An aerial view of the downtown Whole Foods, most of its active street frontage occupied by a parking lot. Image: Google Maps
Believe it or not, the flagship Whole Foods at Sixth Street and North Lamar Boulevard was once the center of gravity for much of downtown Austin’s daytime social life — you’d meet friends for brunch there and take visitors from out of town to gawk at the cheese displays. That sounds kind of silly now, but you have to understand how different downtown looked when the store opened in 2005. Although the flagship store’s presence on downtown’s western edge remains a benefit to downtown visitors and nearby residents, it’s been there long enough now for us to ask the real questions — for instance, what’s the deal with the parking lot?
See, one of the innovations of the downtown-scaled Whole Foods flagship store and the corporate office building rising above it was its three-story underground garage, which we considered at the time to be the best-designed parking structure in town. The addition of a sensor package in the 2010s providing drivers with real-time data on parking availability with the help of digital signage and those little green and red lights above each space was, by parking garage standards, pretty stunningly efficient. That underground garage includes 900 spaces, but there’s also a surface parking lot in front of the store along North Lamar Boulevard containing another 100 spaces or so. That lot takes up about an acre and a half, or more than 35 percent of the roughly four-acre Whole Foods property’s total area.
This ant-sized drawing of the Whole Foods flagship building concept artfully avoids showing off the surface parking lot in front of it all. Image: Austin Chronicle / HKS Architects
This almost made sense, charitably speaking, when the building was constructed. If you’ve been kicking around Austin for a while you’ll understand this area’s rapid shift in context over the last few decades — although it’s now considered part of downtown proper, the region around Sixth and Lamar was once home to car dealerships and other low-density warehouse properties. Even the development of the building that would become the Whole Foods flagship by Schlosser Development Corporation was extremely controversial in the early 2000s. There are longstanding rumors that this completely redundant surface parking was included as a concession to area neighborhood associations who wanted a lower-intensity use against North Lamar.
But rumors are just rumors, and an equally plausible explanation is that the developers realized it would be a tough sell to get customers who weren’t very comfortable with subterranean parking to use the garage without coaxing them a bit — if you build a tiny surface parking lot that’s pretty much always full at the top, people will realize on their own that they need to take the ramp down into the garage where the real parking is. This sounds incredibly patronizing, but we’ve definitely heard Austinites mention that the Whole Foods garage was their first experience with underground parking. Austin was once a fairly small and suburban city. Still kinda is!
light sensors for parking space vacancy
byu/thenightisyung inmildlyinteresting
Anyway, that brings us to the present reality of the Whole Foods parking lot, a space that feels fairly useless in the modern context of its surroundings and the building’s ample underground parking. We’ve got to wonder if tearing up this acre and a half of pavement and adding something a little more active — say, an expanded outdoor park space suitable for events, or maybe some additional street-facing retail — wouldn’t offer a nice change of pace for business. Heck, we’re just spitballing here.
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