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Albert Huffstickler at the Ney Musuem

Be a good neighbor and volunteer to help with the Father's Day Weekend, June 19-20, 2004

March, 2004   National Register District Neighborhood   Vol. 30, No. 3

W hen my partner and I began searching for a home to buy in Austin, I was living in Albuquerque, NM, and she was in an apartment on Riverside Drive, on Austin's south side. We were convinced that we wanted and would be able to afford to buy south of the river, primarily due to familiarity with that area. However, through the gentle insistence of our realtor, we gradually began to turn our eyes northward, eventually settling upon a house in Hyde Park, a neighborhood whose history was utterly unknown to us. After I moved to Austin a few months a later, in May 2001, the inadvertent wisdom of our decision gradually began to sink in.

For such a cohesive, historic neighborhood to survive with its sense of community intact, even as its city spreads and sprawls all about it, as Austin has done explosively since my first high-school, road-trip visit almost fifteen years ago, is remarkable. Further, given the nature of urban expansion under capitalism, in which "all that is solid melts into air," to borrow a phrase from Karl Marx, such survival reveals a deep and continuing will to hold neighborhood identity intact, come what may. The communal will to survive is complex and multivalent, operating through myriad systems of individuals, organizations, and institutions. Having lived in Hyde Park now for over two years, I have grown interested in how this neighborhood, now my own, works, endures, and prospers.

In this series, I will examine the workings of two superficially very different anchors of Hyde Park historical identity: the Elisabet Ney Museum at 304 East 44th Street, and the curious hodge-podge of small businesses mere blocks away which together constitute an informal sort of museum dedicated to Albert Huffstickler. Fundamentally, the two systems of cultural memory maintenance are very much the same; however, comparison of the two makes very clear the necessity for specific, centralized institutions to perpetuate the living awareness of significant artists after their passing. Next month, I will look at the active and enduring role of the Ney Museum in keeping her contributions to Hyde Park alive. Parts Three and Four will turn to a more recent Hyde Park artist, investigating the local people and organizations working to make "Long Live Huff!" a reality, benefiting all of us. Note: Series continues in following issues.