Downtown Austin’s Old Bakery & Emporium Plans a Fresh Coat of Paint

A view of the bakery building in the 1970s. Image: Texas Historical Commission

Built in 1876 by Swedish immigrant Charles Lundberg, the historic former bakery at 1006 Congress Avenue now known as the Old Bakery & Emporium still serves downtown with a shop selling handmade items by area artisans, alongside a visitor center and celebrated gallery space showcasing the work of local artists over 50. But a relatively unsung aspect of the site is its small plaza directly south of the bakery building, one of the city’s most underrated outdoor spaces for a low-key affordable lunch near the Capitol — that’s largely thanks to the My Thai Mom food truck, which occupied the site for years but sadly announced its closure back in September.

A current view of the bakery and its adjacent outdoor plaza — RIP to the My Thai Mom truck. The big blank wall of the bakery building overlooking the plaza is where we’re expecting that mural to go. Image: Downtown Austin Alliance

While we wait to see if another decent lunch option takes over the plaza, it seems the Downtown Austin Alliance Foundation also has its eyes on a revitalization for this city-owned space, with an effort to upgrade the plaza — officially called Old Bakery Park — taking shape in the form of a new mural planned for the large blank wall overlooking the space, along with some tweaks to the site’s seating options and landscaping.

Here’s how the Old Bakery Park currently looks. Image: Downtown Austin Alliance

The project, as part of the foundation’s mural-focused Writing on the Walls public art initiative, will debut its public engagement process at this year’s Holiday Stroll event taking place on the evening of Saturday, December 3:

Austin Parks and Recreation’s Old Bakery and Emporium will be playing a special role in this year’s annual Holiday Stroll presented by the Downtown Austin Alliance. On Saturday, December 3 from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. the Old Bakery and Emporium will be hosting the first public engagement event to get community feedback for a new mural on the south-facing wall of the park located at 1006 Congress Ave. 

Honoring the Swedish ‘Fika’ tradition, a cultural custom of sharing conversations and coffee, community members are encouraged to grab a hot chocolate and chat with local artist, RichesArt, who will provide graphic sketches and work with community members to project their vision onto the future mural wall, helping visualize a mural in the space. RichesArt will also provide a spray paint canvas wall for people to experience the process of creating a mural.

Community members can learn about the project and share their vision for a new mural. The event will feature several opportunities for people to provide feedback and share their vision including online polls, a life-sized timeline of the building’s history, and a downtown mural coloring book where people can draw and share their vision for the new mural. 

— City of Austin

The Holiday Stroll is already an essential event for any committed downtown-loving Austinite, but the possibility of sketching a grackle in graceful mid-swoop and actually seeing it projected on the bakery wall for even a few magical seconds sounds like a powerful motivation to get out there this Saturday and see what all the fuss is about. If you can’t make it out to the stroll, the project also has a quick online survey you can fill out here.

A view of the Old Bakery all decked out for the Holiday Stroll. Image: City of Austin

We are fans of murals in general, since outdoor placemaking is kind of our thing, but we’d like to leverage the power of our readers to participate in this event and actually request something interesting — for instance, the story of the Old Bakery and its preservation thanks in part to efforts by the Junior League of Austin represents a local history of women’s empowerment that is probably more accurately represented by somebody like Angelina Eberly rather than, say, Wonder Woman. We also think public feedback ought to emphasize the importance of ample seating and other features activating the space beyond the power of a mural, which is a good start but certainly not the whole story. How about we convert some of the street parking spaces surrounding the plaza to space for more than one food truck? Now we’re cooking.