About this tour
Just west of Congress Avenue sits a rarity: an entire city block of intact Gilded-Age mansions, most of them built by or for a single extended family. Eugene Bremond, a banker, gathered his relatives around him here in the 1870s and '80s, and the Bremond Block became a compound of ornate Victorian homes wrapped in cast-iron porches and gingerbread trim. It survived the twentieth century nearly whole and is now a National Register historic district — the best-preserved concentration of high-Victorian residential architecture in Austin. This short walk circles the block house by house, reading the family tree in the doorways, and steps a little way out to two more grand survivors nearby.