Full Name: McAlester, Virginia Savage
Other Names:
- Virginia Savage
- Virginia Savage Talkington
- Virginia Wallace Savage
- Virginia Wallace Savage McAlester
- Virginia Wallace Savage Talkington
Gender: female
Date Born: 13 May 1943
Date Died: 09 April 2020
Place Born: Dallas, TX, USA
Place Died: Dallas, TX, USA
Home Country/ies: United States
Subject Area(s): architecture (object genre) and preservation (function)
Career(s): art historians, authors, and preservationists
Institution(s): Harvard University and Southern Methodist University
Overview
Architectural historian and preservationist who led the movement to protect Dallas’s historic neighborhoods, earning the title “Queen of Dallas Preservation.” Savage was born on 13 May 1943 to Wallace (1912-2000) and Dorothy Savage (1918-1999). Her father was a lawyer who served as the mayor of Dallas from 1949 to 1951. Her mother, a preservationist in her own right, bought abandoned properties on Swiss Avenue, Dallas, where the family lived, to protect them from demolition, inspiring her daughter’s passion for preserving the city’s historic homes.
Savage earned her undergraduate degree in architectural sciences from Radcliffe college in 1965. Savage went on to complete her first year at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, but apparently did not complete her graduate degree. In November 1965, she married Clement Talkington (1941-2020), a vascular surgeon, with whom she had two children.
Inspired by her mother’s preservation efforts, she was one of the founders of the Historic Preservation League, which later came to be known as Preservation Dallas, in 1972. This organization helped designate more than 4,000 local landmarks, including her own street, Swiss Avenue, which became Dallas’s first historic district. As part of this organization, she also helped preserve numerous homes in Munger Place that would have otherwise been demolished. She divorced Talkington in 1977. McAlester remarried later that year to Arcie Lee McAlester (1933-2016), a geology professor at South Methodist University. During this time she also founded Friends of Fair Park, an initiative to protect the park’s 277 acres from development and to restore its Art Deco buildings. Her efforts helped raise $200 million and contributed to the designation of Fair Park as a National Historic Landmark in 1986. Her work with other preservation bodies included several terms on the Dallas Landmark Commission between 1973 and 2004, during which she sat on its Fair Park Task Force and chaired its Preservation Tax Incentives Task Force.
Her 1984 A Field Guide to American Houses is widely considered the first and best catalog of American domestic architecture, and it earned an American Library Association reference-book honor and a National Trust award. She wrote several other books on American houses and neighborhoods, and two colleagues are finishing her nearly half-complete A Field Guide to American Buildings.
She was given the key to the city of Dallas in 2014. After her husband’s death in 2016, she partnered with contractor and developer Steve Clicque in her final years. McAlester received an honorary doctorate from Southern Methodist University in 2019. She served as an advisor emeritus to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Virginia Savage McAlester died in Dallas on April 9, 2020, at age 76, due to complications related to myelofibrosis, for which she had undergone a stem cell transplant in 2013.
Selected Bibliography
- The Making of a Historic District: Swiss Avenue, Dallas, Texas. Washington, DC: National Trust for Historic Preservation, 1975;
- A Field Guide to American Houses. New York: Knopf, 1984;
- Great American Houses and Their Architectural Styles. New York: Abbeville Press, 1994;
- A Field Guide to America’s Historic Neighborhoods and Museum Houses: The Western States. New York: Knopf, 1998;
- The Homes of the Park Cities, Dallas: Great American Suburbs. New York: Abbeville Press, 2009.
Sources
- Harvard Club of Dallas. “In Memoriam: Virginia McAlester, 1943-2020.” https://hcdallas.clubs.harvard.edu/images.html?file_id=NwkK2cJlbdU%3D.
- Historical Marker Database. “Harris-Savage House.” https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=152040.
- Penguin Random House Authors. “Virginia Savage McAlester.” https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/178887/virginia-savage-mcalester/.
- Reference and User Services Association. “Outstanding Reference Sources, 1984.” PDF. https://rusaupdate.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/1984_OutstandingReferenceSources.pdf.
- Texas State Historical Association. “McAlester, Virginia Wallace Savage Talkington.” Handbook of Texas. https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/mcalester-virginia-wallace-savage-talkington.
- Traditional Building. “Virginia Savage McAlester, Best-Selling Author and ‘Queen of Dallas Preservation,’ Dies at 76.” Originally published in the Dallas Morning News, April 10, 2020. https://www.traditionalbuilding.com/news/virginia-mcalester.
- University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture. “An Evening with Virginia McAlester.” https://soa.utexas.edu/events/evening-virginia-mcalester.
- “Virginia Savage McAlester.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Savage_McAlester.
- “Virginia Savage McAlester Leading the Ultimate House Tour.” New York Times, December 26, 2013. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/26/garden/virginia-savage-mcalester-leading-the-ultimate-house-tour.html.
- “Virginia Savage McAlester, ‘Queen of Dallas Preservation,’ Dies at 76.” New York Times, April 21, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/21/arts/virginia-savage-mcalester-dead.html.
Contributors: Inaya Shafi