Rainey Street’s Opening a Temporary Pocket Park This Summer

An aerial view of the 64 Rainey site — it’s the vacant lot at the center of the image seen here. Image: Google Maps

As cranes and towers rise in tandem over the Rainey Street District, the fate of a small 0.27-acre parcel at the corner of Rainey and River Streets is a more subtle topic of ongoing discussion in this downtown Austin neighborhood — owned by the City of Austin since 2003, the corner tract of city-owned land at 64 Rainey Street was designated as parkland in 2014, but if you’ve been on Rainey since the early bungalow bar years you might recall that the site was once home to a gravel parking lot.

For years after that, this corner was used for construction staging on the 70 Rainey condo tower, but the plan was always to eventually convert the space into a small park paying homage to the street’s history as a working-class neighborhood in concert with the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center next door. Now that the MACC is pretty deep into its own expansion project, the city’s Parks and Recreation Department is gearing up to start sprucing up this adjacent vacant lot, with a design for the space based on community feedback that’s expected to include a grand entrance to the revamped MACC site, historic markers and storytelling elements depicting the neighborhood’s past, and recreations of the iconic murals by local artist Raul Valdez that were demolished with the Jaurez-Lincoln University building in the Rainey neighborhood back in 1983 and replaced with the world’s crappiest IHOP.

Here’s How Austin Imagines Rainey Street’s New Pocket Park

That’s all well and good, but construction on these permanent elements isn’t expected to kick off until at least the end of the year, so to tide us over the city’s installing a “temporary activation” at the 64 Rainey space this summer to generate public interest in its potential, featuring donated pieces of large artistic furniture fashioned from used wind turbine blades by the Ohio-based company Canvus, which will be decorated with site-specific artwork by students of the MACC’s Caminos teen leadership program. Here’s how that’s gonna look, more or less:

Image: Canvus / City of Austin

Cities really agonize over the design of these public spaces, but this temporary installation kind of underlines the truth of the matter — just put down some benches in a high-traffic area and people will most likely use them! (Most landscape architects will tell you this after a couple of drinks.) Although we’re sure the final permanent pocket park at 64 Rainey will look nice, there’s something appealing about the simplicity of the Canvus installations, even if we’re a little concerned about the lack of significant shade interfering with the project’s summer debut. Weather permitting, this temporary activation should be open to the public sometime next month.