Austin360 blogs > Out & About > Archives > 2010 > January > 11 > Entry
Neighorhood Walks: Guadalupe, Part 1
Curiosities — geographical, architectural and cultural — crouched around every corner of the Guadalupe neighborhood during a recent weekend walk.
After some mind-thawing tea, Little and I scrunched over the 1887 birds-eyed-view map of Austin, which displayed her neighborhood and many of its current structures along its far right margins. This and other historical Austin maps are priceless for showing the original terrain — lost creeks, leveled hills, abandoned industrial sites — as well as the surviving buildings from what was, then, at most a medium-sized town (15,000 inhabitants by 1890).
The Guadalupe neighborhood, sometimes called Robertson Hill after the pioneer family that once owned the French Legation, sits on a smooth knob overlooking the Colorado River valley to the south and downtown to the west. Today its trapezoidal outline is defined by East Seventh Street, Interstate 35, East 11th Street and the Texas State Cemetery.
Surprise No. 1: The French Legation grounds offer a grand view that would have included the Colorado River during the 19th Century. The sleepy former home of French legate Alphonse Dubois de Saligny, now owned by the State of Texas and run by the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, sometimes bursts with energy during special events. Yet few people gaze south to imagine this commanding view.
Surprise No. 2: Three missing creeks. All appear on the 1887 map; Little showed me the remains of one under a grated culvert down an alley between Seventh and Eighth Streets. Another, the namesake for Longbranch Inn, included, within living memory, a pond, boat and attendant mule. A third, probably just a ravine, ripped through the neighborhood’s north side, right where the towered Robertson Hill Apartment Homes now stand.
Surprise No. 3: A creek artificially revived, along with other wonders at the cemetery. Little served as a consultant on the site’s renovation so she showed me curiosities ordinary tourists would not puzzle out, like an abandoned hall-of-fame-type project meant to match a circle of upright boulders. We paused at monuments and graves, including the fluid stone designed for Ann Richards (someone had left a flower and note) and sculptor Elizabeth Ney’s Texas Gothic marble-and-painted-iron cage for Civil War general Albert Sidney Johnston.
Surprise No. 4 and my favorite: Little urged a little jog down Inks Avenue where she revealed a low, limestone house with a Gulf Coast/New Orleans-style porch and a memory of its own view of the river. Could this house date to the French Legation era? Worth some digging.
More to come …
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