History

Hyde Park is over 100 years old. Platted in 1891 by the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Land and Town Co., Hyde Park was marketed under the direction of Monroe Martin Shipe as an affluent suburb featuring large, majestic residences. Completion of Shipe’s streetcar line in 1891 provided a reliable transportation connection to downtown from the relatively isolated area.

Trees were planted, parkland established, lakes created and a theater pavilion erected to augment the pastoral quality of the area, which was marketed as the “fashionable part of the wealthiest and most aristocratic city in the land.” The first houses built in the neighborhood were stylistically pretentious examples of late 19th-century domestic architecture. Many of them, such as the Oliphant-Walker House (3900 Avenue C) were built in the Queen Anne style by locally prominent citizens.

Shipe’s vision of Hyde Park as a self-sufficient community led him to provide municipal services, including mail delivery, street lighting, and sanitation, as well as to encourage churches, schools and stores to locate in the neighborhood. Residents early on had access to establishments such as the Avenue B Grocery (4403 Avenue B) and the Hyde Park Presbyterian Church (3915 Avenue B).

Despite these early promotions, however, sluggish land sales prompted considerable changes in marketing strategies within eight years of Hyde Park’s founding. Shipe ceased to advertise the area for the city’s elite, and instead portrayed it as a neighborhood for the middle and working classes. In response, Hyde Park’s architectural character shifted to smaller, more modest frame houses. While fairly steady growth characterized the addition throughout the first decades of this century, its greatest building boom occurred between 1924 and 1935.

The preponderance of bungalows in the neighborhood was the result of construction during this period. Popular across the nation from the 1910s through the 1930s, bungalows, such as the Charles William Ramsdell House (4002 Avenue H), often were associated with early efforts in suburban development.

For the first half of the 20th century housing in Austin was formally segregated through both public policy and private deed restrictions. During that time period Hyde Park was one of the neighborhoods from which people were excluded on the basis of race.

Source: The Texas Historical Commission