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EXPERT INTERIOR
DESIGN HELP
IN YOUR
NEIGHBORHOOD
MARJORIE DURST DESIGN CONSULTANT I CAN HELP YOU BRING YOUR THOUGHTS TOGETHER, CREATE A COHESIVE PLAN AND HOLD YOUR HAND THROUGH THOSE DARK HOURS OF DECISION MAKING
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Keep Hyde Park Weird:
A Contrarian View of the HPNA's "Enforcement Committee"
Beware the conformist posse. The Hyde Park Neighborhood Association announced in last month's Pecan Press that it has formed a new "Enforcement Committee" charged with the neighborly activity of citizen surveillance and enforcement of the labyrinth of municipal ordinances limiting Hyde Park residents' exercise of their property rights ("Enforcement Committee Starts Up", Pecan Press, August 2003, p. 1). This latest development is a sure sign that our Neighborhood Association has drifted from its original vision, mounting a campaign whose most likely result is the further erosion of the essential character of our neighborhood.In the article, the Association's spokesman complains that the City is failing to enforce its ordinances (without providing examples), and that the neighborhood must "defend the law" to protect neighbors in the "planned community" of Hyde Park. A casual reader might be alarmed by the unwittingly Orwellian tone, with its implicit threats of a new network of picket fence Gestapo that would make John Ashcroft proud. But while those of us who know the leaders of our Neighborhood Association recognize their earnest desire to promote the bucolic residential character of the neighborhood, it is important to caution against the increasingly rigid thinking that seems to dominate the HPNA's planning-related activities.
It appears that the HPNA would have us tolerate a committee of snoopy neighbors busying themselves with telling others how to tend their homes by appealing to the implicit covenant we all make when we choose to live in this "planned community". This language sounds more like the rhetoric of suburban conformity suited to Steiner Ranch or Circle C, the very sorts of sterile subdivisions Hyde Park residents by and large consciously reject. Hyde Park was once a suburb, 100 years ago, conceived by a developer now canonized, saddled with a pseudo-English moniker repeated in a dozen other American cities. A suburb that no doubt was governed by an array of restrictive covenants, including the sort that only Jim Crow could love.
To many of us, the genius of Hyde Park is the apparent lack of any real planning, the quirky way in which it reflects the essential character of Weird Austin. Hyde Park is no Colonial Williamsburg. It's not even Tarrytown, thank goodness. It is a hodgepodge of elegant Victorians sandwiched by oddball postwar ranches, 1500 square foot
