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Neighorhood Walks: Guadalupe, Part 2

By Michael Barnes | Monday, January 11, 2010, 03:52 PM

Surprise No. 5: Besides the commanding, familiar churches — Ebenezer Baptist Church and namesake Our Lady of Guadalupe, community centers for black and Latino neighbors — two others caught my eye. One’s a rough gospel church, still in some disrepair, which radiates gorgeous music during services, Little says; the other a trim African Methodist Episcopal house of worship I’d never before spied on out-of-the-way East Tenth Street.

Surprise No. 6: Mark Rogers. I’d heard his name, but didn’t know his story with the Guadalupe Neighborhood Development Corporation. Since the early 1980s, this group has purchased land, moved houses, cleaned lots, renovated structures and, mostly recently, created apartments and “alley flats” for low-income families. This grassroots efforts is credited with salvaging local ethnic diversity as Guadalupe inevitably gentrifies.

Joining us along the northern sectors of the district, Rogers told me about the prostitutes and drug pushers who populated the alley behind his house during the 1980s, then how Narciso Gil, Sister Amalia Rios, Mary Helen Lopez, Candelario Hernandez and Bobbie Sparrow pushed area improvements before his work began. The area was crisis back then, losing one third of its population and threatened by ill-timed downtown commercialization. (That population trend surely has reversed, given the rather awkward and bland Robertson Hill apartments which at least brought some residential density to the neighborhood.)

We passed various astonishingly creative structures along East 11th street, designed by Bercy Chen Studio. Also some improvements encouraged by the Austin Revitalization Authority, a public-private group that can’t buy a positive headline, given its slow progress. We also checked one of the alley-oriented flats that just won an award from the Austin Heritage Society and wondered at the columned, formal St. Joseph Masonic Lodge on East Eleventh Street, which, like so masonic buildings in Texas, stands stubbornly empty.

Personal stories emanated from doors and windows, including Emily Little’s memory of an African American woman, dying, surrounded by neighborhood friends. “It was the first time I’d encountered such a situation outside a hospital,” said Little, who grew up in a more affluent West Austin near Laguna Gloria.

Little shared that story to illustrate the one irretrievable thing lost during Guadalupe’s predestined gentrification: Human connections. Little: “What we lose is community.”

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