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More Haus
March 29, 2005 ( life )
House Defense Detail!
So, we showed up early to sign up (but that's nowhere near as important as we'd been lead to believe), and sat through a huge amount of cases. This was actually a great thing, as we were able to learn from their mistakes and the reactions and deliberations of the committee, and modify our presentation along the way to better work with it. (That, and our house was going to be permitted to be demolished without comment had we not been there to speak for it).
Anyhow, we also got to see how other, more prepared neighborhood associations were organized to deal with it, and decided that while I'd present the main chunk (As it was all in my head better anyhow), blanu would also speak some, just to emphasize the strength in numbers effect. We had a total of 12 people including the 4 Haus residents present.
The city staff on preservation had done his standard review of ownership for major figures, but he didn't dig very deep, and as the architecture is evidentially not terribly outstanding, he'd OK'ed it for demolition or removal to another location.
We overwhelmed them with the amount of information, community support, and research effort we'd gotten together over Easter weekend. The chairwoman asked if I was available for hire, and I responded that only if I had more than a weekend to respond.
All night long, the 6-person council had been split over every single issue, for often very opaque reasons, but we got a unanimous pass in the motion. The next meeting is at the end of April, and we'll present again with more information on the historical and cultural significance of the Haus. Our presentation is at:
http://griffjon.com/dashaus/2807RioGrande.ppt , it has all the coolest information on the history and architecture of the house, lacking a few interesting details of Metzenthin (he graded Annie Webb Blanton very poorly on her submission to the UT SongBook Committee!)
The chairwoman ran after us in the hall to thank us separately for caring; the committee is all-volunteer, and I think we really impressed them by nothing more than caring. Of course we could shrug, accept the annoyance, and move somewhere else -- but the thing about DasHaus is, you don't really want to...
Anyhow, I'm not sure how many other people really believe this would work going into it, but now everyone's jazzed and promising to help me research! Yay!
Posted by griffjon at March 29, 2005 08:14 PM
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