HPNA General Meeting April 5th Agenda Hospice Austin's new Support Source program Historic Preservation: Architecture in Hyde Park - Terri Myers '04 Homes Tour Update HPNA Budget

T hat will be the theme for this year's Hyde Park Homes Tour on Fathers' Day Weekend (June 19 and 20). Once again carriages will travel the streets of Hyde Park. The homes on this year's tour will all be within walking distance as in the early days of the tour. Although the stroll from one house to the other along this year's route will be easy, there will also be the added attraction of horse-drawn carriages to carry guests from three different stops along the way.

This is a particularly important year, as the Hyde Park Neighborhood Association celebrates its thirtieth anniversary. The first Homes Tour was a walking tour and included houses such as the

April, 2004   National Register District Neighborhood   Vol. 30, No. 4

I n an April 1, 2004 news conference at the Hyde Park Baptist Church, HPBC officials startled reporters and residents alike with their announcement of plans to convert the church's 5-story parking garage into a Wal-Mart Supercenter. According to local attorney and HPBC spokesperson Richard Suttle, there were several factors that led to the church's decision to convert its parking structure into a retail facility.

One factor, explained Suttle, is the church's ardent desire to construct a second high-rise parking garage next to its current garage -- an aspiration that has been stymied for the past several years by vigorous neighborhood opposition, opponents arguing that the church already has a perfectly suitable and chronically underutilized parking facility. "But if, all of a sudden, our old garage has become a Supercenter," exclaimed Suttle, "that argument is moot, and it'll be obvious to everybody that we DO need to build a new garage!" A second factor, according to Suttle, was the spirited resistance that Wal-Mart's ambitious expansion plans in the Austin area have generated recently among many Austin residents, who are concerned that those plans, at least as currently conceived, will only exacerbate urban sprawl and the decline of the central city. Such resistance has led Wal-Mart executives to develop an alternate expansion strategy, one focused on more compact, high-rise retail facilities in the city core. Entitled "Up, Not Out, With Wal-Mart!" the campaign has been actively searching for locations to test its new strategy; and the HPBC garage, centrally located and multistory, made it a "prime target" for conversion to retail. A third factor, said

Suttle, was a recent research study by Wal-Mart marketing analysts, which concluded that there is a "crying need" for a Supercenter facility in the core Hyde Park neighborhood. While acknowledging that there are already a number of groceries in this area -- among them, the H-E-B in Hancock Center, Central Market on Lamar, Fresh Plus on Duval, Wheatsville on Guadalupe, and the store in the Triangle development currently under construction -- researchers contended that these outlets provide "at best marginal relief." The only grocery in central Hyde Park, noted the study, is the beloved but diminutive Avenue B Grocery -- a situation which analysts likened to "trying to water your garden with a thimble."     The catalyst which caused all these factors to coalesce in the current project, explained Suttle, was a recent focus group at the UT Business School, which revealed that HPBC and Wal-Mart share certain core values -- prominent among them a relentless attention to the bottom line, a keen awareness that size does matter, and an insatiable appetite for surplus parking. "It was as if we'd been reading each other's mail!" enthused Suttle. From this recognition Continued on page 5