The Extended Stay America hotel at the future site of downtown Austin’s new tallest tower, 6 X Guadalupe. Image: Booking.com / Extended Stay America
To build the new tallest tower in Austin, you’ve got to break a few eggs — or, in this case, demolish a completely unremarkable hotel. In other words, the Extended Stay America now occupying the famously “cursed” former home of the late Alamo Hotel at the northwest corner of West Sixth and Guadalupe Streets is not long for this world, with recent city documents pointing to its demolition sometime next month.
Looking eastward at a rendering of the 6 X Guadalupe tower. Image: Gensler
Once the site’s cleared, groundbreaking can begin for the 6 X Guadalupe mixed-use tower by developers Lincoln Property Company and Kairoi Residential — Lincoln can’t confirm to us exactly when the old hotel’s getting knocked down, but permit filings related to street closures around the site during the demolition describe work starting on September 3 and lasting until October 15. It may also interest you that the Extended Stay America hotel isn’t taking reservations at this location after the end of August — that seems as good a sign as any that we’re about to get some action here.
We’ve seen delays on a lot of high-profile demolitions in the downtown area for projects like this before, meaning these dates aren’t necessarily firm — heck, the city hasn’t even approved the permit yet — but any kind of progress on 6 X Guadalupe after about a year of very few updates to report is good news for those of us who would like to see this record-setting 66-story, 848-foot residential and office tower make it past the drawing board downtown.
An overhead rendering of the 6 X Guadalupe tower. Image: Gensler
Any tower project would likely be an improvement over the hotel currently at the site, which we’ve mentioned before is so boring in its design that your brain refuses to let you notice it on your travels through downtown unless you’re actually staying there. The hotel, just like the vacant post office across the street, attracted some local controversy over the sheer depth of its blandness when it was developed in the 1990s — though its developers agreed to move the building up to the corner of West Sixth and Guadalupe Streets instead of sticking it right in the middle of its huge parking lot, the outcry for ground-floor retail or any other effort to make the project look like it belonged downtown instead of next to a highway somewhere went unanswered:
A July 1998 article from the Austin American-Statesman describes the controversy over the design of the Extended Stay America building at West Sixth and Guadalupe Streets — but looking at the hotel in 2019 with downtown rising in the background illustrates the incompatibility of the old structure more than words ever could. Images: Austin History Center / James Rambin
Just like the post office behind it, the Extended Stay America arguably made Austin a better place through its extreme badness, creating local demand for the city to take action by drafting urban design guidelines for buildings in the downtown area. That’s great news for us, and we thank the hotel for the unique service it provided — but now, roughly two decades later, it’s time to knock it down. We’ll keep y’all posted.
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