to figure out what went wrong here 20 years ago. Architect, client, and agency were all at fault. In that order.
Almost a year ago, the Executive began trying to get around regulations like Section 106 through imaginary energy crises, military readiness, and other performative red herrings. Heck, they even demolished a federal building illegally (and of course performatively, without a long-range plan – see my blog about it). But this is not to put Section 106 under one political banner, because in 2024 Section 106 was being challenged as an impediment not to knuckle-dragging capitalists, but to progressive causes like climate change and renewable energy. And bike lanes. I blogged about it here.
There is also an exception being drawn up for military housing, which makes sense intuitively.
Well of course I’m going to pick an architecturally significant example of military housing.
Your intuition is not wrong, but it has no context. The context is that military housing is like all things military – it never has to justify its budget. That means that the housing got “improved” regularly in the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s. That means it has lots of layers added, with each having the potential to become a unique mold biome. And of course those of us involved in actual Section 106 reviews in a city with lots of military bases knows that this has been an issue for more than a decade. Not new.
Tile looks 1930 but that sink looks scallopped in the awful 80s.
Here is how Section 106 works:
1. There is a federal project. This could be obvious, like a highway or a building, or it could be a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers to build along a navigable waterway.
2. There is – or is not – a historic resource.
3. There is – or is not – an effect on that resource.
4. If there is an adverse effect, you oughta try to do something about it.
5. If nothing can be done, you go ahead anyway.
Here is one of my favorite results – the Solomonic baby sliced in half:
The LITERAL bottom line in the process is that the project can proceed, something the Post Office knew back in 1991 when the above article appeared. They knew they could tear it down after they went through the process. (BTW photo proves that I was out standing in my field).
Or you can just repackage the project into different phases that do not engage Section 106 as much.
At her request, I spoke to National Trust for Historic Preservation CEO Carol Quillen last summer about this issue and what should be done. After all, Section 106 has not been revised in over two decades. The conclusion I shared with her is the same I reached years ago in the effort to get the National Register of Historic Places to reflect the diversity of American history. The issue is rarely the law or regulation itself, but the practice of its implementation.
Ah yes, Federal Building West. We encouraged them NOT to worry about the original 1974 bathroom in the basement.
As with many current initiatives from the federal government, it appears that they are trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. In over 40 years of dealing with historic preservation review at the federal, state and local level, I have consistently seen that at least 97 percent of reviews are dispatched in a few days. My friend and Washington State SHPO Allyson Brooks provided statistics from last year. They did 5,371 reviews with a response time of 3.7 days. 45 of the projects were “adverse affects”. It could be that there is not a problem, or perhaps there is that one guy with a problem who wants to make everyone pay for it.
Moreover, most federal agencies have executed Programmatic Agreements that essentially resolve potential Section 106 issues in advance, and provide an agency-specific and resource-specific process for dealing with the rules in a more streamlined way. But that doesn’t play well in a media landscape designed for third graders.
Our National Historic Landmark army base is a decade older than Fort Sheridan in Chicago.
So what specifically is the ACHP looking to review?
1. Defining the undertaking and establishing the area of potential effects
I suppose this is to fend off surprises by limiting the scope of the undertaking. The old newspaper clipping above is a case where the new building did not require the demolition of the old building per se. It’s just that, in order to stage the construction of the new building, the old one had to go.
2. Assessing indirect and cumulative effects
I guess this is to try to limit the review to immediate effects rather than long-term or indirect ones. I can’t imagine this affects a large number of cases. One of the interesting ones I witnessed – which was resolved by the Advisory Council in favor of the military, was the issue of cutting trees at the 1930 Randolph Air Force Base. The Air Force wanted to cut down trees to limit bird strikes, and the SHPO wanted them to keep original trees. The Air Force won, and yes, it took a while.
3. Managing review/scope of review for long linear projects with limited federal involvement
This could be for projects like San Pedro Creek or Brackenridge Park that are primarily projects of state and local agencies and the federal role is a permit. Again, Programmatic Agreements can help with this.
4. Managing timelines for review.
Yeah, well that would be good. In fact, this is the big one. European countries have more stringent regulations than we do, and their businesses are used to going through the process. It must be worse there, right? No. See, they have a process which has an endpoint. The US has so many lawyers that projects can get tied up forever not by the regulations, but the ancillary and attendant lawsuits. There is no endpoint in a litigious environment. That doesn’t happen in Europe.
They are better at trains too
You can tweak the regulations all you want, but unless someone sets an example of NOT filing frivolous lawsuits, the timelines will get longer not matter how short the laws are. Anyone know anyone who could set such a noble example? Bueller? Bueller?
My prediction is that the review will cause more problems than it solves. If you go digging into a legal process that is slow 3% of the time, you will reduce the quality of outcomes at the very least, and likely harm that high-performing ratio.
JULY UPDATE
Well, the Advisory Council has flouted its own process, in order to flout the process. Like a suicide bomber! See my latest blog and the preservation community response.
Authenticity after 60 years
In my investigations over the last 15 years into the limitations of the National Register of Historic Places I often suggested the use of “authenticity” instead of “integrity” in judging whether a property qualified for listing. In creating the National Register in 1966, U.S. heritage experts had chosen to go with “integrity” instead of “authenticity” which was more common internationally. Integrity is more mechanistic, and defined by architecture, which makes sense given the heavy influence of architectural practice on the U.S. preservation movement from the 1930s through 1960s. In dealing with the broader range of heritage sites in the 2000s, I thought deferring to “authenticity” could help address the diversity deficit in the National Register of Historic Places. You can see my 2016 blog about integrity and authenticity here.
Now that we are more than 60 years removed from the Venice Charter of 1964, it is interesting to note that “authenticity” has itself undergone a transformation away from a formalistic architectural definition and toward ideas of heritage as defined by the communities who steward them. To quote from the most recent World Heritage discussion of authenticity:
“Over time, the understanding of authenticity has undergone significant evolution from a
material-based notion to a pluralistic, functional, traditional, spiritual, intangible, culturally
relative and value-based concept, reflecting the diversity of human societies, the different
ways in which heritage is created, used, and remembered, as well as reflecting the
evolution of the notion of heritage.” Authenticity in the context of the World Heritage Convention: Evolution and Impact, 25th Session of the General Assembly of States Parties to the Convention concerning the protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, November 2025.
This is similar to what I have been saying in presentations and book chapters since 2010: Heritage conservation is a four-step process of Identifying, Evaluating, Registering and Treating historic resources. Heritage conservation happens when a community determines what elements of its past it wants in its future. As noted in the Burra Charter, the community whose heritage is being conserved needs to be involved in each step of the process – Identification, Evaluation, Registration and Treatment. If we bring community into the process too late, or if we assume as professionals that we are better qualified to Evaluate or determine Treatments, we will come up short. How you conserve Mount Taylor and how you conserve a Victorian house museum are not equivalent.
Mount Taylor, NM last month.
Villa Finale, the month before
Authenticity received its first definitional challenge about 1980, just a few years after the operational guidelines for World Heritage were established, following Western architecture-based practice that focused on design, materials, workmanship and setting. That challenge was Warsaw, Poland, completely rebuilt after World War II thanks to precise documentation done forty years earlier. The materials and workmanship were not authentic. But it was extremely important to the community. The next challenge came in 1992 when Japan brought with it an understanding of the integrity of process, rather than product. The Shinto temple is a thousand years old even as it is rebuilt from scratch every twenty years, because the tools and craftsmanship are one thousand years old.
Meanwhile in the West, we see no problem restoring an 18th century house with epoxy, nail guns and other tools and techniques that did not exist at the time, because we revere the object more than the process.
The shift toward a more holistic – and genuinely international – approach began with the Nara Document on Authenticity in 1994. To the original four aspects of authenticity were added form, substance, use and function, traditions and techniques, location, and spirit and feeling. The key idea was that authenticity had to be defined within a cultural context. And while that definition is not universal, the process – Identify, Evaluate, Register and Treat – is.
Another 30 years has passed, and authenticity has continued to evolve. By the 2000 expert meeting at the Great Zimbabwe, authenticity was linked explicitly to living traditions, stewardship and ritual. Many cultures do not place as high a value on material remains as they do on speech, memory and community values. In May of this year, the International Conference on Cultural Heritage in Africa: A Dialogue on the
Concept of Authenticity was held in Nairobi, Kenya discussed how African heritage is dynamic, community-centered, and deeply rooted in both tangible and intangible values. A similar discussion is planned for Southeast Asia.
The other problem, as you might imagine, is that “authenticity’ has no equivalent in Japanese, Arabic and certain African languages. Different societies conceive of continuity, value, trust and authority in different ways. As the document notes, the challenge may be existential: How do you ask for proof of Outstanding Universal Value if values are culture-based and not universal?
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.
Villa Finale Museum and Gardens
Located in the heart of King William – the first historic district in Texas – Villa Finale tells the story of preservation and the story of Walter Mathis, who worked to save more than just architecture. This unique house museum is the result of Mathis’ lifelong commitment to historic preservation, his passion for collecting artworks of a great variety, and his dogged ability to raise up a community and neighborhood from neglect to prominence. I was proud to take the first tour of Villa Finale when it opened to the public in 2010, and I am more than proud to take the helm of this exquisite site in 2025.
If you haven’t visited, we are the only house museum in King William, we have lovely gardens that stretch back to the “Sauerkraut Bend” of the San Antonio River, and we are the stewards of Walter Nold Mathis’ legacy. Mathis was a descendant of Canary Islanders, decorated World War II pilot, and a serial preservationist. He restored Villa Finale in 1967 and then went on to fully or partially restore another 14 homes in King William, which became Texas’ first historic district in 1968.
Walter Mathis was a lifelong collector, and Villa Finale boasts the largest collection of fine arts, books and antiques of any National Trust historic site, with some 12,500 items. My favorites include the Mary Bonner paintings, which I have admired for years.
Walter also collected a wide variety of items related to Napoleon Bonaparte, including an actual death mask and a wide variety of busts and statuary.
The house is open to the public five days a week and you can do either a guided or self-guided tour, which you can learn about here. We also have a great variety of events each month, including a fabulous presentation of iCatrina by Araminta Romero on October 3.
This weekend we are hosting the Texas Spirit Gathering all day Saturday, and upcoming events include an acoustic music evening November 8, a “Merry Friendmas” Christmas party for our members (join here!) and presentation on historic Christmases in King William by Sallie Schuchard Thomas and Maria Pfeiffer with Michaele Thurgood Haynes on December 7. But wait, there’s more – December 11 features a demonstration of our musical machines and then Ken Slavin brings his vocal talents December 12.
I hope to see you soon!
OCTOBER 23 UPDATE
Oh I just had to add a few more images as I begin to become better acquainted with all 12,500 items in our collection.
One of many significant examples of 18th-19th century Cusco school of iconography
School of Canaletto – Venice
Onderdonk bluebonnets. Did you know it is illegal to be a Texas artist unless you paint bluebonnets?
So many helmets…
Luster weibchen. Ja ja, doch, sicher.
Yes they were treacherous in the olden days. Ruling by Imperial Edict.
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?
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.
San Antonio Roundup July 2025
Two big losses this year – the Texas Pavilion (Institute of Texan Cultures building) has succumbed to demolition, seemingly accelerated by the Conservation Society’s failed attempt to get an injunction or even a hearing at either District Court or the 15th Court of Appeals. The unfortunate precedent being set is clear – if you want to demolish a property, make sure it is owned by an institution of higher learning, because they have a special carve-out in the State Antiquities code and may be willing to enter into a transaction for that privilege.
That loss was followed by the lame duck City Council approving the Digital Arts and Media Pilot Program, a digital billboard scheme that was opposed by 71% of those surveyed. Now we will have 10 Times-Square styled digital billboards attached to buildings and accompanied by artwork. All because one billboard company couldn’t play by the rules. Sigh. You can read my earlier blog here.
Speaking of public opposition, the City just wrapped up a couple weeks of workshops on the proposed Sports and Entertainment District previously known as Project Marvel. (Side note: one of the ways you know something doesn’t have great public support is that you have to keep renaming it. The Digital Arts and Media Pilot Program used to be Urban Entertainment Districts). The Express-News today had a feature on the “No Project Marvel” movement. I attended workshop sessions and it was actually pretty tame and useful. I should note that the Conservation Society has not taken a position on the Sports and Entertainment District. Some people did use the mapping workshop as a mechanism to vent.
It has been a difficult and chaotic time for most things, including historic preservation funding, as I blogged about in May here. The historic preservation tax credit did survive the OBBB, along with New Market tax credits, and the 2025 Historic Preservation Fund money was finally released. Solar credits were cut though, dampening one of Texas’ leading industries and giving China a big advantage.
On the plus side, a very cool 1906 Craftsman building in my Beacon Hill neighborhood that we deliver newsletters to is becoming a local landmark. I call it the house of Seven Gables.
Also on the plus side, the design and planning for the Civil Rights exhibit in the Woolworth Building that is part of the new Alamo Visitor Center and Museum is coming along very well. Can’t preview it but safe to say some great stakeholder input and some excellent design.
The biggest news has been the killer floods which claimed 13 lives in San Antonio and then more than 100 in Kerr County on the 4th of July when the Guadalupe River gained 20 feet in an hour and a half. The grim total may well exceed 200 including the flash floods in Travis and other counties. A combination of changing climate, Hill Country geology and limited notification systems came together in this catastrophe which has made the news worldwide and caused great grief and sorrow.
Project Marvel
The new Mayor and City Council have been sworn in! We don’t really know how they feel about Project Marvel, the “sports and entertainment district” meant to link the Alamodome, Hemisfair and the Convention Center and provide a new home for the San Antonio Spurs, BUT we will hear how the public feels thanks to a series of workshops being held over the next three weeks in each of our 10 Council districts.
Here is the image of Project Marvel that was released last year and garnered the support of perhaps 41% of the public. Famously, the new Spurs stadium occupies the site where we failed to save the 1968 Texas Pavilion.
Our legacy media San Antonio Express News loves the project and endorsed it again this week. The schedule for the public workshops is here so that you can participate. And just to get the juices flowing, let’s take a look at ALL of the renderings of the project that have been released over the last year.