The failure of the agreement between private developers Aspen Heights Partners and the City of Austin’s Economic Development Department to construct two residential towers containing hundreds of market-rate and affordable housing units on 1.73 acres of city-owned downtown land formerly occupied by the HealthSouth rehab hospital at 1215 Red River Street was one of the more quietly depressing…
architecture
Gosh, That Building Sure Is Blue
Do you think this heat wave is making everyone in Austin feel stupid? Me personally, I’m wearing a big dunce cap and wandering around Waterloo Park telling everyone to look at the blue building, remarking on how blue it is, asking concerned bystanders if they’ve ever seen a building that blue, and so on. It’s starting to…
What’s the Deal With French Place?
French Place is a bit of an enigma. It’s not quite a neighborhood, but also not just one street — the best way to describe it is a small enclave within the larger Cherrywood neighborhood of East Austin, with porous boundaries depending on who you ask. Best we can tell, French Place makes up the region of…
Celebrating the Grand Reopening of Austin’s Most Elegant Public Toilet
Last week, the City of Austin marked the triumphant return of what must be one the oldest public restrooms in town at Austin Memorial Park Cemetery, located inside an elegant six-sided stone tower near the site’s main entrance at Hancock Drive. The restroom, originally known as the “service tower,” was built across the driveway from the cemetery’s administration building in 1928…
Avoiding an Expanding Highway’s Gravitational Pull at the Frio Apartments
The redevelopment of the 22-acre former campus of Concordia University at the eastern edge of the Hancock neighborhood is one of Austin’s lesser examples of the planned unit development (PUD) process — “the deal so bad, a guy went to jail!” Although it’s taken a bit longer than we expected for this large collection of tracts just west of I-35 to build out since the approval of the…
Austin, Let’s Talk Cottage Courts
On West 34th Street just north of Hemphill Park in the North University region of Central Austin, you’ll find a nearly century-old style of housing that barely exists in the city at the moment — the cottage court. The project, known as the 34th Street Cottages, contains five small homes and dates back to the…