Building the Ivory Tower. LaDale C. Winling
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16, 17. Census maps of Austin, 1930 and 1950. At the turn of the twentieth century, the African American population was distributed in neighborhoods throughout Austin, including Wheatsville and Clarksville. A city plan in 1928 and infrastructure program sought to segregate African Americans in East Austin, draining them from the mix of traditional neighborhoods throughout Austin. Maps created by the author. Census data from University of Minnesota Population Studies Center, www.nhgis.org.
Rivers of Oil
Back on campus in 1930, the university was ready to build. Texas A&M and the University of Texas had waged an institutional feud from 1923 to 1930 over royalty payments for the oil. The state legislature required drillers to pay one-eighth the value of the oil to the university, to be deposited in a fund for investing in the university’s buildings and grounds. Texas A&M had appealed for a portion of the oil proceeds because they were technically a branch institution of the University of Texas.55 After much negotiation, in January 1930, the UT Regents settled the dispute with the directors of A&M, agreeing to give A&M one-third of the royalties and freeing the funds from litigation and negotiation. The Texas state legislature institutionalized this agreement in 1931.56
William Battle knew the value of architectural symbols and concrete buildings. He had played politics effectively when he served as an acting UT president from 1914 to 1916, overseeing the creation of UT’s architecture building, Sutton Hall, designed by Beaux-Arts architect Cass Gilbert. Battle was a professor of Greek and Latin, was familiar with classical forms, and was a key go-between to the city’s business class through the Town and Gown social club, a collection of the city’s leading citizens. He was one of ten UT presidents and numerous university officers who were members of Town and Gown at some point in the organization’s first fifty years.57
University development policy was often debated and negotiated in civic groups and alumni organizations, keeping college life and city life in synch. Battle maintained relations with commercial, legal, and political leaders like Walter Long, of the city’s chamber of commerce, on behalf of the university.58 Long served for decades as the public face of Austin’s business interests and credited the campus building program as a key bulwark against the Depression. The chamber promoted the idea of UT investing its oil money in higher-yield securities so that more revenue would lead to a larger building program. Enabling amendments to the state constitution passed handily, and UT construction proceeded apace.59 Among academics and civic boosters, there was little doubt that the interests of the city and the university were one.
Tom Miller, Austin’s long-serving mayor throughout the midcentury decades, made the university-city nexus a metropolitan political issue in his first run for office. He wrote in a full-page newspaper advertisement in 1933, “I will further cordial relations between the city government and State and University authorities. I am also conscious of the great asset in material and cultural value of all the other great schools of Austin.”60 To a broad phalanx of political, business, and social organizations, the effects of the university on the city were clear, and there was a consensus that the two should work together: the growth of one should spur the other.
In 1930, university officials expected UT would prosper despite the nation’s deepening economic depression. The university’s oil lands had produced about $3 million in revenue, and Texas was poised to build with its share.61 Like the city, the University of Texas sought a new master plan to accommodate its future growth. This expansion would encompass more than a dozen new buildings and facilities. Battle led the university’s committee on campus grounds, and he recommended Philadelphia architect Paul Cret for the campus plan, a marker of UT’s ambition to rank among the nation’s top universities.62 Cret was a Frenchman who headed the University of Pennsylvania’s architecture school. Through his private firm, he designed buildings and monuments across the United States and Europe. The architect was born in France and trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He brought the aesthetics of European architectural refinement to Texas. Battle termed him “a man of great ability, the highest training, and notable taste.”63 All of his work for UT would be cloaked in the style and ornament of the Spanish Renaissance Revival.
Cret delivered the master plan in 1933. It showed axial arrangements and pathways bounding and connecting rectilinear campus zones consistent with Beaux-Arts principles. He adapted it to the local conditions by creating multilevel terracing to accommodate the sloping Austin landscape. He developed schemes for new buildings, and, when selected as the architect for individual buildings, Cret provided designs and ornamentation that alluded to and, in some cases, rivaled palacios in sixteenth-century Spain (Figures 18 and 19).64
Cret’s master plan for the University of Texas was urban planning ideology writ small. The Beaux-Arts tradition and City Beautiful movement emphasized urban order by creating grand boulevards, using visual symbolism, and harmonizing the chaos of large and growing cities. Cret’s plan reinforced gender and racial segregation on campus and in the city by creating campus zones that prescribed areas of activity and reinforced geographic concentrations. It called for UT’s white female students to live and study as far on campus as possible from segregated, black East Austin.65 The zone in the northwestern corner of campus included women’s dormitories, the women’s gymnasium, and a building for home economics. Cret located the zone near two existing dormitories created for women in the 1920s, the Scottish Rite Dormitory and Littlefield Dormitory. A Masonic organization had built Scottish Rite just off the northern edge of campus to provide housing for the daughters of masons at UT. The Littlefield family had donated funds for a dormitory for first-year female students, built at the corner of Twenty-Sixth (now Dean Keeton) and Whitis, and it was the northwestern anchor for the women’s zone. To the southeast of campus, Cret’s plan also used the existing Texas Memorial Stadium, along with new parking, men’s housing, athletic fields, and open space, as a buffer between East Austin and campus.
Figure 18. Paul Cret campus plan perspective. Paul Cret, a leading Philadelphia architect, created a Beaux-Arts master plan for the University of Texas campus. Flush with revenue from leases on the oil lands, the university commissioned Cret to design more than a dozen buildings between 1930 and 1945. In this era, the university fulfilled its ambition to become a “university of the first class.” University of Texas Buildings Collection, Alexander Architectural Archive, University of Texas Libraries, University of Texas at Austin, Paul Philippe Cret Collection, Project # 241.
Figure 19. An overhead view of Cret’s design. University of Texas Buildings Collection, Alexander Architectural Archive, University of Texas Libraries, University of Texas at Austin, Paul Philippe Cret Collection, Project # 241.
Cret’s plan followed leading planning practice. The top guide on college design, Charles Klauder’s College Architecture in America, indicated, “Girls especially like to carry on all the activities of home life under their own roof.” Klauder recommended closed, “homelike” dormitories with as many amenities as possible provided on the premises. This would preempt “the inconvenience, loss of time and exposure of making an outdoor journey” for women.66 Thus, the design called for dormitory groups with house mothers and deans of women supervising them. Students also lived in nearby female rooming houses in respectable neighborhoods like West Austin. Claudia Taylor, the future Lady Bird Johnson, while an undergraduate in the 1920s and 1930s, lived in a women’s rooming house on West 21st Street near the western edge of campus.67 Formerly the home of a prominent family in one of the more desirable neighborhoods in nineteenth-century Austin, the building was inspected by university administrators to “enforce certain standards relative to sanitation, health and social environments.”68