Image: City of Austin Parks and Recreation Department
Andrew Jackson Zilker was an enterprising young man who understood the value of a frosty cold beverage. After arriving in Austin at the age of 18 in 1876, Zilker made his living in the ice business, running the immensely successful Lone Star Ice Works during a historical period when artificial ice was still a novelty viewed with some suspicion by the public. Zilker’s profits in the ice trade built the foundation of his great personal wealth, which allowed him to purchase land holdings south of the river and later donate 350 acres of that property to the city for permanent use as parkland — that’s where we got Zilker Park and Barton Springs, of course. That means it’s fair to say that Zilker Park owes its very existence to ice, the demand for which is created by a more general American passion for cold drinks, and specifically cold beer. “Zilker” is a German name, for what it’s worth. Do you see where I’m going with this?
An 1880 patent for an ice machine filed by Zilker Park’s namesake, Andrew Jackson Zilker. Image: UNT Libraries Government Documents Department
After the extremely loud and incredibly dumb saga of the Zilker Vision Plan, the park finds itself in a sort of malaise era, its presumably traumatized benefactors at the city forced to vigorously defend mundane happenings like bathhouse renovations and the removal of a single dying tree as necessary maintenance operations rather than any sort of nefarious plot to pave and privatize the city’s single most beloved green space. To make things easier for everyone, I’ll just explain my nefarious plot right now — Zilker Park needs a public beer garden, and as the park cautiously mulls its future, you people ought to be asking the city to build one every chance you get.
Munich’s beer gardens deserve all the hype.
These are the English Gardens – central, accessible on foot, by bike and transit. There’s a playground and ice cream for kids, and tasty beer for the adults. Dogs welcome. People flock here. pic.twitter.com/ss6ibG2m7D
— Miriam Pinski (@mirijulip) March 25, 2024
It’s not as crazy as it sounds, assuming you think it sounds crazy — it sounds extremely normal to me, but some of you might need convincing. Beer gardens in public parks are a common sight in Germany, and serve as an attraction for the whole family, but you don’t have to look overseas to find successful examples of this sort of thing operating in common spaces like a park. Beer gardens are also immensely popular stateside in Milwaukee, with five permanent facilities operated by the county parks department in public green spaces bringing in more than $3 million in sales last year.
Estabrook Beer Garden, opened in 2012 inside Milwaukee’s Estabrook Park, is the first public beer garden opened in America for nearly a century. Image: Visit Milwaukee
These beer gardens, a local tradition revived in 2012, also serve a basic menu of pretzels and sausages — and since they are indeed public, guests are welcome to bring their own picnic items. They are decidedly not nightlife attractions, closing no later than 10 p.m., and enhance their surroundings by serving as family-friendly community spaces filling a similar “third place” niche as brewery taprooms.
Opportunities exist to provide additional food and drink concessions in multiple locations around the park, including but not limited to temporary or seasonal vending operators. Given the millions of people who visit the park annually, this seems like both a good placemaking opportunity as well as a revenue opportunity.
In addition to its obvious parks fundraising capacity, the establishment of a beer garden at Zilker would actually pay respects to Austin’s own history. There’s a reason Scholz Garten is the oldest business of its kind still operating in Texas — in the second half of the 1800s, beer gardens were the “social center” of life in Austin, according to a 1937 retrospective in the Austin American-Statesman. “You didn’t get drunk, it was pleasant drinking,” the article helpfully explains. Consider this quote our manifesto:
Before motion pictures, automobiles and the faster pleasure seeking of the modern age the old beer gardens played their part in the social life of Austin. They were places where the entire family went, where the children romped noisily over the grounds, darting in between the musicians on the bandstand, and where good food, music and beer were mingled with good conversation.
— Austin American-Statesman, 1937
We can bring this back, if we want. There’s nothing stopping you from asking for it every time the city solicits input on the future of Zilker. The Fun Police may have come after your beer and wine sales at the Zilker Cafe near Barton Springs a few years ago — so successfully, in fact, that the cafe space is still vacant. The concerns about alcohol sales near a public pool could be assuaged by placing the beer garden somewhere further away, like the pecan grove picnic area near the park’s entrance.
The question of a Zilker beer garden really comes down to philosophy — is the park simply a place for quiet contemplation of nature, or should it offer uses that enhance public enjoyment? Compared with the Austin City Limits Music Festival, a beer garden would be a downright tranquil addition to Zilker’s lineup. Why the hell not?
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