Build Tapestries, Not Just Buildings
A sitting room in Hotel 1928 in Waco, TX. (Source: Hotel 1928.)
A fancy new hotel opened here in Waco, Texas, last December. In 2018, local fixer-uppers Chip and Joanna Gaines purchased a stately brick building downtown (the former Shriner Lodge), and for the past few years, have been working to transform it into the very swanky Hotel 1928.
Featuring 33 rooms, two dining options, a rooftop lounge and a stately library with thousands of books, it’s a genuine effort to provide an elevated lodging experience that highlights Waco’s history. I dragged my husband there over the holiday. We sipped hot drinks from the café in front of the fireplace and examined some of the titles stacked tightly into the shelves.
I’ve watched Hotel 1928 come into existence over the past few years, sometimes from the window seat at Lighthouse, a coffee shop right across the street where I occasionally get work done. More than the building has changed—the adjacent buildings on the block have also filled up with new business tenants including the boutique leather-boot shop Tecovas, a boutique vintage shop, a fine home goods atelier, and soon…we’ll have a fine arts and books shop.
The block perhaps points to a future that Waco’s leaders might be aiming for: a small-town tourist destination attractive to travelers on the higher end of things. Other new developments seem to support this theory: a Terry Black’s BBQ, an Oyster Bar, and the soon-to-open Hotel Herringbone where happy hour is complementary and hotel bookings come with the option to rent a Moke or electric bike (although on which bike lanes, I’m not so sure).
If my street-level observations are any indication, these developments are indeed beginning to attract curious, well-heeled travelers. More than once, I’ve seen fashionably dressed voyagers huddling on their phones outside Hotel 1928, in that particular way travelers do when they aren’t sure where to go.
Their disorientation as visitors has partly to do with the fact that they are new to town, but it’s also because of the relationship between the hotel and the rest of the downtown. Sitting on the corner of 6th and Washington, Hotel 1928 is technically close enough to the rest of downtown and even to Magnolia’s Silos to venture there foot, but for an out-of-towner staring at a busy two-way street, four massive parking lots, and a very bright and unshaded sidewalk without a crosswalk across, this isn’t immediately obvious.
These issues deserve attention and, fortunately, solutions are swift at hand. In fact, you can look at the very block for clues. In a downtown where many of the buildings are severed from each other and separated by parking lots, these buildings remain connected, creating a perfect tapestry from one end of the block to the other, with no gaps between them. This is just one seemingly insignificant feature, but it turns this one block from a collection of buildings to a tapestry that makes people want to visit and explore.
The value of this for a downtown can’t be underrated. It’s not enough to bring amenities and interesting shops and restaurants. The connective fibers between these endpoints also need attention and investment. Otherwise, downtowns will become a collection of end-point “islands'' with nothing but traffic connecting them. Until the city builds a crosswalk connecting the two sides of Washington Avenue (which I’ve been told is in the works), this will be the fate of this lovely block.
We can see a corollary principle within the Complete Streets idea, an approach to designing streets such that they effectively serve a variety of users at once, not just cars. This model reminds us that it’s not just about putting down a bunch of sharrows and technical components…it’s about bringing these components together in a way that people actually feel comfortable using them. There’s a world of difference between providing an amenity and providing it in an attractive, usable way. Simply providing a variety of lane types wouldn’t really do the job.
What if we began to look at our neighborhoods with a similar frame of mind? What if we saw them not just as collections of buildings and technical components, but as tapestries? What if city planners and developers started working together to think not just about the immediate project on hand, but how that project fits into the overall fabric of the block and the neighborhood, as a whole? What if we aimed for complete blocks, not just complete buildings?
Fundamentally, this would not be so much about insisting on particular kinds of design decisions or architecture. It would be more about acknowledging that relationships sustain cities. Relationships between the buildings, the streets, the sidewalks, the light poles, and yes…between the people. Everything we add to the city should serve to enhance those relationships and the connective fibers that neighborhoods need to feel like places, not just collections of buildings.
For example: does entering a business require crossing a busy street? If so, perhaps a crosswalk should be part of the plan. Does it get dark here at night? How about investing in some lighting? If a city is especially hot in the summer, why not insist on trees or plants of some kind in the parking lot?
In a way, the block of businesses on Washington Avenue is an example of what to do and what not to do at once. We should plan for a coherent tapestry not just single buildings and projects that stand on their own. But we should also remember to connect the dots. See city streets and blocks as tapestries: they are colorful, interesting, and surprising, but to really work their magic, they have to be connected in the right way.
Tiffany Owens Reed is the host of The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast. A graduate of The King's College and former journalist, she is a New Yorker at heart, currently living in Texas. In addition to writing for Strong Towns and freelancing as a project manager, she reads, writes, and curates content for Cities Decoded, an educational platform designed to help ordinary people understand cities. Explore free resources here and follow her on Instagram @citiesdecoded.