08 Mar Environmental City: People, Place, Politics, and the Meaning of Modern Austin preview
My new book, Environmental City: People, Place, Politics, and the Meaning of Modern Austin, will be available soon! The book is a history of the environmental movement in austin, what it has acheived, and how that movement still shaped the politics and urban design of Austin today.
This blog will include sections of the book, as well as history I could not include in the book.
Take a peek at the very first "teaser" from the book………
A start for the environmental movement: the Parks System and Early Conservationists
Because of the mixture of lifestyle and economic definitions of the city, a parks system has been a central concern of many since the 1920s. Parks were not something that would promote conflict between “environmentalist” and “developers”; early businesspeople promoted them as ways to define the city and attract other residents. The 1921 Master Plan noted that since the city’s heavy economic base was not industrial, “it is only natural that the chief characteristics of greater Austin will continue, as at present, essentially a cultural and educational city.” The plan specified that parks were to be so numerous any citizen would be able to walk to a park in a short distance (this later became the “5 minute walk” idea).
In addition to preserving a “natural” character of the geography, the parks were conceived by the plan as integral to the definition of individual neighborhoods. Parks were to be placed and built so that they served as “intimate community and recreational areas . . . The design should reflect in a measure, the nature of their surroundings” within the neighborhood. In this regard, the plan suggested that the creek beds of Austin serve as natural features around which to plan a system of parkways and boulevards, singling out Shoal and Waller creeks as two main avenues of transportation. Though the name “greenbelts” for these areas was yet to come, as early as 1921 people were thinking about making park land along Austin’s creeks. The creeks were included in the plan as part of a parkway system that would defined the kind of city Austin could be.
The 1961 Planning Commission wrote that their plan saw itself as “an expression of the moral obligation that the city has to its residents … [that would] stabilize neighborhoods and protect property investment, and will insure that Austin will continue to improve its physical environment on the basis of the long range public interest”. To these men “public interest” was defined in large part by property values, and the Planning Commission and Planning Department of 1961 saw that what made Austin property values high was a pleasant, neighborhood environment. Planning for the use of the creeks and parks, then, was simultaneously a mechanism to ensure quality of life and quality of investment.
Within a few years, though, many people would start to think that sometimes these two did not go together in perfect harmony. Although the quality of life in Austin helped to determine the quality of investment, there was disagreement as to which was more important. The early conflict between people in town was which of these ends of the spectrum – quality of life or quality of investment – would be the focus of the emerging city. It was this disagreement that created much of the conflicts over Austin’s natural environment.
As with any growing city, the growth interests were not monolithic, nor were all the wealthy citizens of Austin in favor of unbridled growth. Some were not happy with the kinds of changes brought by growth. Some actively fought to protect public lands from being used for private schemes, and tried to find ways to preserve the creeks and parks from the kinds of pollution brought by urban growth. They were not anti-growth, but they were concerned with saving public land in the midst of the growth that was occurring.
One of the earliest and most active of these Austinites was Roberta (Bobbie) Dickson (later Crenshaw, married to Ben Crenshaw, Sr., father of the famous golfer). Bobbie spent years of her life trying to get the City of Austin bureaucracy to pay more attention to parks in Austin, and was instrumental in saving several large parcels of land from development.
The thing that most bothered Dickson was the way the city machinery and some of the business elites treated public land as a private commodity to enrich themselves. As member and later chair of the Parks Board, she served mostly as a thorn in the side of several growth promoters who would regularly grant their friends and business partners land that the city owned. Dickson remembers how she was perceived at the time; “In those days I was considered a wild radical dingbat. I guess I would have been the Brigid Shea of that period, except that Brigid knew what she was doing. She is a professional at what she does, who . . . knew what it took to make an issue, while I just went along making people mad”..
One of the people Dickson worked with was Russell Fish. Russell had been an Air Force pilot trainer in San Antonio, where he had met Janet Long, daughter of Walter Long, Austin’s long time Chamber President. As a boy scout, Russell had grown up with an interest in wild lands and was an enthusiastic devotee of the emerging ecosystems sciences in the 1960s and 1970s. Moving to Austin with his new bride to help her father run his legislative service, Russell became a well respected member of the community.
Early on, the efforts of Dickson and Fish were mostly re-active: the city would often give or lease land to developers that was officially dedicated parkland, and the two would spend time and energy trying to retain the land as parks. A good example of this was Ski Park. In the mid 1960s, a developer and former Chamber of Commerce president named Tom Perkins, who loved water skiing on Town Lake, convinced the City Council that a ski park on the lake would make a good project. The ski park required the creation of a ski pond next to the lake, a building, and a set of bleachers for spectators to sit on, all of which existed on city park land. All of that would have to be built on public land. The city gave that park land to Perkins to develop his ski park. But the ski park did not do well, and soon went broke. Ski Park is one of the first examples of a long term trend in Austin. The city, through administrative or city council action, will give land to developers or help pay for their developments in some fashion. The city itself usually gets nothing in return, other than the promise of some vague benefit in the undefined form of “growth”, “revenue”, etc.
Ski park was by no means the end of schemes to develop parkland along the lake for private gain. In the late 1960s a developer who was a member of the Texas Legislature decided to build a huge theme park on Lake Austin just east of I-35, across from Perkins’ failed ski park. This developer approached the City Council, asking for 40 acres of dedicated parkland on the lake, and asked that the city to grant him half of the lake itself above the dam. This developer had been to Disneyland, and in typical Texas fashion, wanted to make a Texas version of a water theme park. Texas fashion means doing things big, and his design was typically Texan, typically grandiose. He wanted the lake space because he was going to have two Civil War era frigates built, put them on the lake, and have them shoot fireworks at each other in a nightly faux battle. Near them, he was going to place a submarine like the one in Disneyland, allowing people to view the bottom of Town Lake. This scheme was supposed to generate the kind of attendance that Disneyland generated, along with revenue and tax money for the city.
Such pretensions to greatness were sour enough for Dickson and Fish, but worse was the use of city parkland and city funding to help build such a place. Fish, for his part, spent hours at the Council pointing out that the land was dedicated parkland, and that the city would be sued if it gave the developer the land. Dickson spent weeks behind the scenes trying to rally opposition. But when it came time to vote on the issue, the Council seemed ready to give the land to the developer on a 4-3 vote.
In a last ditch effort, on the day the Council was to vote on the project, Dickson went to the Austin National Bank to see the banker in charge of the loan for the project. She convinced the banker that Fish was sincere in his threat of a lawsuit, and that this project, like the Ski Park, would quickly go broke. As Dickson recalls it, the banker called down to the council and got Council member Ben White on the phone, telling him that the bank would not give the loan out to the developer. White then refused to vote on the project, effectively sinking it. As she and I talked about this episode, Dickson laughed in delight at the memory of how infuriated the other pro-project Council members were. “They thought they had old man White in their paw, but he surprised them. When he refused to vote, they took a recess, took White in the back room, and tried to strong-arm him. But all he said was, ‘I am not going to vote on this issue today’. So it failed!”
From Environmental City: People, Place, Politics, and the Meaning of Modern Austin, by Scott Swearingen. The book will be released toward the end of march.
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