Hello, and welcome to The Bookmark.

I'm Christine Brown, your host.

Today, my guest is Kenneth Hafertepe, author of Historic Buildings of Waco, Texas.

Ken, thank you so much for being here today.

Well, thank you, Christine, and thank you for pronouncing my last name right.

Christine: Oh, I practiced it.

Ken: That doesn't happen very often, so... Well, we had you on last time for your last book, which was Historic Homes of Waco and this one is about the historic buildings.

Why did you want to switch gears and talk about the buildings this time?

Well, it was basically because there was so much interest in historic homes of Waco.

It got a lot of good publicity in Waco and throughout Texas and won some awards, and it struck me that there were whole lots of buildings that were not houses that actually had interesting stories attached to Some of them, you know, very outstanding on the the skyline, like the Alamo building, but others that are museums, like the Dr. Pepper Museum, and many interesting churches.

And it seemed an opportunity to tell a story that brought a lot of these old build and the people who designed and built them and worked them, bring that all to light.

So that was the objective.

Was it easier or harder to do the research and find out about how the buildings came to be for the buildings versus the homes?

Good question.

There's a sense in which it was about the same degree of or difficulty of getting the basic information about it.

I was able to use things like city directories, and there was a general contractors guide that listed a lot of buildings and the architects.

So that was all cool.

The thing that I was looking for in terms of the historic homes was to find an interesting story, something that said something about Waco at the time that it was built, and as a result, there are some perfectly attractive houses on the streets of Waco that did not make it into that b because it was the the story of the people just did jump out at me.

For historic buildings, it was kind of different because it was not the narrative of an individual or a couple or a family, but had to say something about where Waco was at the time that the building was designed.

So took a fair amount of sorting through.

It was also a bit of a challenge in that I really wanted to get the names of as many architects as possible, and although I found quite a few there were some that just seemed to be slipping through the cracks ther There was one at the Bankers Trust Building, where it was only last year where I decided just for the sake of due diligence, I would put in a Google search one last time for “Bankers Trust Architects, ” and by golly, it came up with the name of the architects, Sanguinet and Staats of Fort Worth and I was like, Where have you been all my life?

I've done that Google search so many times to no avail, and by golly, and it turns out it wasn't that surprising because Sanguinet and Staats was the firm that designed the Alico Building.

And so this is just a block away And the Alico also had a bank as one of its anchor tenants, so sometimes the interesting information can come in surprising ways.

Can you talk about the range of the types of buildings?

Because I mean, homes, they're going to have different styles, but they're homes.

But in this book we've got a lot of variety.

And what the purpose of the buil Yeah, the Historic Homes of Waco was roughly chronological from early to the most recent.

But then within eras arranged by style for the homes.

In this case, it was pretty clear that it was going to have to be focused more on building types, and that way people would be able to make meaningful comparisons of the different types of buildings within any one building type.

So it ranges from churches, which is the first chapter through various sorts of commercial and industrial buildings, public buildings like city halls and courthouses, skyscrapers got its own small chapter and then a fairly lengthy chapter on educational buildings, both high schools and into the colleges and universities.

And one of the surprises that I didn't realize before coming to Waco was that there was such a heavy concentration of Masonic groups in Waco.

And so there are actually three very interesting Masonic buildings in downtown Waco, and they each have their own interesting story I think maybe another interesting contrast to the last book is that with some exceptions, you may not be able to go and visit the historic homes and get inside them.

But with a lot of these buildings as a visitor or somebody who was traveling to Waco, you could see a lot of the interior of these gorgeous buildings.

There's a better bet you'll be able to get in, and although it may not seem like it, I can be somewhat introverted.

So I'm not the type of person to go up and ring the doorbell of a house and say, “Hi, I'm writing a book Can I see your house?

” Because people might look at me like I was crazy or something.

But yeah, churches tend to be open to the public and the commercial buildings.

One of the challenges actually in that regard, sort of the exception to the rule is when a building is no longer occupied and it may be boarded up.

And I'm thinking here of what Waco and always think of as the customers building, which was the very long term dry goods store in East Waco, which was originally the Cornish building.

And in that case, I got a phone call out of the blue from someone who had purchased it in hopes to restore it, and so did a very thorough walkthrough of that building.

So I kind of had to count my blessings there, is that, yes, the good things like that can happen.

Well, let's try to talk about some.

We won't be able to get to all of it because there are a lot of wonderful buildings in here.

But in our limited time, let's talk about some of the buildings in the categories.

And I want to start with, as you mentioned, the first chapter, which is the places of worship in the churches.

And there are, again, a variety of not only styles but congregations and branches of religion in the books.

Yes, absolutely.

The oldest religious building in Waco is the Episcopal Church, St Paul's, which dates to 1878-79.

But there's quite, quite the parade of styles of the 20th century from First Baptist Church, which dates to 1906.

All the way up.

I went a little farther time-wise than I did in historic homes, because there are two religious buildings of the early 1960s.

Oh, my goodness.

And that was the the new First Methodist Church by Henry J. Steinberg of San Antonio, and the congregation Rodef Sholom our oldest Jewish congregation by Kamrath and McKee of Houston.

And they it did strike me that Waco tends to lean towards the traditional.

And that's true in churches as well as in other sorts of bui It took more of an experimental attitude to go for something like the temple, Rodef Sholom which was inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright and his architecture.

But Wacoans tended to go for the tried and true, be that gothic revival or neo classical revival, colonial revival, Spanish colonial.

You can find all sorts of interesting examples of those in Waco.

So it's a rich variety.

One of the ones that really was one of the last ones to where the entry really flowered into something that was interesting was for Saint Francis on the Brazos Catholic Church, which was built in downtown Waco in the late 1920s and finished in 1931, but built for the immigrants who were fleeing the Mexican Revolution and all the political turmoil that was happening in Mexico at that point.

And the Franciscan priests who had been sent to, uh, to serve that community came up with the idea, apparently with Roy Lane, one of our local architects, that they should do a church that riffed on Mission San Jose and San Antonio.

The what was known even in the 18th century as the “Queen of the Missions ” in Texas And what made that even more striking to me was that in 1928, when Roy Lane went to San Antonio to study it and make drawings of it and start thinking about how he could use that in a a Catholic church in Waco, the mission, San Jose, it was actually a ruin.

It had no roof, it had no dome.

It was not to be restored for another decade until money from the New Deal came pouring into Texas because FDR wanted to keep Texas part of the Democratic New Deal coalition.

And so it was an acknowledgment of Texass Hispanic heritage.

But at a point when Texans really hadn't found the way to actually restore that building and now it's been restored quite magnificently.

So very glad for that.

But the exterior was very much based on the original mission, although they had to flip the tower around so that it would be closer to the street corner at Third and Jefferson in downtown Waco.

The interior is not really based at all on San Jose, but the exterior with all of the the beautiful carvings of saints and the like are very closely fashioned on the San Antonio prototype.

So that was interesting reading about all of the craftsmen who were involved with the project.

And it was a major undertaking for the Catholics of Waco at the time.

One of the things that struck me but not until I got further in because the churches were first, is as I was reading along in the book, it seemed to me that the churches are one of the few categories of building that continued to serve the purpose they started out like, especially when you get into the commercial and industrial, those the purpose of those buildings has changed over time.

But the churches continue to be churches for the most part, and then that means maybe they haven't been altered or changed as much as some of the other buildings.

That is a good point.

The probably the biggest challenge for churches in terms of that is they have so much success that that they can outgrow an earlier church.

In the case of Rodef Sholom, they had a very nice Victorian synagogue designed by W.W. Larimore that was replaced about 40 years later by one design by Milton Scott in a more neoclassical style, very similar to this first Baptist Church.

And then that gave way to the current Frank Lloyd Wright influenced one.

So that's kind of the biggest challenge the churches have had.

Nowadays, some of the downtown churches are facing challenge in terms of their members moving out to suburbia and the like, which is true for older white congregations, but also for black congregations as well.

So Saint James Methodist Church was recently sold and the hope is that it'll be adapted as an event center where special events and concerts and things of that sort can be had, but the oldest black church in Waco, New Hope Baptist, has a very small congregation at this point, so its future is unclear.

But they've done a wonderful job of maintaining that church.

It's really remarkable being able to walk through that and seeing the stained glass windows that remain.

And a lot of the pews up in the especially remain and the paintings over the stage.

So it's very exciting for me when you can get that window back into an earlier generation of Waco and and the sort of faith that they displayed in building these wonderful churches.

Well, to switch gears entirely, let's move to maybe a more commercial or industrial which we have to talk about.

My favorite building in Waco, which is the Artesian Manufacturing and Bottling Company.

But I know it is the Dr. Pepper Museum.

Yes, absolutely.

Which is, in fact, on the dust jacket.

Right there.

In fact, if you look closely enough, that photo, you have to look at the one inside the book, too, to see it.

There's actually a sort of U-shape that's from the gash that the building suffered during the tornado of 1953.

So the building has been through a lot, but one of the earliest surviving Waco buildings for industrial purposes and somewhat like Dr. Pepper being an interesting blend of flavors, so too the the building blends the Romanesque revival with elements of the mission style.

So it's really a distinctive building.

The thing that that that created a challenge for Dr. Pepper was the switch from bottles to aluminum cans for soft drinks because the Dr. Pepper plant was built entirely for selling the product in glass bottles.

And so when the switch came to a aluminum, that's when the building lost its original function.

Fortunately, some locals like Wilson Lanning, Jr. and Calvin Smith of Baylor, came up with the idea of creating a Dr. Pepper museum.

And it's still going strong today and a great tourist attraction in Waco.

So they've actually been doing some great work restoring the building back to its original arrangement and have just created an exhibit talking about all the different people who've worked at Dr. Pepper over the years, which has diversified the story a great deal.

Well, we should probably also talk about the other big tourist draw to Waco, which is what's currently the Magnolia Market at the Silos.

What's the story of that building?

Well, it's actually pretty complicated, believe it or not.

I'm surprised myself in the sort sort of on paper archeology of seeing that that site had originally been a lumber company and lumber yard.

It's very close and still this close to the train tracks in downtown Waco.

But it was sort of like a home design store of the 1880s that people could come there and buy doors, windows, shutters or whatever lumber they needed for building projects.

But it later became a cotton a cotton oil processing plant.

And those were very popular in Texas in the early 20th century.

And cotton being such a huge part of Texass agricultural base.

So the plant was even larger than it is now.

But what we now refer to as the silos were actually for the cotton seeds to be stored in before they were processed.

So the silos was sort of a common name for it, but it wasn't actually the function.

But that was really kind of a turning point in Wacos history when Chip and Joanna Gaines were able to purchase the building with an assist from the taxpayers of of Waco and create the Magnolia markets, which built upon the brand they were creating and their HGTV show.

So before they could do that, they did have to undertake a rehabilitation of a plant that had been closed down for quite a while.

And because of the public fundin that was involved, that pulled in the Texas Historical Commission.

So they received a lot of guidance as far as what was appropriate and what could be what could be done to an old building and what shouldn't be done to an old building.

And it ended up winning some awards as a successful adaptation of a historic building to a new purpose while still maintaining its character.

So that's actually a Waco Win-Win kind of story.

Yeah, I would say the taxpayers got a good return on their investment.

Yes, I think that's that's fair to say.

I want to put a pin in talking about the buildings to maybe zoom out a little bit and talk about what you just mentioned about preserving a building, because a lot of these buildings over the course of their lifetimes have changed, some because they had to do repairs after the tornado, some to their detriment.

Can you talk about the importance of preserving the buildings and why we should do that?

Well, really, it seems to me important because it's something that gives a city or town its character by the buildings that have been built over the years.

And, you know, each city does it a slightly different way.

So it's a peculiar mix that says, “Waco, ” and so if you let all of that architectural heritage go away, the tendency is to make it more monotonous, shall we say, when you don't have these these historical buildings that are still there.

So it's just very important.

Also, one of the things that I feel very strongly is that these buildings, both homes and public buildings, are containers that whole stories of the people who built them and lived in them and the like and that they're, they're actually historical evidence that help tell us what it was like living in Waco at different times.

So I think it's important in that sense that we remember that we're building on the shoulders of the people who came before us.

And, you know, sometimes things do need to change, but you know, it's important to have a respect for what's come before.

To build on that, one of the things I love doing as somebody who grew up in a college town is when I visited another college campus, you kind of see what you're talking about with it's a it's a story of where you've been like a town, but on a smaller footprint.

College campuses, you see buildings styles change over time.

What's popular, what's necessary, what were the needs of the college, and Baylor has some great examples of buildings in this book here, too.

Definitely.

Definitely.

I think that one thing that is often the case on college campuses is that a new president tends to result in a new direction for the buildings to go in.

And that's certainly been the ca Baylor.

Baylor had been in independence for several decades, dating back to 1845 before it moved to Waco in the 1880s and started out with two very eclectic Victorian buildings, which are still symbols of the campus for students.

When they come back, the towers of Old Main and Georgia Burleson Hall.

But it's interesting seeing the changes that have happened over time.

The first big growth spurt after that was the Carroll Science Building and the Carroll Library and Chapel, which, which were in the newly fashionable Middle classical style.

And then Baylor started a long love affair with the colonial revival, which we love most dearly.

And they ended up having one arc the local architect, Birch D. Easterwood, who designed most of their buildings of the 1920s and 1930s and even up into the 1940s.

So when he moved from Waco, he continued working, designing Baptist churches throughout Texas.

So he's a pretty important figure in terms of being sort of a form giver for Baptist universities and also Baptist churches like the one in Galveston is by Birch Easterwood and his son, Kenneth Easterwood.

And towards the end of what's discussed in this book, we talk about the Tidwell Bible building, which was the last of Birch Easterwoods buildings on the Baylor campus and also the Armstrong Browning Library, which has been voted in a lot of online publications as one of the most beautiful libraries in the United States.

It's very richly decorated in a European style, particularly on the inside.

It's kind of dry as the West Texas winds on the outside with.

And given that the architect worked extensively at Texas Tech, I guess we can understand that.

But the insides are this sort of lush and lavish European style.

And the Brownings, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, had lived in Italy for many generations, and so that Italian theme was something that was very strong in Baylor's focus.

So it's a very distinctive campus, and it is a campus that, the incoming prospective students are pleasantly surprised at how pretty it is and well-maintained and the like.

So that's an interesting aspect.

It is.

And I love how we're just a few we're just a couple of hours apart, Baylor and A&M.

But the way they grew couldn't be more different.

And I think it says a lot about the culture of the campus, what their internal culture is, And A&M culture and Baylor's culture are very different.

So whereas geographically, you wouldn't think there would be, you know, a huge difference in taste based on what we what we build.

I mean, that that's the whole point of the book, I think, is that we could see what we thought about the world and ourselves based on the buildings we built.

Yes, and, you know, a different culture than either of these two would be the University of Texas.

And interestingly enough, one of the the buildings on Baylor's campus was the Women's Memorial dormitory and actually funded by a committee of female Baylor alumni.

And they went and visited dormitories at Georgetown in Georgetown at Southwestern University.

And the women's dorm at U.T.. And so they were taking ideas from those visits.

But by golly, it sure ended up looking a lot more like a Baylor building.

And that sort of red brick and Georgian classical colonnade and the like.

So, you know, it gets back to the determination of people who were out there raising the funds and, and pushing Baylor onward towards a that was actually the first dedicated female dorm at Baylor.

And Brooke Storm had been built about seven years earlier.

So, yeah, college campuses are very, very interesting.

Well, unfortunately, we're running short on time.

So if you want to read more about the commercial buildings, the museums, the Masonic lodges that was actually fascinating to me.

It's all in the book.

But to wrap us up in our final 2 minutes, what do you hope the take-away is from your book?

Well, I know that Waco is growing and will continue to grow.

In fact, one of those Masonic buildings is now being adapted as a hotel by Chip and Joanna Gaines.

And so what you see in the book is the pre adaptation of that.

I hope that the book can serve as kind of a guidepost for people who are interested not only in studying Waco buildings, but perhaps getting involved in buying a building and restoring it and the like.

But this historic homes of Waco, we're really intended to get people to think about what is distinctive about these buildings, what what makes it stylish, what makes it a Waco version of a particular style and reading the book can help people think through that process of what they might want to do with, with those buildings as we move into the future.

Well, that's wonderful.

I also want to add, I know you didn't intend this to be any sort of travel guide based on its size, but it certainly made me want to go see some of these places.

Next time I'm in Waco, I'm going to add a few stops on my Ken: And it's available on Kindle.

Christine: You can just take it wherever you want to go.

It's a travel book.

But then I think you miss the beautiful big photographs If you read it anywhere- Ken: And you need this for your coffee table.

Christine: Well, thank you so much for coming and for talking about this wonderful book.

I appreciate your time.

Ken: Thank you for having me.

And thank you all for joining us.

Unfortunately, we are out of time.

The book, again, is The Historic Buildings of Waco, Texas.

I'm Christine Brown, and I will see you again soon.