La Villita: The Little Town That Survived

A block from the River Walk, behind a low stone wall, sits a neighborhood that has been continuously inhabited for roughly three hundred years. It is called La Villita, the Little Town, and the name distinguishes it from the planned civic grid of Main Plaza that the Canary Islanders laid out when they arrived. La Villita grew up on the south bank of the river bend almost as an improvised settlement, beginning as an improvised settlement of jacales, or brush huts, housing families of soldiers from the nearby presidio.

Over the decades it acquired permanence. The low buildings along its narrow paths were rebuilt in adobe, then in stone. By the eighteen forties, German immigrants had moved in alongside the earlier residents, and then Swiss and French merchants. They brought their trade skills, their building habits, and their children. The neighborhood became a layered record of successive populations sharing a small piece of urban ground.

By the early twentieth century, La Villita had deteriorated and was largely forgotten as a historic district. The intervention that saved it came during the Depression. Mayor Maury Maverick, a figure of genuine civic ambition, backed a restoration project, assisted by the National Youth Administration, in which architects including O'Neil Ford helped survey and restore the neighborhood between nineteen thirty-nine and nineteen forty-one. The restoration was not a re-creation. Ford's team worked with existing walls and original materials wherever they could.

La Villita is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places and operates as an arts village, its restored buildings housing galleries and studios. What makes it remarkable is less any single structure than the fact that the sequence of occupation, from Payaya presence to Spanish soldiers to Tejano families to European immigrants to the New Deal restoration, is still visible in the stonework and the proportions of the rooms.