Every November, the Waller Creek Conservancy hosts Creek Show, a nighttime art exhibition featuring lighted installations along the downtown stretch of Waller Creek, designed and built by local artists and creative teams. These events, as part of the conservancy’s mission to revitalize and restore the urban waterway, are meant to call attention to the viability of Waller as a…
Republic Tower Project Planned for Downtown Block at 308 Guadalupe
308 Guadalupe Street is the address generally used for a future project at the downtown block bordered by West Third, San Antonio, West Fourth, and Guadalupe Streets. That block, located directly south of Republic Square’s snazzy new incarnation and currently only occupied by a parking lot, is one of Austin’s last remaining empty downtown blocks…
Development and Preservation Could Play Nice at Historic Palm School Site
Downtown’s historic Palm School, the long and storied past of which often simmers with the same racial tensions providing the subtext for much of the history of Austin’s growth, deserves to be preserved. That basic point is clear to seemingly everyone with skin in the game regarding the future of the building and its site, the most important of…
What Can You Do With a Block With a View? In Downtown Austin, Not Much
Hey, who would win in a wrestling match: Capitol View Corridors, or God? Trick question — Capitol View Corridors are God. Okay, maybe I’m kidding just for the sake of an oblique reference to an American classic, but they both do a bang-up job hanging out all invisible up in the sky just waiting to cold-cock any enterprise of man that…
Getting to Know the Avenue, Downtown’s Upcoming Experiment in Car-Free Living
With so many tower projects in the works for downtown Austin, picking a favorite is a lot like picking a favorite child — you’ve probably got one, but it’s not polite to talk about in front of the other buildings. Still, the Avenue apartment tower planned at 721 Congress Avenue is high on my list, for a…
North Austin Complex Plan Jumps Off the Drawing Board
An $11 million renovation of the John H. Winters Building across West Guadalupe Street from mixed-use project The Triangle is about to begin, and it’s occurring in advance of a construction project building a nine-story office building and parking garage, only the first phase of development at the roughly 80-acre plot of state-owned land around the…