A view of the current building at the corner of West Fifth Street and Congress Avenue in downtown Austin, from marketing material prepared by its former owners at World Class. Image: World Class Holdings
The internet’s crazy, right? You can find all sorts of stuff on here. More importantly, people put all sorts of stuff on here, and sometimes they don’t even seem to realize that other people can see the stuff. Pretend you didn’t read the preceding sentences and let’s dig into the mysterious plans for a 36-story hotel tower potentially rising under the AC by Marriott brand at the southwest corner of West Fifth Street and Congress Avenue, an extremely prominent site in the heart of downtown’s most active sector and just across the street from the Frost Bank Tower.
Containing 340 rooms alongside 2,800 square feet of meeting space and a 5,500-square-foot restaurant on the first and second floors, you may think all these numbers are oddly specific until you check the online portfolio of hospitality firm Merritt Development Group, which helpfully includes all of this information alongside a rendering of the building by the Austin office of global architecture firm DLR Group:
A view of the proposed hotel at 422 Congress Avenue, replacing the southwest corner of West Fifth Street and Congress Avenue — we’re looking sort of southwest from this perspective. You might think, “hey, this kind of looks like the Hyatt Centric that just opened a few blocks north,” and you’d be right because the general footprint of both towers is influenced by the Capitol View Corridor and other zoning overlays running down Congress Avenue, making every tower include that setback from the street after a certain height so we can see that sweet, sweet dome. Image: MDG / DLR Group
Well, we chuckle to ourselves a bit too loud, that’s awfully helpful of the developers to just put all their plans online for us to look at. Usually it’s like pulling teeth to get these guys to cough up a rendering, but here they are just throwing it on the internet. To find out what’s going on here, we contacted founder David Merritt, who cryptically informed us that the project wasn’t quite ready for primetime — according to Merritt, it’s still in the early stages of due diligence and hasn’t even locked down its brand identity. But it’s all right here on your website, David! We get the feeling from his reply that someone else uploaded this information. Nevertheless, here’s a heavy disclaimer that everything we see here about the project is subject to change.
The project, such as it is, would replace Shiner’s Saloon at 422 Congress Avenue, a bar we’re convinced banks its popularity on the fact that tourists falsely believe it to be associated with the Shiner beer brand and the Spoetzl Brewery. The site is perhaps better known as the former home of rooftop venue Ethics Music Lounge, which shuttered in 2018 due to the alleged mischief of new landlord Nate Paul of World Class fame, who reportedly purchased the property and promptly locked out the club owners. Once World Class started imploding a couple years ago, an LLC connected with California-based fund Karlin Real Estate purchased the property out of some extremely clownish bankruptcy proceedings typical of the World Class brand — thankfully now we can count on someone building something here instead of just hanging a banner on the building referencing a meme from 2015 and calling it a day.
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