Brush Square is the Front Yard of Tomorrow’s Downtown Austin

Image: Asakura Robinson / Austin Parks and Recreation Department

A funny thing happened earlier this week when Brendan Wittstruck, an urban designer at local firm Asakura Robinson, presented plans to the City of Austin’s Design Commission detailing the Parks and Recreation Department’s efforts to rehabilitate downtown’s historic Brush Square. The plans themselves weren’t fundamentally different from the designs we saw two years ago when the project was first explained in detail — in fact, barring a few minor tweaks they’re almost exactly the same.

The project is Phase I of a rehabilitation of one of the original four parks in the Waller grid, of which three remain today. This work is based on the 2019 Brush Square Master Plan, itself based on decades of previous planning efforts.

Although limited funding is available for Phase I, this project seeks to build on the momentum of the Master Plan to provide accessibility improvements, improved lighting and site furnishings, enhance and expand on programming potential, and create an attractive public outdoor space for downtown residents and visitors.

— Brush Square Project Review Application

If you recall the plans from 2018, the phases pointed out in the illustrations below will be familiar to you — though we can fix up the existing green space on the square, things can’t really get rolling until we’re able to demolish the parking lot at the site, and eventually relocate the fire station at the square to a newer facility.

Image: Asakura Robinson / Austin Parks and Recreation Department

Once that’s done, we can also knock down the non-historic annex of the 1938 fire station building, reclaiming that space for park use while adapting the historic building for a visitor’s center or similar public use:

Image: Asakura Robinson / Austin Parks and Recreation Department

What changed here, and critically so, is the city around the square. The region of downtown Austin surrounding this historic space has undergone so much growth in the last two years — currently underway in some places, announced in others, and speculated in many more — that it alters Brush Square’s entire context, turning what once looked simply like a nice plan for an upgraded public space into the focal point of a downtown district that’s mostly yet to be built. The updated version of the plan acknowledges some of the area’s concurrent projects:

Image: Asakura Robinson / Austin Parks and Recreation Department

Towering residential and office development, an expanded Austin Convention Center, the new Capital MetroRail Downtown Station — Brush Square finds itself in the slightly awkward position of serving as the front yard for major, game-changing growth on all sides. We know this sounds a little pie in the sky, so we’ve prepared a map to explain the staggering amount of things going on around here without using too many words. Click around and check for yourself, there’s a lot to see:

Even with a pandemic currently keeping our brains busy, there’s no indication yet that any of the projects listed here are struggling to move forward — and perhaps the most critical feature of all, the new Capital MetroRail Downtown Station, is pretty far along at this point. This first phase of the Brush Square project, according to its recent presentation documents for the Design Commission earlier this week, is currently expected to finish construction in late 2022 — and we can’t wait to see a new downtown district rise to meet it.

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