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.
Walter and Willie?
I just saw the Mexican American Civil Rights Institute exhibit on William Merriweather Peña, the Mexican-American architect/partner of Caudill, Rowlett & Scott who designed the Texas Pavilion/Institute of Texan Cultures building for Hemisfair ’68. I blogged about him back in April, 2024, when it became apparent that the state would be demolishing the only major downtown building by a Mexican-American architect.
William Peña, Courtesy CRS Center, Texas A & M University
Texas Pavilion/Institute of Texan Cultures. Photo by author, 2018.
I learned a lot about Pena from the exhibit, including a very interesting parallel to my role as Executive Director of Villa Finale Museum & Gardens. Villa Finale was the final home of Walter Nold Mathis, who willed his home and massive collection of decorative and fine arts to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Just as Willie Peña was finalizing the design of the Texas Pavilion, inspired in part by the firm’s recent visit to the Museo Anthropologia in Mexico City, Walter Mathis was buying and restoring Villa Finale. When Hemisfair opened in April, 1968, Villa Finale and the King William neighborhood were on their way to becoming the first historic district in Texas. But the parallels go back further.
William Merriweather Peña and Walter Nold Mathis were both born in 1919 in Texas. Peña’s family was from Laredo and Mathis’ from San Antonio. Walter went to UT Austin and Willie attended Texas A & M, and both joined the army after graduation as World War II broke out. Two and a half years later, they were both fighting in the Battle of the Bulge – Walter from the air with a B-26 and Willie as a captain on the ground. Both were war heroes. Walter flew more than twice as many missions as he had to and won three distinguished Flying Crosses, an air medal and a Presidential Citation. Willie stepped on a landmine in Schleiden, Germany, lost part of his left leg and was honored with a Purple Heart, Bronze Star and later honors from France and Belgium.
Walter Mathis in World War II courtesy Villa Finale Museum & Gardens
Walter became an investment banker with an overriding interest in historic preservation and collecting art. Willie became an architect and partner in Caudill, Rowlett Scott and by the 1960s was know as “The Father of Architectural Programming” with a book that remains in print in its fifth edition.
1968. Willie is completing the modernist Texas Pavilion at Hemisfair, the first World’s Fair in Texas and the only one to preserve historic buildings. Walter is restoring Villa Finale and is more responsible than any other individual for the creation of Texas’ first historic district. He will buy and fully or partially restore another 14 homes in King William. This is the time period when historic preservation tranforms into a community planning tool. Peña and his partners are similarly revolutionizing architectural practice, eschewing the idea of individual artistry for a group focus on process. They called it squatting, when the whole architecture team would go to the building site and develop “brown paper” programming of uses and needs before ever thinking about design. Everything was designed by the firm, not individuals. It would be a couple decades before the starchitects returned.
Stylistically, Willie and Walter are miles apart, functionalist Brutalism on the one side and ultradecorative Victorian on the other.
One of the Napoleon parlors in Villa Finale, 2025
Yet they shared a birth year, a war and its battles and both went on to transform the streetscape of San Antonio in the churn of the 1960s. There is irony in the fact that Willie’s contribution was erased this year while Walter’s has been and continues to be lovingly preserved.