Vendors offering everything from handmade ceramic cactus lamps to perfectly worn-in vintage T-shirts to freshly baked pop tarts lined the courtyard and filled the mint-green cafetorium of the old Baker School last Saturday.
“There's a lot of big markets, and I feel like this one feels more eclectically Austin,” one shopper mused, “a little more grassroots.”
The first-ever Hyde Park Holiday Market gave hundreds of Austinites a peek inside the former Austin ISD school now known as the Baker Center.
“It's always been such a beautiful building,” one vendor said. “It's really great now that they're utilizing it in such beautiful ways.”
The event was put on by one of the building’s tenants, The Press Room, which holds a vast collection of printing blocks used to create newspaper ads and posters for the cinema.
“ We have this historic collection,” said Travis Smith, who has managed The Press Room since it opened in 2019. It has about 60,000 blocks in its collection that can be inked and pressed to make prints. “It covers about 50 years of cinema history, graphic design, industrial history.”
The Press Room was founded by Tim League, who bought the school with his wife, Karrie, when the district put it up for sale in 2017. They had hopes of making the space a headquarters for their cinema chain, Alamo Drafthouse.
“It turned out that we were the only ones who bid on it that didn't wanna scrape the building,” Karrie League said, “so we won it.”
The Baker School was built in 1911 and operated into the 1990s. When the Leagues acquired the building, they had a mission to restore the space back to how it had looked in its heyday in the 1940s.
After two years of renovations, the Leagues reopened the school as the Baker Center in 2019. Two out of three floors of former classrooms were dedicated to Alamo. The Press Room was based in the repurposed cafeteria kitchen.
Smith, who had built a career in letterpress and printmaking, was hired to catalogue and organize the blocks. He began showcasing them in small workshops, saying he felt the collection needed “to be seen and used, to keep it working and healthy.”
But while work in The Press Room stayed steady, financial struggles during the pandemic led to Sony’s acquisition of Alamo Drafthouse in 2024. The sale created another transition moment for the school.
“In the end, Alamo only occupied half of one floor,” League said. “We just started advertising and looking for tenants.”
The building didn’t sit empty for long.
By early this year, the Baker Center was transforming into a hub for creativity and activism. Occupants run the gamut from the League of Women Voters and the Travis Audubon Society to architects, Austin Classical Guitar, interior designers and a photography studio.
With a new community established, the Leagues and Smith started talking about ways to provide greater access to the building. That’s where the markets come in. The holiday market was the third hosted in the building this year and, Smith said, as far as vendors and attendees go, the biggest one yet.
The events also offer a special opportunity for The Press Room to be open to more than just a few people at a time.
“I want people to come hang out with me,” Smith joked. “We'll have the printing press activated, running prints.”
Next on the agenda for the former school? Giving people more reasons to visit.
“The building itself is an experience,” Smith said, adding that he hopes it will be a “catalyst to bring people together and build creative community.”
And Karrie League wants to make sure visitors keep coming back.
“Building out the coffee shop, a wine bar right next door, and putting the community garden in the front,” she said. “I'm trying to create a place that people love to be [in].”
