What’s the Deal With French Place?

A characteristic bungalow on Lafayette Avenue. Image: Curbed Austin

French Place is a bit of an enigma. It’s not quite a neighborhood, but also not just one street — the best way to describe it is a small enclave within the larger Cherrywood neighborhood of East Austin, with porous boundaries depending on who you ask.

Image: Austin History Center

Best we can tell, French Place makes up the region of Cherrywood bound by I-35 to the west, Edgewood Avenue to the north, Cherrywood Road to the east, and Manor Road to the south — with French Place itself running through the heart of it all. Although the whole region is a charming example of a beloved Austin neighborhood, the historic bungalow-heavy French Place gives the rest of Cherrywood a run for its money, with its combination of well-preserved structures dating back to the 1930s or even earlier alongside thoughtful modern construction.

Perhaps the oldest home in the area now known as French Place, dating back to 1905.

Far from a real estate branding exercise, you’re likely to hear from a homeowner within this small region that they’re proud French Place residents — even if they pay dues to the Cherrywood Neighborhood Association. But what’s the source of the French Place name? Even the neighborhood itself acknowledges that whatever historical process made the name stick remains a bit of a mystery. The best guess of local historians is that the 1887 subdivison of part of the future Cherrywood neighborhood by landowner Lucy Dancy, which created roughly nine square blocks known as the Dancy Addition, was dubbed with numerous references to the French heritage of Dancy’s late husband, Colonel John Winfield Scott Dancy, including street names like Lafayette Avenue.

Image: Cherrywood Neighborhood Association

However, the waters are muddied considerably by the fact that in 1939, the granddaughter of Lucy Dancy — named Olivia French after her husband, J.H. French — developed the subdivision east of Lafayette Avenue known then as Forest Hills, with the family name possibly influencing references to the area. With this collection of possible namesakes, it’s hard to know precisely how the collection of subdivisions in the region came to be known as French Place — the Cherrywood Neighborhood Association’s newsletter ultimately admits we’ll likely never know for sure:

So what is French Place and what are its boundaries? Possibly everything south of Edgewood to Manor Rd. and east from I-35 to Cherrywood could be called French Place, though there’s no legal precedent for the name in city records. It’s not a legal subdivision, it’s just the way neighborhood terminology evolved. Since the Nowlin and Dancy families had so many ties to France and New Orleans, maybe they called it French Place from the outset. Maybe neighbors just liked the name of the street. Maybe J.H. French had a hand in it. We may never know for certain.

— The Flea, Cherrywood Neighborhood Association, 2013

But once you stop worrying about where French Place came from, you can just appreciate the area on its own terms — a quiet collection of beautiful homes shaded by mature trees on gently winding streets in one of East Austin’s most desirable neighborhoods. A name’s just a name, after all.

Several of the Tudor-style cottages built by J.H. French in the 1930s still stand in the area.