E4 Youth’s Augmented Reality Offers a Step Into Historic East Austin

The short walk I took from Figure 8 on Chicon down to East 12th, dirty matcha in hand, became a minor audit of streets that no longer belong to the people who built them. East Austin in 2026 reads today as a near-complete replacement project, offering no quarter, with a careful arithmetic of who gets to come and stay, or remain, and under what terms. 

The redevelopment on the old Rosewood Courts site is already opening in phases: Its first residents moved in while crews still work the far end of the parcel. By completion, Pathways at Rosewood Courts will hold 184 income-restricted rental units across three new apartment buildings – among them a roughly 90-unit structure and two four-story builds facing the preserved row – alongside eight restored historic buildings and a strip of 12 affordable townhomes for first-time buyers on the adjacent Poquito Street parcel. It replaces one of the first three housing complexes built in Austin, which opened in 1939 and housed 124 families. The renovation arrives, conspicuously, only after the surrounding blocks have been emptied of the people the original courts were built for.

There will even be a miniaturized re-creation of the original Emancipation Park, a legally and justly purchased land by descendants of enslaved hostages that the city of Austin seized through eminent domain. The park had traditionally been used for Juneteenth celebrations. These same Rosewood Courts, the first and cheapest-built per Austin History Center records, rose where the park was taken away.

Inside the new welcome center, Carl Settles is building something stubborn. E4 Youth, the nonprofit workforce-development and storytelling organization he founded and runs, has spent 19 years assembling what he calls a four-E ecosystem – engage, empower, educate, elevate – with storytelling as the foundation beneath. The WOW (What Once Was) Heritage Center is its next iteration: a partnership between E4 Youth and the city’s Housing Authority, set inside Rosewood Courts and meant to stand as a permanent cultural institution within what’s left of Austin’s African American Cultural Heritage District.

Through a heritage grant, E4 Youth recorded an initial tranche of oral histories; the digital archive it holds now runs to nearly 100, with 34 specific to Rosewood Courts, and the organization is in conversation with the Austin History Center about archival standards. Some of those voices feed a place-based augmented-reality walking tour, “Our Stories, Our Streets,” live now in a 1.0 build at tour.whatoncewas.org and being tuned throughout the summer. According to Settles, the route runs six self-guided stops across historic Black Austin neighborhoods – the Gold Dollar Building, Blackland, Rogers Washington Holy Cross, Rosewood Courts, Huston-Tillotson, and the Victory Grill – tracing the diaspora from Reconstruction forward, each location triggering a short story on the visitor’s phone.

Rosewood Courts construction Credit: Carleton Construction, Ltd

The guide moving through it is Jacob Fontaine, rendered as a 3D character and voiced by educator and rapper Bavu Blakes. The choice is a pointed one. Born enslaved in Arkansas around 1808 and brought to Austin by the Episcopal minister who owned him, Fontaine founded the city’s First (Colored) Baptist Church in 1867 on the ground where the Austin History Center now sits, and in 1876 started the Austin Gold Dollar, one of the first Black newspapers in the South. A man who built a congregation and a press out of Reconstruction now walks visitors past the building that still carries his paper’s name. It is a fun and intriguing concept, and still I felt a host of other things watching him rendered out in the app – a ghost made as real as 2026 can manage.

The plan is to develop the product for broader reach and, over the coming year, to layer in AI and semantic search across the oral-history archive, so the characters surface actual community testimony instead of scripted lines. AI hallucinates; the source material does not. 

Notably, the developers are college interns. “You can train young people to document local stories, turn those stories into digital media and immersive experiences, and connect that work to paid pathways,” Settles said. More characters are coming, both historic and invented – including, at the students’ own suggestion, a 10-year-old Black girl who meets the history from her own vantage.

That pipeline runs on a longer creative collaboration. Florinda Bryant came on as education director after a performance career that included years at Creative Action, formerly Theatre Action Project; she and Settles came up gigging in the late Nineties. Rosewood, it turned out, was also her family’s ground.

“My grandfather and my great-grandmother were actually in Rosewood when it first opened,” Bryant said. She learned this during an interview with Delores Duffie, the East Austin civil rights activist and Rosewood advocate who turned out to be related to her best friend. “Those moments only happen when we take the time to sit down and talk to each other about the history. You know, we get out of here way before we’re supposed to, the way white supremacy works, and so we don’t get to keep our true connections.”

“The story is the infrastructure that everything else gets built on,” Settles said. That line is the organization’s entire argument, and it is also where the work stops being abstract. The elders whose testimony anchors the archive have children scattered – “in Pflugerville and Round Rock and Manor,” as Settles put it – and grandchildren further out still. 

The kids he means include mine. The math of staying – $600,000 for a two-bed, one-bath, property taxes that punish the patient – runs against most people I know; perhaps my wife and I are simply in the wrong tax bracket. Settles keeps a house in Georgetown for the same reasons. The center’s animating question is what to do about that displacement, in a city where, as he put it, you go “out of state, out of sight, out of mind.”

The hard question, the one Bryant keeps circling, is whether the people the work serves understand what they are being asked to return to – a question that mostly answers itself with a short walk around the block and a glance at Zillow. “When we say ‘right to return,’ what does that mean?” she asked. “Who’s coming back? Where can we come back to?” The displacement she describes is not the kind one chooses; it is the kind one survives, when it can be survived.

The pipeline produces young people like Breeana Green, a creative intern and ACC student who moved to Austin from Beaumont, 45% Black, in November 2024, and did not expect to find what she found. “I’m not gonna lie – I didn’t think Austin had that much Black history,” she said. “Like, you go into Austin” – 7.6% Black – “and you barely see like Black people for, like, 10 blocks. So I’m like, I didn’t think it was there.”

Green’s first oral-history work was with Ora Houston, the longtime East Austin pillar and former City Council member whose home is among the last historic buildings on her stretch of East 22nd Street. Green took notes while her team worked the questions, and what stayed with her was something in Houston’s bearing she could feel before she could name. “I can just tell what she went through and then how she still holds on to like the magical aspects of life. Like, she doesn’t let what she went through determine who she is.”

Asked why the work matters, Green offered: “I think it’s important to understand that when you learn about history, you start to realize that history is repeating itself. And I feel like we feel like we can’t do anything, but we already have the blueprint in front of us if we just listen to them.”

That sentence sits at the moral center of what E4 Youth is attempting. Texas, like much of the old Confederate South, has been moving steadily toward the wholesale erasure of Black history, and the project does not stop at Jim Crow’s borders. It reaches further back, toward the older conservative comforts of Burke and de Maistre, toward an order in which Black people are not so much oppressed as ahistorical – a population without a past.

The renovation of Rosewood Courts, arriving after the surrounding blocks were emptied, is in some sense the last act of a long containment. Settles knows it. So does Bryant. 

What E4 Youth is building amounts to one of the last citadels in a city that spent decades pretending Black Austin was an accident it could correct. It is not the only one – Kenny Dorham’s Backyard, the Austin History Center’s oral archive, Six Square, Huston-Tillotson, the Black churches all have weight – but it may be the most ambitious in its reach for what comes next.

There is “a tether,” as Bryant puts it, and young people like Green are on the other end of it. Most of them will have arrived from somewhere else, and most will walk onto a property where a local’s great-grandmother once lived. The hope is that, like Green, they listen well before deciding what goes into the record.

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