A closer view of the 51-story apartment and hotel tower announced this week at 90 Rainey Street. Image: Urbanspace / Nelsen Partners / dwg.
Like almost every week, it was a good week for towers in downtown Austin. This time around, we got a look at an all-new development in the Rainey Street District, plus progress updates for a few other projects — not to mention some extremely fresh new renderings. As they say in the old country, “bada bing, bada boom:”
90 Rainey Street
Image: Urbanspace / Nelsen Partners / dwg.
Local developer and Urbanspace CEO Kevin Burns brought the Austin Business Journal a scoop yesterday afternoon outlining his plans to develop a 51-story mixed-use tower containing apartments (290 units) and hotel space (293 rooms) on a tract spanning 90-92 Rainey Street — properties currently home to Container Bar and Bungalow.
As seen in renderings of the building from architects Nelsen Partners, the project takes the unique step of integrating both of these bars into its design, wrapping around Container Bar and elevating Bungalow to a sort of niche on the second floor. It’s admittedly a little weird, but that’s a thing I’ve heard we’re supposed to keep Austin — plus, that Bungalow building is historic.
A rendering of the tower as seen from Rainey Street, with Container Bar and Bungalow occupying two floors of a hollowed-out space in the side of the building. Image: Urbanspace / Nelsen Partners / dwg.
Joining the 44 East Avenue condo tower also planned with 51 floors on the opposite side of this district, it appears these projects — along with the Travis tower development destined for the former Villas site at 80 Red River Street, alleged to potentially be around 50 stories in height — are setting the new standard for height in the neighborhood, and we’ll be excited to keep track of them all as they move towards reality.
Looking at the tower from the corner of Davis and Rainey Streets. Image: Urbanspace / Nelsen Partners / dwg.
Speaking of the neighborhood — though we’re still getting used to the name, The Quincy apartment and office tower going up right next door to the 90 Rainey Street project is moving along, with fences up and excavation appearing imminent any day now. You can actually see a partially-transparent massing of the Quincy project in the renderings of this new tower:
Image: Urbanspace / Nelsen Partners / dwg.
There’s one more eyebrow-raising detail from the ABJ story on this project, related to the oft-speculated future of the Waller Park Place site a block away — emphasis ours:
Burns said he doesn’t expect construction to start until at least 2021. He said he wants his project to deliver near the same time as WeWork’s forthcoming office tower at Red River and East Cesar Chavez streets a stone’s throw away.
Burns said WeWork is planning a tower of nearly 1 million square feet, though WeWork hasn’t released any details on its plans yet.
Insert the googly-eye emoji here — that’s a lot of square feet, and implies that WeWork might be pursuing a development with similar scale to the massive three-tower complex previously considered for this site.
6 X Guadalupe
Though the timing of its actual construction still remains to be seen, we’ve got some impressively snazzy renderings we haven’t seen before of the 6 X Guadalupe tower from the architects at Gensler Austin. They’re probably the nicest ones yet.
Images: Lincoln Property Company / Kairoi Residential / Gensler Austin
Images: Lincoln Property Company / Kairoi Residential / Gensler Austin
Nothing new to report beyond that, except we’d really like to see this thing get moving. Bookings for the Extended Stay America hotel currently atop the future tower’s 600 Guadalupe Street property are still available through at least August, so we might need to keep being patient for a while.
Texas Capitol Complex
A full view of the Capitol Complex and its pedestrian mall, already under construction on the north side of the Capitol. Image: Texas Facilities Commission / Page
Though we’ve already covered the ins and outs of the Texas Facilities Commission’s ongoing project to transform the north side of the Capitol into a pedestrian mall with some shiny new state office buildings and thousands of underground parking spaces also in the mix, some new renderings out of the architects at Page give us an even better look at how this side of downtown will transform:
Looking down at part of the Texas Mall of the Capitol Complex project just across from the Bob Bullock Museum. Image: Texas Facilities Commission / Page
Looking at a new state office structure at 1801 Congress Avenue, part of the Capitol Complex project. Image: Texas Facilities Commission / Page
A closer look at the 1801 Congress Avenue office building. Image: Texas Facilities Commission / Page
RiverSouth Financing
A gauzy glamour rendering of the RiverSouth offices at dusk. Image: Stream Realty Partners
We learned yesterday that Austin developer Stream Realty Partners has secured $122.9 million in construction financing from the New York Life Insurance Company for its upcoming 15-story RiverSouth project in South Austin.
A view of the now-closed Hooters building at the RiverSouth site. Photo by James Rambin.
Though the demise of the Hooters at 425 Riverside Drive has experienced a slight delay, we now know that both the wing shop’s demolition and RiverSouth’s official groundbreaking will arrive next week at an event hosted by Stream on Wednesday, March 13. The building is still on track for completion in 2021.
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