Downtown Austin’s Extended Stay America is Finally Coming Down

The hotel in better days, immediately prior to its demolition. Photo by James Rambin.

Two years after the announcement of 6 X Guadalupe, a 66-story mixed-use tower planned at the northwest corner of Sixth and Guadalupe Streets in downtown Austin, the ’90s-era hotel currently occupying the site is finally, mercifully, waving goodbye.

Looking towards the backside of the Extended Stay America hotel at Sixth and Guadalupe Streets, where demolition began today. Photo by James Rambin.

And hey, it’s about time! This demolition arrived a little later than we thought, but on this foggy Tuesday afternoon there’s a small chunk already missing from the backside of the Extended Stay America building, with more coming down even as we speak. An announcement from construction firm JE Dunn, the contractors for this project, states that demolition officially began today and will continue for four to six weeks, followed by six months of excavation for the structure’s foundation and underground parking.

Another view of the bite already taken out of the hotel building earlier today. Photo by James Rambin.

If you need a refresher on what exactly we’re getting at 6 X Guadalupe from developers Lincoln Property Company and Kairoi Residential, the latest marketing material describes the tower as containing roughly 589,000 square feet of office space, 349 apartment units, and more than 11,000 square feet of retail space — and yes, at 66 floors and 848 feet in height, the building will become Austin’s new tallest. Designed by the Austin offices of international architecture giant Gensler, there’s no shortage of good renderings for this thing:

Image: Gensler Austin

Image: Gensler Austin

It’s perhaps the largest imaginable improvement from the Extended Stay America currently being scraped from the site — the hotel, which replaced the much more interesting Alamo Hotel, was actually so ugly it was one of the motivating factors behind the City of Austin’s drafting of urban design guidelines for new buildings back in the 1990s, in order to ensure structures like it were never built in the central city again. Needless to say, we’re pretty glad to see it go.

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