Guided Tours Offer Glimpse Into East Austin History

EAST AUSTIN, TX -- In our hectic, tech-driven world, we sometimes forget to slow down, take a look around and appreciate our neighborhood and collective history.

Enter: East Austin History and Tours, an organization offering free, guided tours of its neighborhoods with historical tidbits on the various buildings along the way.

Reporting Texas.com has profiled the group, originating as a Facebook page but seamlessly making the transition from the virtual world to the real.

Reporting Texas' feature on the group centered on one such recent outing during which 50 or so people from college students to retirees walked the three-hour tour to learn about East Austin. The writers surmise the heightened interest in the guided tours is attributable to the gentrification-fueled changes to the landscape: Just a week before the featured tour, the empty building once housing Mount Sinai Baptist Church -- the area's oldest Baptist congregation -- was bulldozed by developers.

The loss of the building's cast a spotlight on the more corrosive aspects of gentrification, brisk changes to the landscape that are erasing the sector's history and character. With that vanishing history in mind, the tour group was launched last year for people interested in learning more about what came before them.

Organizer Rocío Villalobos said East Austin History and Tours was inspired by Jane’s Walk, a citizen-led movement in the U.S. and Canada that recruits residents to share knowledge of their neighborhoods by organizing walks. The inspiration was the late Jane Jacobs, author of “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” which is a classic 1961 critique of urban planning.

It's been said that past is prologue, and the current exodus of some residents unable to afford higher property taxes as a result of gentrification reminds of the orchestrated push of minority populations to the East Austin areas that developers now covet as trendy enclaves.

The city's 1928 city master plan designated the area as the “negro district," and African American residents were joined by Mexican-Americans in settling in East Austin. Today, some of the same populations are being displaced from their longtime homes due to soaring property tax rates.

The exodus is most keenly felt among African Americans, with 5.4 percent of its population leaving for the more economical suburbs. The suburban flight yields a dubious distinction for the city, making it the only municipality among the nation's ten fastest-growing to see such declines.

Reporting Texas featured tour began at East 11th and Chalmers streets, north of Huston-Tillotson University. In the piece, historical archaeologist and anthropologist, explains the significance of the historically black college that served as their starting point.

“This is the oldest historically black college west of the Mississippi,” he tells the walkers, telling them of the circa-1870s university.

The next stop on the tour was Edward L. Blackshear Elementary School located in an area once known as Gregorytown -- one of the Freedman Town communities that emancipated slaves across the South after the Civil War, Reporting Texas noted.

Our Lady of Guadalupe Church on Lydia Street, the oldest Hispanic Catholic church in Austin and community focal point, was the next stop of the walk. Tour guide Eliot Tretter explained how the church was built when the existing church sought to keep non-whites out.

The tour resonated especially with Darwin Hamilton, 43, who once lived in East Austin before he had to relocate to East Austin. Before his personal exodus, his family had lived in East Austin for five generations until the city compelled the acquisition of his property for an urban renewal project, he said.

“These walks need to happen as the demographics of the city has changed in this area,” Hamilton said. “The people that come here need to know what this area was and appreciate and respect it.”

To join the East Austin History and Tours Facebook page, click here.

Read the full story at Reporting Texas >>

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