What do you call the part of downtown Austin northwest of the Capitol? No, I don't mean Judge's Hill, a neighborhood located further to the west than this area according to its self-defined boundaries -- we're talking about the region roughly bound by West 12th Street to the south, Rio Grande Street to the west, MLK Jr. Boulevard to the north, and Lavaca or perhaps ...
downtown
The Only Good Visitor’s Guide to Austin’s Convention District
Though our civic apparatus and the greater convention center-industrial complex would have you believe the ever-expanding Austin Convention Center is a critical economic booster for the city, the jury's still out for plenty of Austinites on where the sprawling center, which currently occupies six city blocks, falls on the continuum between "necessary" and ...
Congress Avenue’s Pocket Patio Transformation, Mapped
The annual PARK(ing) Day event creates public space in downtown Austin by converting, for a day, many of Congress Avenue's street parking spaces into temporary parklets. It's a fun time, but perhaps more importantly, the event serves as a reminder of how much space we've sacrificed to parking in the public realm of our most famous street -- space that, in many cases, can be ...
CodeNEXT Is Dead, Long Live CodeNEXT!
CodeNEXT, Austin's long-awaited rejiggering of the land development code, is dead. Mayor Steve Adler was the first politician to acknowledge the reality that "something has gone horribly wrong" and the project had been "poisoned" by "misinformation, hyperbole, fearmongering, and divisive rhetoric." The news cycle moved from breaking news to roundups and ...
Downtown’s Eight-Block Transformation Kicks Off at Capitol Complex
Unlike a lot of downtown Austin developments that kick around in a state of limbo for what feels like a million years before turning dirt, the Texas Facilities Commission isn't screwing around. Commission documents from earlier this month indicate that construction on the underground parking garage component of the Capitol Complex Master Plan's Texas Mall project will begin by ...