History
The surrounding neighborhood was first occupied by German, Scottish, Italian, Armenian, and other European immigrants. According to old phone books, these residents were bookkeepers, waiters, clerks, ice deliverers, dressmakers, Kodak finishers, carpenters, carriage painters, streetcar linemen, and horseshoers, as well as conductors, switchmen, engineers, and brakemen for the nearby railroad. Many residents took the streetcar to work in downtown Austin. The earliest homes were built of longleaf pine from Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana—a lovely red hardwood, unfortunately logged to extinction. Today the streets are shaded by pecan and oak trees as old as the neighborhood, which thrive in the rich soil of the Colorado River floodplain. The river last flooded the area in the 1930s.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Mexican Americans began to move into the neighborhood as downtown growth displaced them eastward. These changes were exacerbated in the 1950s when Interstate 35 severed East Austin from downtown, creating a cultural and sociological barrier. Many Anglo residents moved out, not only due to "white flight" but also because the city failed to upgrade the utilities and other infrastructure. However, some descendants of the original owners still live in the Willow-Spence historic district. In the 1970s and 1980s, a few Anglos began returning, drawn by the historic homes. This trend continues, but a lively Mexican-American culture prevails.
Read more about this topic: Willow-Spence Streets Historic District
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)