Cass Brewer, showing off the level framing of his first backyard clubhouse. Image: Diane Brewer
Forts and clubhouses, timeless portals to the secret world of kids, stand apart from adult society and its grim concerns of property and propriety — and this usually works out just about fine, at least until those kids get old enough to hide beer inside them.
But no age, innocent or otherwise, can save you from suburban residential zoning. Enforced by adults hidden inside their own clubhouses — clubhouses with taxable values, you understand — a network of vigilant eyeballs watches for toes over lines. We have the audacity to call this a neighborhood, but for nine-year-old Cub Scout Cass Brewer, who built his backyard clubhouse against an invisible border of the grown-up world, Barton Hills was a battlefield, invaded by an army flying a red flag.
Cass and his friends doing their best Goonies impressions in the Austin American-Statesman’s January 1980 coverage of the clubhouse saga, with the ominous red tag affixed to the structure at the center of the action. Image: Austin History Center
The war began in January 1980, as a building inspector for the City of Austin discovered Brewer’s fort stood within five feet of his parents’ property line, encroaching upon the “setback” area where residential zoning forbids construction. The inspector placed a red tag on the clubhouse indicating a code violation, meaning its young architect would either have to move the structure away from the setback zone, seek a variance from the city, or simply tear the whole thing down.
To be fair, the scale of Brewer’s project went far beyond the ambitions of most kid builders, owing at least in part to the example set by his father, Charles Brewer, who worked in Austin’s forever-booming residential construction industry:
Nine-year-old Cass Brewer says proudly that the wooden clubhouse he built in the back yard of his parents’ home in Southwest Austin is sturdy enough to weather a hurricane.
“It’s even waterproof and has some insulation in it,” said Case, who’s been “fooling around” with building things since he was 2 years old.
Cass erected the clubhouse, with the help of some neighborhood friends, against a chain-link fence on the property line of his parents’ large, wooded back yard at 2404 Kathy Cove in the Horseshoe Bend subdivision.The approximate 5×6-foot square clubhouse was built with scrap material that Cass got from his father, a builder for [Austin residential developer] Bill Milburn.
It sits on a foundation of rectangular pieces of timber anchored into the ground with cement. Like a real house, its walls were framed with 2x4s, over which sheets of plywood were nailed. The southeast corner of the clubhouse is shaded by a 30-foot cedar tree.
— Austin American-Statesman, January 24, 1980
Brewer’s parents, perhaps seeing an opportunity for a lesson in civics, elected to help their son fight for his clubhouse by requesting a variance from Austin’s Board of Adjustment. They also knew an amusing human interest story when they saw one, and contacted the media — resulting in the Statesman coverage seen here, a few local TV news items, and a couple of Associated Press wire stories syndicated to papers nationwide. “For those days, it went as viral as it could,” Brewer, now 48, says.
Mike Kelley, a humor columnist for the Austin American-Statesman, satirized what some perceived as a bureaucratic overreaction against young Brewer and his clubhouse in January 1980 soon after the story broke — and you’ll notice he mentions two “feloniously ugly” bank buildings, which at the time could only be a reference to the “Golden Mirror” of Bank One Tower and the black monolith of the Austin National Bank Tower. Image: Austin History Center
The first hearing arrived in March, and the Statesman celebrated the occasion with some amusingly tongue-in-cheek photos of young Cass standing before the zoning board. Approving the clubhouse variance required four votes, but only received three, with one commissioner dissenting — which automatically postponed the item to the board’s next meeting. “I remember being up on the dais, fighting for it,” Brewer says.
Cass Brewer stands before the city’s Board of Adjustment in this March 1980 Austin American-Statesman coverage, complete with some hilarious photos straight out of “Parks and Recreation.” Images: Austin History Center
But despite the board coming within one vote of saving Brewer’s clubhouse, the next meeting in April didn’t go well. It’s not clear exactly what changed the commissioners’ minds, though Cass’ mom Diane Brewer says a surprise testimony against the clubhouse by their neighbor, former Statesman editor Maggie Hillery, dealt the final blow — and so, with neighbors pitted against neighbors, the variance died by unanimous vote. Brewer, with the help of his friends, had to tear the structure down.
“It would be tough to say the board made the wrong decision,” says Rahm McDaniel, who currently serves as a member of the city’s Board of Adjustment. “It sounds like it was a real neat clubhouse, but being adorable isn’t a hardship — then again, it’s no more trivial than a lot of the Lake Austin cases we see”
The photo in this Statesman coverage of the clubhouse’s demolition shows the level of detail Brewer put into its construction. Seriously, how many nine-year-olds do you know who can properly frame a wall? Image: Austin History Center
True to his word, Brewer rebuilt his clubhouse in what he wryly calls the “proper area” — and knowing he wouldn’t have to unceremoniously tear it down this time, the new version ended up even more ambitious than before.
“The structure he built back, entirely on his own with some help from the neighbor kids and his brothers, was bigger, stronger, more solid and two stories tall whereas the other had just been a lean-to,” his mother Diane Brewer says, with unmistakable pride. “This little guy put in an upper floor, windows, and a framed opening for a doorway.”
Despite the early defeat he suffered at the hands of the grown-up world and its many land-use regulations, Cass definitely got the last laugh. As president of Austin residential development company Legacy DCS, which he founded with his wife, Carrie, Brewer’s worked in the building industry for most of his adult life.
Cass and his father Charles celebrating a groundbreaking. Image: Legacy DCS
Cass now oversees the construction of custom homes, multifamily buildings, and other master-planned communities in and around Texas, with his father Charles — who supplied the raw materials and encouraged his son to fight for his clubhouse in the first place — working alongside him as the firm’s vice president. “I guess you could say I’m just building bigger clubhouses these days,” he laughs.
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