Top to backside: The Norwood House in 1922, 2024, and a doable future for the construction and land round it. (courtesy of the Norwood Park Foundation, Wolf Sittler, and the Norwood Park Foundation, respectively)
High on a bluff overlooking the Colorado River valley, an idyllic home as soon as stood. It was an Arts & Crafts bungalow constructed by investor Ollie Norwood with symmetrical brick siding, massive home windows, hardwood flooring, a low-pitched roof, and a pergola raised on pyramidal columns of river rock. Its doorways opened onto rose gardens, a fountain, a greenhouse constructed right into a hill, a tennis courtroom, a gazebo, and a bathhouse with a big spring-fed geothermal pool.
But that was way back. Little is left of the Norwood property at present. Only just a few crumbling partitions present the place the outbuildings as soon as stood. The pool was crammed in as a security hazard – an off-leash canine park sits over it now. The view from the property at I-35 and Riverside Drive continues to be there although, taking in Lady Bird Lake and the Downtown skyscrapers. Then there’s the home itself, a stripped, wood field behind a sequence hyperlink fence, completely unrecognizable.
Travis Heights resident Charlotte Bell informed us the Norwood House was nonetheless stunning as just lately because the Eighties. That is when a bunch of neighbors minimize a cope with a apartment developer to designate the home a historic landmark to maintain it from being bulldozed. The apartment undertaking fell via however not earlier than the home was quickly moved, inflicting its brick facade to break down. The metropolis bought the lot within the Nineties, and the Women’s Chamber of Commerce made plans to show the home right into a museum. They deserted the undertaking in 2000. By 2011, holes within the roof had let water destroy the hardwood flooring and compromise the framing. The metropolis’s Parks and Recreation Department examined the home and beneficial it’s torn down.
At that time, a second era of Travis Heights residents sprang up, named themselves the Norwood Park Foundation, and satisfied town to allow them to rehabilitate the home. “The idea was for NPF and the city to combine private and public money to get this old house back to its original appearance,” stated Bell’s husband, Wolf Sittler. “Then it could be used as a publicly owned event space like the Zilker Clubhouse, another historic house with a gorgeous view that can be rented out.”
“The parks department has never been adequately funded. We need private money to get this done.”
– Wolf Sittler
NPF almost made that occur in 2021, after PARD allotted $3 million for the undertaking from bond and resort tax income. The basis bought its design plans permitted and secured the permits to begin work. But then, former NPF President Colleen Theriot stated, the COVID pandemic all of a sudden drove building costs up, doubling the cost of the undertaking. Unable to lift the additional funds, NPF pulled out of the deal and dissolved in the summertime of 2022, after 10 years of effort.
PARD informed us it has moved the money for the Norwood House to different makes use of. The division proposed two choices in a Jan. 25 memo: The metropolis might take full management of the property and create an occasion facility, as initially envisioned. Or it might take away the Norwood House’s historic landmark designation, demolish it, and do one thing else with the location, like creating an overlook with displays describing what was as soon as there.
PARD stated it’s going to make a suggestion within the fall. Kim McKnight, the division’s supervisor of historic preservation, stated their aim is to lift consciousness of the choices and open a dialogue with metropolis leaders and residents to see if there may be sufficient will to re-create the old home.
PARD met with a brand new group of neighbors calling themselves the Revive Norwood Alliance on Jan. 30 as a part of that outreach. Bell and Sittler have been current and stated PARD appeared open to going ahead with the unique plans. “Their position seemed to be that since someone is now advocating for the house they’re more inclined to go with what the advocates want,” Sittler stated. “But the parks department has never been adequately funded. We need private money to get this done.”
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