Lindsey Derrington is the Executive Director of Preservation Austin, the only citywide nonprofit dedicated to celebrating and protecting historic Austin places. In this interview, Derrington describes how she helped the residents of East Austin’s Rogers Washington Holy Cross, a neighborhood built by and for black professionals after World War Two, obtain a historic district designation from the city.
“I started Preservation Austin almost ten years ago. I started as a programs coordinator. I’ve been working in historic preservation since 2007, when I first graduated from undergrad. I became interested in this field because I’m from Saint Louis, which is a very different city than Austin.
When I grew up in the suburbs, got my driver’s license, was driving around, the city that so many people had turned their backs on – it’s like the textbook example of white flight and urban renewal and segregation.
And it’s got this beautiful history and culture and all these buildings that need so much investment and care. And so I became inspired to do this work in high school before I even knew what the work was like, I knew I wanted to do something with historic places.”
“Local historic districts are really basic tools that have been used in cities and smaller communities since the ‘70s, really to protect historic places by taking groups of buildings that are significant and actually zoning them historic to protect them from demolition.
Fundamentally, it’s a planning tool. You get to say, hey, here’s a group of significant homes, and how do we want development to look within this area?”
“The neighborhood pursued their historic district because they saw all the changes happening around them. If you drive a few blocks in either direction from this really small community, Rogers Washington Holy Cross is not a big one – so much history, but relatively few homes compared to some historic districts, which might be like hundreds of homes – it’s changed.
Blackland neighborhoods changed. Chestnut has changed. These are really desirable homes for people with a lot of money and sometimes you drive down blocks and half of the houses or more were built only a few years ago, and they’re much bigger and much more expensive than the housing that was there before. And of course, you’ve lost all that history with those demolitions.
So I think the critical thing for neighbors in this community was to figure out how to implement a local historic district. This achieves two things for us: we get to celebrate our history and we get to protect it, because we’re not going to see that kind of development in Rogers Washington Holy Cross because literally we’re able to say, here’s the map. Here are the houses that are contributing.”
“After World War Two, it wasn’t easy to do anything, whereas the federal government made it really easy for white families to do a lot of things, but not so much for black families. So setting this neighborhood in that context, but then just running with all the incredible stories and even day to day experiences that are incorporated into that history that make Rogers Washington Holy Cross so special.
I’m not sure with any of the other home tours we’ve done that we’ve had so many original families. That’s rare, I think, having so many children of the original people who built the houses – or Mr. Poole, he built that house and he’s still here. I think that’s unique, no matter what the city is, Austin or anywhere else in the country.”
“So Preservation Austin, it’s important to us that we are building a more inclusive preservation movement for this century. It seems weird to keep emphasizing we’re in the 21st century because we’re like 24 years into it. But preservation as a movement needs to grow.
Everyone needs to see themselves reflected in this work, which they haven’t always. The work that we do is, like anything else in the US, has been very focused on white wealth, and many men who have made money, and really looking at like just only a very narrow section of our history and using historic places to kind of to interpret that history.
And so for us, we’re citywide. We take very seriously that commitment to representing the whole city and then also expanding what people think of preservation.”