Hyde Park

Hyde Park was sold to white buyers only, as Austin's first streetcar suburb. Monroe Shipe's early advertising promised a place free from nuisances for the city's elite, then turned in the late 1890s toward the working man or woman, and the neighborhood's bungalows now outnumber its Queen Anne houses. Before the houses came, a state fair ran in the east part of the neighborhood from 1875 to 1884, and a curve of 39th Street follows its horse-racing track. Shipe Park was dedicated in 1928, and part of the neighborhood became a National Register district in 1990.

What the plaque says

Hyde Park Advertised in 1892 as "The most fashionable part of the wealthiest and most aristocratic ward in the city", Hyde Park was Austin's first planned suburb. Encompassing an area bordered by the present streets of Guadalupe, 38th, Duval, and 45th, it was promoted by Monroe M. Shipe (1847-1924), President of the Austin Rapid Transit Railway Co. and the M.K.&T. Land and Town Co. Shipe arranged for an electric streetcar line to run from Congress avenue to Hyde Park. He built a lake and pavilion for recreation and had the city's first moonlight tower erected at the corner of Speedway and 41st Street. He also built the first Hyde Park school and by 1893 forty homes had been built in the neighborhood. Among the area's illustrious early residents, whose homes still remain, were sculptress Elisabet Ney; Swiss woodcarver Peter Mansbendel; and horticulturist F.T. Ramsey. By the early 1900s the large Victorian homes in the neighborhood were being joined by smaller bungalows. The lake was drained and the pavilion was razed. Hyde Park was within the city limits of Austin by the 1930s and the streetcar ceased operation in the 1940s. Renewed interest in the 1970s resulted in revitalization of the neighborhood. (1989)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• LBJ Presidential Library — 1.4 mi
  A ten-story travertine archive on the University of Texas campus holding 45 million pages from a presidency of civil rights laws, the War on Poverty and Vietnam.
• Harry Ransom Center — 1.7 mi
  The University of Texas archive where a Gutenberg Bible and the earliest surviving camera photograph are always on view, free, beside the papers of Watergate and the movies.
• Bullock Texas State History Museum — 1.9 mi
  The state's history museum at the head of Congress Avenue, built around the hull of La Salle's ship La Belle, raised from Matagorda Bay with 1.8 million artifacts.
• Texas State Capitol — 2.3 mi
  Austin's fourth statehouse, a Renaissance Revival capitol of 1888 that stands 311 feet to its Goddess of Liberty and was restored after the 1983 fire.

More markers nearby

• Elisabet Ney — steps away
• Texas Confederate Woman's Home — 0.5 mi
• Jane Yelvington McCallum — 0.9 mi
• John Elbridge Hines — 0.9 mi