Outstanding Project Award: Basila Frocks

Basila Frocks won the Outstanding Project Award at the Power of Preservation PROM. This four-minute award video tells how a nearly 100-year-old dress factory on San Antonio’s West Side became a small-business and community hub.

The Basila family, from Syria, built the factory in 1929, during the Great Depression, and hired women from the neighborhood as seamstresses. Over the years it also hosted weddings and quinceañeras, with a ballroom, the Don Quixote nightclub, a restaurant called La Gloria and even wrestling matches.

When the building faced demolition, the community fought to save it. When it was slated to become a dollar store, they fought again. One speaker says what drew them to the building was that “the community had stepped up to save it.” Asked what they wanted, neighbors named a coffee place, a home for local artists, green space and, above all, a place they could walk to.

“I don’t think development and preservation need to be at odds with one another,” one speaker says. A tenant who watched the building come back from its bones now brings the artists and artisans the business works with into the space.