Preserving a Place for the Living
when historic properties sit vacant and fall victim to neglect or arson, they may be replaced with newer development that does more damage to the character of a historic neighborhood than vinyl windows
The September/October issue of Texas Architect magazine includes an essay I wrote about San Antonio’s evolving approach to how it protects its historic building fabric. My interest in the topic evolved out of what I perceived as growing frustrations with the city’s Office of Historic Preservation and the burdens it sometimes place on those making a good-faith efforts to invest in the city’s historic buildings and spaces.
The goals of the agency remain noble and I am hopeful the OHP will—like the city it is charged with protecting—continue to serve both the needs of the present while preserving the legacy of the past.
Anyway, here’s the text of the article:
On a Friday morning in late March, a dozen or so members of the public sat in rows of stackable chairs in the large first-floor meeting room of the Cliff Morton Development and Business Services Center. Looking down upon them was the Historic Compliance and Technical Advisory Board seated behind a raised dais.
After calling the meeting to order and dispatching a number of routine business items, the board entertained presentations from individual property owners. Taylyn Cunningham approached the lectern and told the story of how his family had grown up on San Antonio’s East Side. Feeling a connection to that community, he and his wife purchased a 1,500-sf house in the historic Dignowity Hill neighborhood just east of downtown. He described how some of the neighboring homes had been thoughtfully restored by their owners while others had been abandoned and were now occupied by squatters. He told of how he had embarked on an effort to restore his 1908 home, investing more than its purchase price to make it livable.
Despite the improvements being only partially complete, code enforcement officers had ordered work on the property to be stopped because the work that had been done was not considered appropriate by the San Antonio Office of Historic Preservation, the city department charged with protecting aspects of the city having “historical, cultural, architectural, and archaeological merit.”
Early efforts to preserve places of historic value in San Antonio and elsewhere often relied on the passion of dedicated individuals rather than a government agency. Just after the turn of the 20th century, it fell to two members of the then newly formed Daughters of the Republic of Texas (DRT) to wield their personal influence and fortunes to ensure the Alamo—or at least the Alamo Chapel—would be preserved. Then, as now, good-faith disagreements existed over what it actually meant to preserve a historic building as well as what was worth preserving. Although the DRT was responsible for protecting the Alamo Chapel and its iconic (if anachronistic) bell-shaped parapet, they were also responsible for demolishing a portion of the adjacent Long Barracks, which played a more significant role in the 1836 battle that made the Alamo historically important.
In response to other threats to the city’s historic fabric, the Conservation Society of San Antonio was established in 1924 as one of the nation’s earliest community preservation groups. Working through informal channels—and often relying on the philanthropy of its members—it helped save a number of important San Antonio landmarks. In 1939 the Society supported the adoption of a city ordinance to protect La Villita, the city’s oldest neighborhood. One of the nation’s first historic preservation laws, the ordinance included language that called for the neighborhood to “not be a dead museum for mincing scholars, but a place for the living and those not yet born.” A young O’Neil Ford served as a consulting architect for the project, which saw the insertion of new structures into an existing fabric of historic buildings.
The Conservation Society later advocated for a more comprehensive historic zoning ordinance. Passed in 1967, the resulting ordinance authorized the city council to designate historic districts within the city and called for the creation of a nine-member board to adjudicate what could be done to the exterior of structures within the boundaries of those districts. The ordinance required at least four members of this board be “design professionals.”
The following year the city hired its first historic preservation officer to coordinate all preservation efforts undertaken by the city. Patricia Osborne, an active member of the Conservation Society, would be the first to hold this position and helped establish the King William Historic District, a cohesive collection of large homes south of downtown.
For the next quarter century, Osborne created additional historic districts while working tirelessly to save threatened individual buildings outside of those districts. The lack of official standards combined with the brevity of the 1967 ordinance gave Osborne and the board that would come to be known as the Historic and Design Review Commission broad authority to protect historic structures in San Antonio. “Pat was a pioneer in the early years of preservation,” recalls Ann McGlone. “She had little to no staff support and sometimes had to get ‘creative’ on her one-woman crusade to save San Antonio’s history.”
In 1992 McGlone succeeded Osborne as San Antonio’s Historic Preservation Officer. Over the next 16 years she increased the size of several existing historic districts and oversaw the addition of 10 new ones. She also helped update the preservation ordinance to better codify the historic review process.
San Antonio currently has 31 designated historic districts, and the city’s Office of Historic Preservation is the largest in the state, with a staff of nearly two dozen people charged with interpreting and enforcing Article VI of San Antonio’s Unified Development Code. After its most recent update in 2023, the section dealing with historic preservation now runs over 54,000 words—10 times longer than the original 1967 ordinance.
As the size and complexity of San Antonio’s preservation efforts grew, so too did the length of Historic Design and Review Commission meetings. Intended to address more nuanced questions of preservation, its time was increasingly occupied by homeowners whose renovation efforts had been “red-tagged” by city officials, not because the work being done was unsafe, but because it had not been bestowed with a “Certificate of Appropriateness.” In response to this, the Historic Compliance and Technical Advisory Board (CTAB) was created earlier this year to help address more straightforward technical issues and material specifications. The current makeup of the board includes university professors and attorneys, but no practicing architects. Rather than working with homeowners to develop creative solutions to complex design problems, its rulings tend to align with staff recommendations that reflect a strict interpretation of Article VI.
When the CTAB met to review Taylyn Cunningham’s case, it was only their third official meeting. They approved the recommendations made by Office of Historic Preservation staff requiring the homeowners to, among other things, use a specific technique to remove exterior paint applied by a previous owner and reinstall windows that had already been removed and discarded.
“Replacing our windows was a quarter of the price of restoring them,” Cunningham recalled. “That’s tens of thousands of dollars we were able to put into the property for other essential work.”
Homeowners like the Cunninghams often find themselves in situations where they can afford to rehabilitate a distressed property, but not in the specific manner dictated by the Office of Historic Preservation. Cunningham acknowledged that replacing the windows without a Certificate of Appropriateness was a violation of the code as written, but he also feels the fixation on such details is undermining the larger effort he and those living nearby are making to preserve Dignowity Hill.
“The neighborhood is still up and coming with a lot of abandoned homes and a notable crime rate,” Cunningham said. Before the renovation of their home was shut down by the city, the back door of their home was kicked in during a burglary. The metal door they replaced it with was one of the items identified as not compliant with historic standards. “I had to appear before CTAB twice and request a property visit from the members before they allowed me to keep the door, and that was only because we found photos proving the door was not original and the addition had been modified several times in the last 20 years.”
In its nearly 60 years of existence, San Antonio’s Office of Historic Preservation has proven to be a powerful guardian of the city’s unique sense of place. But the restrictions it places on property owners—and its increasing inflexibility—represents a cost that some are unwilling to pay. When Silver Ventures purchased the former Pearl Brewery in 2002, they chose to forego the potential tax breaks associated with designating the complex a historic district in order to have the flexibility they needed to create a thriving mixed-use district that has become a model for thoughtful adaptive reuse. More recently, attempts to establish a historic district for the neighborhood of eclectic bungalows surrounding Mahncke Park failed due to residents’ concerns about the restrictions that would be placed on their homes.
Preservation has always represented a dynamic balance between protecting artifacts of the past while simultaneously accommodating the realities of the present. Rebuilt wood windows may be more historically appropriate than reproductions, but ultimately a vibrant and living neighborhood is preferable to a “dead museum for mincing scholars.”
“There is always a tension between preserving the past and building for the future,” says McGlone. “When architects embrace that tension, when they respond to the authenticity of existing buildings, new projects can be transformative.”
This essay first appeared in the September/October 2024 issue of Texas Architect magazine.
