If you’re looking for Karrie League, odds are that she’ll be on a couch somewhere in the hallways of the Baker Center. “I work in the hallways because then people can sit and chat with me,” she said.
She’s there because, along with her husband, Tim, she owns this onetime Austin ISD campus in the Hyde Park neighborhood. She’s also the de facto building manager, tenant coordinator, superintendent, and guardian of the building. “I never thought that would be my career path,” she said. “But I actually really like it.”
One of Austin’s true architectural gems, the former Baker School was left to molder for decades. Now, it’s not simply being restored and reimagined by the Leagues. They’ve turned it into one of the city’s most vibrant and diverse creative communities, a hub of offices and stages that provides a home for artistic, healing, and nonprofit endeavors that might otherwise struggle to find rental space.
The couple are most famous for founding the Alamo Drafthouse movie theatre chain, but since selling their stake to Sony Pictures Entertainment in 2024, they’ve not exactly entered some comfy quasi-retirement. Instead, two projects that were bubbling in the background became their day jobs. In New York, they’ve put the finishing touches to the Metro Private Cinema, a new, more bespoke take on the “dinner and a movie” experience. In Austin, their focus is the Baker Center, a building that started as a solution to an Alamo problem.
For years, Alamo management officed out of any available space – over the kitchen at South Lamar, a nondescript office block at Fifth and Mopac, a stint on Sixth Street – but they kept outgrowing the space, and so in 2016 Tim started the task of looking for something the expanding Alamo could grow into. It was actually his longtime realtor who first alerted Tim to the Baker Center. Tim recalled, “He tells me, ‘It’s twice the size of anything you’re looking for,’ and I look at it and go, ‘Dave, It’s perfect!’ … It’s an old thing, a cool thing, and that’s just catnip for me.”
Unfortunately – or so it seemed at the time – the private equity partners in the Alamo blanched at the idea of such a huge investment, so the Leagues presented a simple solution: They would buy the building, and then Alamo would become its main tenant.
The building in question was the Baker School. Built in 1911 by Endress & Walsh and Roy L. Thomason and named after public school and library advocate DeWitt Clinton Baker, it was located on the site of the original park in Hyde Park. Over time, it was expanded and altered, and the classical early 20th-century lines and light, airy rooms were hidden and shrouded in dust.
What it really lost was its purpose. It closed in 1980 as a regular elementary because the neighborhood just didn’t have enough kids. Then it became the W.R. Robbins Alternative High School, but that closed in 1995, and the district just used it for whatever was needed – teacher training, a TV studio, storage. The dream floating around the neighborhood was that maybe one day it could become a school again, but that was never realistic. So, finally, in 2017 the district sold the Baker School to the Leagues, and the Baker Center was born.
The original idea was for the Drafthouse and related projects like the American Genre Film Archive to take most of the space, and then a handful of smaller tenants from the creative and nonprofit world to fill what was left. However, the plan didn’t end there. On the western side of the property is a 1-acre lot known as the Baker Field, and the plan was to use this for housing, including a 25% affordable housing component. Richard Weiss, the Leagues’ longtime architect, explained, “We were working on something that was modern but had to relate to the original building and speak architecturally to it.” However, the city had other plans. They wanted the field as a detention pond, “and so that put the kibosh on affordable housing because they took the land that the affordable housing was going to occupy.”
However, that didn’t affect plans for the center, which became the Drafthouse headquarters until the firm moved out completely in 2025. Now, the Baker Center houses around 30 tenants at any one time, a mixture of architects and medical providers, game developers and PR firms, photo studios and film archivists, all contained within a building that is the antithesis of a bland corporate box. The Leagues weren’t the highest bidder but, Karrie said, “We were the only ones who didn’t want to scrape the building.”
Austin is losing historic buildings at a terrific rate. Letting the Leagues save Baker may have been the last great preservation act of AISD, which recently angered residents by bulldozing the 1955 brick Wooten Elementary with no real notification, with nearby Burnet Middle to follow soon, and profound fears of the future fates of the Rosedale and Rosewood campuses among others. But it’s not just AISD: Austin is becoming notorious for being closed-minded about preservation and creative reuse of older buildings.
In contrast, in 2023 the Leagues achieved National Register of Historic Places status for Baker, making demolition by any future owner even less likely. Any renovations and remodeling have been as sympathetic as possible. Much of that work has been done by McNeil Smith, who’s been working with the Leagues on construction projects since building the terrace for the Alamo Village in 2010. Smith said, “I love the utility of it all, the tradition of it, the aesthetic of it, and the idea of repurposing it all instead of just tearing it down.”
Moreover, the Leagues have gone to great lengths to restore the building to something closer to its historic state. When they moved in, Karrie said, “The ceilings had been dropped to 8 feet, there was this nasty carpet and vinyl on the walls.”
The decision was made to strip away what Weiss called “decades of bad decisions” and hope that the original construction was there and in good shape. Of course, this was a huge gamble, he added, “because we didn’t know what was under the three layers of plywood on the floor, and between each layer was a layer of asbestos.” When they peeled back the additions and found that the original materials were there and restorable, “it’s what a gold miner feels when they hit gold.”
Where materials were missing, the restoration has hewed as close to the original 1911 design as possible. In one of the biggest investments, the cheap, rattly, and drafty aluminum windows installed during one of the earlier remodels have been replaced with modern, energy-efficient duplicates of the original glazing.
The center’s hybrid history is everywhere. Some walls are still covered in lockers, others with old Alamo posters. In the front hallway, there are shots of chaotic Drafthouse events alongside pictures of children from the early days of the school, prim and proper in their uniforms. The Baker Center has become part of the Leagues’ legacy, and they are part of the building’s history that they’re working to preserve. If anything, it seems like a throwback to early days of the Alamo, when Tim and Karrie were hands-on as not just theatre managers but also builders. As Smith put it, “If you know Tim, you know he’s not afraid to grab a hammer.”
Like any older building, it has quirks and idiosyncrasies. “It’s a rather demanding grande dame,” Karrie observed, “but I love it.”
“It has a distinct personality,” Tim laughed. “But because it is this old, funky thing, I think it attracts people with whom it resonates.”
And the funniest part of this? The Leagues don’t even have their own office in the building. But then again, that’s what a corridor is for.
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This article appears in January 23 • 2026.