La Villita began as a cluster of brush jacales housing Spanish soldiers and their families stationed near Mission San Antonio de Valero (the Alamo) in the 1700s, on high ground along the San Antonio River. After a destructive 1819 flood, residents rebuilt with more permanent adobe and later stone houses, and through the mid-to-late 1800s the neighborhood filled with German, French, and Italian immigrant families who worked as merchants, bankers, educators, and craftsmen, giving the district its architecturally mixed streetscape of modest one-room homes alongside larger merchant residences. By the early twentieth century the area had deteriorated into a slum. Its revival came during the Depression, when Mayor Maury Maverick paired his River Walk development with a WPA/National Youth Administration restoration (1939) that repaired historic structures and trained young workers in arts and crafts trades, deliberately repurposing the neighborhood as a crafts and artisan quarter rather than restoring it to residential use. That reinvention has held ever since: La Villita today functions as a pedestrian arts village of roughly 25 studios, galleries, shops selling pottery, jewelry, and Mexican folk art, and restaurants housed in the historic buildings. It also serves as an event venue, most notably hosting "A Night in Old San Antonio" (NIOSA), a four-night Fiesta San Antonio festival drawing around 85,000 attendees and benefiting the San Antonio Conservation Society, which helps steward the district's ongoing preservation and programming.