Preservation activist made history and architecture more accessible
Dwayne Jones was at the courthouse trying to get a Dallas judge to sign an order to prevent the demolition of an old home while Virginia Savage McAlester rallied a crowd on site, stalling with a human shield.
With a few phone calls or her extensive email list, McAlester could rally dozens of people to any site to protect historical buildings. In this case, 15 or so years ago, someone purchased a home in Dallas’ Swiss Avenue Historic District, promising to rehab it.
As often happens, a bulldozer showed up to tear it down. As executive director of Preservation Dallas, it was Jones’ job to go the legal route while McAlester sprang into action. She lined up people in front of the home and parked her own car in an alley so they couldn’t tear it down from the back.
Known nationally for her preservation efforts and for “A Field Guide to American Houses” (published in 1984, revised and expanded in 2015), which became a handbook for laymen and professionals in the built environment, McAlester died April 9 in Dallas from complications of myelofibrosis, a rare blood cancer. She was 76. Her family will hold a memorial service later because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Though she wrote several books, it was “Field Guide” that became a fixture in her publisher’s annual catalog since its first publication. Knopf holds the book in the same esteem it holds Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” Virtually every preservationist has it on their bookshelves, and architecture students use it as a constant reference guide.
Stephen Fox, a noted architectural historian who lectures at the University of Houston and Rice University, said McAlester’s book made architecture accessible to everyone, with language and detailed descriptions meant for laymen.
“The loss of that (Swiss Avenue) house would have been the first and only demolition in the Swiss Avenue district since it was established in the 1970s,” said Jones, now the executive director and chief executive officer at the Galveston Historical Foundation. “It was really a critical line in the sand, you know, ‘We’re not going to do this because this is not what this neighborhood is about.’ ”
Everyone who knew McAlester has a similar story, but that one just might be her most legendary. And it sums up the way friends and family describe her as they pay tribute now: strong, smart and determined.
Deeply involved
McAlester was born in Dallas. Her father and grandfather were both attorneys, and her father, Wallace Savage, was the city’s mayor from 1949 to 1951. She started college at Radcliffe and finished at Harvard, earning a degree in architectural sciences in 1965, followed by a year of studies at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.
Upon returning to Dallas, she married vascular surgeon Clement “Mack” Talkington. The couple had two children, Amy Talkington and Carty Talkington, both of whom live in Los Angeles and work as filmmakers. She later married A. Lee McAlester, a geology professor at Southern Methodist University, and was stepmother to his two children, Keven McAlester of Los Angeles and Martine McAlester of Dallas. Both marriages ended in divorce.
When McAlester returned to Texas after college, she could have settled into a comfortable life as a stayhome mom who joined the right clubs to support her husbands’ ambitions and appeared as a bold-faced name in society columns. She could have been a philanthropist who wrote checks — and she was — but she most enjoyed boots-onthe-ground work: mobilizing people, raising money and working city hall to promote historic preservation.
“My mom was never at home because she was so busy doing all her volunteer work. She felt more like a working mom than any other mom I knew,” said her daughter, Amy Talkington, the mother of McAlester’s two granddaughters. “I was rarely picked up at school on time, I’ll put it that way.”
“She was invited out of the carpool,” joked McAlester’s longtime partner, Steve Clicque, an accountant/ developer/photographer who worked with her on many projects.
One of McAlester’s earliest efforts in the 1970s was saving the Swiss Avenue neighborhood that she, her parents and grandparents lived in. Established in the early 20th century, the once-swanky neighborhood had fallen into disrepair.
McAlester restored her own family home and was part of an effort that ultimately turned around the entire neighborhood and led to its designation as Dallas’s first historic district in 1973. In later efforts, she led the drive to similarly turn around another historic neighborhood — Munger Place — using a novel revolving fund and helped create Fannie Mae’s first inner-city loan program.
McAlester has written several books, but the seminal “Field Guide” was her most successful. It came about in the 1970s when she searched for a reference book to help her identify architectural styles and details. Unable to find one, her then-husband, A. Lee McAlester, told her that if he could write a book on the Earth, she could write one on houses. She wrote the original “Field Guide” with some guidance and editing from him, but the more recent, expanded edition — nearly 900 pages — was hers alone.
“Field Guide” details architectural styles through the years and the different characteristics that make them what they are, from the roof pitch to window shapes and placement, cornices and even porch columns. She traveled the country to document them, noting regional differences in even the most minor form.
“The book really had a significant influence nationally as a kind of handbook that enabled people locally to be able to identify typical American houses and talk about the characteristics of architectural styles,” Fox said, noting that most architecture books focused on elite buildings and the work of well-known architects — not homes in ordinary neighborhoods from small towns to bigger cities.
“What Virginia did reflected … not just architectural style but the shapes of houses and geographic distribution,” Fox said. “She really merged two points of view, identifying architectural styles with this cultural geographic perspective.”
Fox admired the scope and detail of her “Field Guide” but said her later book, “Great American Suburbs: The Homes of Park Cities,” published in 2008, deserves praise as a more serious look at real estate history in affluent Dallas neighborhoods that he compared to Houston’s River Oaks.
Jones described the seven years he worked closely with McAlester in Dallas as exciting.
“She had this uncanny ability to project and foresee preservation issues in Dallas and rally the forces to head them off or direct them in some way,” he said. “She would call me — in the days when we had those recorders — and the tape would run out, so she’d call back and the tape would run out again. I’d have to listen to several messages to find out what she was calling about.”
Serious about family
A small, self-published book about a family trip to Mexico illustrates the way McAlester interacts with her children and her two granddaughters. After Amy Talkington and her family went on that vacation, Clementine, then 8, told her grandmother she was writing a book about it.
McAlester seized the opportunity to encourage her granddaughter and teach her the meaning of “accomplishment.” She promised Clementine that if she finished the book, she would get it published in hardcover form.
Clementine finished the book and its illustrations, sending McAlester — as her publisher — a formal book proposal. In turn, McAlester returned the manuscript with age-appropriate editing and comments for revision. When Clementine finally finished, McAlester had it made into a book and then encouraged her granddaughter to approach her local library in hopes it could be donated to its bookshelves.
McAlester — known to her grandchildren and within the family as “Ginx” — continued the family’s use of eccentric nicknames when she became a grandmother. Her own father didn’t want to be called Grandpa, so he came up with a list of names and let his family decide which one to use. They settled on “Commander” — another option was “Mayor” — and they still use the term when telling family stories.
A couple of years ago she took them on a vacation to Washington, D.C., where she walked them around the city to show them important landmarks and architecture.
“We made the trip — and this was two years and change ago — and the schedule was so packed that my kids could barely keep up. On the second day, one of them declared: ‘I thought this was going to be a vacation.’ Her idea was to see everything,” Talkington recalled.
Of her own childhood, Talkington said her mother urged her children to find their own passions — not to copy hers.
“If she saw us develop an interest, she would encourage us and help us explore it more deeply,” she said. “She saw I loved to paint and had some skill, and she’d say, ‘What about this camp?’ I was in summer community college classes when I was
16. She found the most interesting programs for us to join based on our interests.”
Widely honored
The list of McAlester’s honors was long — she was recognized by the National Trust, American Institute of Architects, American Library Association, American Association for State and Local History, among others.
Though Clicque said that she was cured of the cancer diagnosis, its treatment caused its own set of problems. She struggled with health issues the past year and a half, but she still insisted on doing things that were important to her.
Last May, SMU gave her an honorary doctorate, and McAlester couldn’t be kept from the ceremony.
“That was a typical mom thing,” Talkington said. “She was in ICU on a ventilator on Monday, and on Saturday she was at SMU because she was determined to do that.”