I have some great data to look at the progression of growth in the neighborhood as developers acquired land and began to parcel it and add infrastructure.
The neighborhood association of Highland Park West / Balcones Area (HPWBA) is comprised of several neighborhoods largely developed between 1946 and 1965. The largest were: Highland Park and Highland Park West, Highland Village, Highland Park Court, Beverly Hills, Colorado Foothills and Balcones Park. There are several developments on Mount Bonnell that came later, largely in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s.
This month is an overview and next month I’ll start going through each of these one by one.
To produce this information I spent a lot of time at the Austin History Center doing research using old phone books and building permit records to reconstruct the progression of development from 1945 to 1965 (so I used the phone books from 1945, 1950, 1955, 1960 and 1965).
If you want to know who the original resident or owner of your home was, I most likely have that information. And if you want to play around with the map (or read some of the earlier articles), I have it all posted on my blog at treymcwhorter.com/blog. Enjoy!
Feel free to reach out and I’d be happy to share what I know, and if you have a good story or information about the early development of our neighborhood, please contact me!
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