As Austin prepares to vote on the historic $7.1 billion transit plan known as Project Connect, we thought it might be a good time to look back at the history of public transportation in our fair city -- and the Austin History Center clearly feels the same, uploading this priceless video to its YouTube page earlier this ...
Blog
Commentary, analysis, and quick thoughts on almost everything in town.
Mapping O. Henry’s Local Legacy Through Downtown Austin Architecture
Pandemic season's a great time to brush up on your local history, armchair-style, and the thing about pandemic season is that it never seems to end -- so thankfully a lot of Austin's best cultural and historical institutions have stepped up to provide us with virtual tours and other online media to fill the gap normally occupied by doing things in the real world. But the best ...
Inside the Former Faulk Central Library, Austin’s Concrete Fortress of Literacy
While downtown Austin's new Central Library rakes in the accolades for its grand design by equally-acclaimed Texas architects Lake Flato, the former central workhorse of our public library system, built in 1979 and renamed in honor of late humorist and Austinite John Henry Faulk in 1996, now sits with empty shelves -- at least for the moment -- at 800 Guadalupe Street, just a ...
Go Shopping on Sixth Street Circa 1974
We've recently discussed the past and present of downtown Austin's ever-changing East Sixth Street, and though it's obviously up for debate, our takeaway from the historical context of the street leads us to believe its present occupation as a hotspot for interchangeable shot bars between Congress Avenue and the highway doesn't do justice to its past as a genuine commercial ...
Brush Square is the Front Yard of Tomorrow’s Downtown Austin
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 ...
