Looking east across downtown Austin from the crown of the Sixth and Guadalupe tower. Image: Curlee Capital / YouTube
It’s a new year for towers in downtown Austin, but the first week of January is historically a little slow for any majorly breaking development news around here — everyone’s still shaking the dust off after the holiday season. So even if it might be a while before we tilt the lid on any new tower plans, the existing lineup of buildings currently under construction throughout downtown represents a kind of permanent photo-op, assuming we could just get our camera up there to see what’s going on.
Enter the unassuming YouTube page of local real estate lending firm Curlee Capital, which uploads some of the most stunning drone footage of downtown projects we’ve ever seen — and only averages a few hundred views per video, which is something we’d really like to change. There’s a lot of good stuff in here, especially some frequent progress updates on the massive construction site for the Waterline supertall, but one of the videos uploaded less than a week ago is currently our favorite:
It’s nearly four minutes of drone footage showing off the Sixth and Guadalupe tower now officially topped out in downtown, and although we don’t know if the general contractors at JE Dunn would appreciate its construction workers getting buzzed so closely, the folks in the video don’t seem to mind. The danger-close perspective of this footage ought to inspire a new level of appreciation for the immense scale of the building, not to mention the fearlessness of everyone working up there, 66 floors up — we obviously don’t have a problem with heights, but it could still give you the willies.
Looking north at the crown of the topped-out Sixth and Guadalupe tower now under construction in downtown Austin, with the University of Texas in the background. Image: Curlee Capital / YouTube
Even the stuff in the background of this video is interesting. For instance, compare the height of Sixth and Guadalupe to a recent project nearby like Indeed Tower, which looks almost tiny from this view. Then remember that the Waterline and Wilson Tower supertalls, which will respectively each break the height record downtown again upon completion, will both rise more than 150 feet taller than Sixth and Guadalupe’s maximum height of 865 feet. Bottom line, if you’re looking for something new to get obsessed with in the new year, you could do a lot worse than Curlee’s YouTube page — it kinda makes us want to buy a drone.
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