It was 2007 when I tried breaking into the defunct control tower at Austin's former Robert Mueller Municipal Airport -- you can call that "urban exploration" or "criminal trespassing" at your discretion, though at the age of 15 there's admittedly not much distance between the two. My failed attempt arrived long after the site ceased its final civil aviation operations almost ...
neighborhoods
In 1963, Austin’s Rowdiest Teens Built a ‘Sex Party Tree House’ in North Loop
Let's make one thing clear from the get-go: "Sex Party Tree House" is an extremely funny combination of words, regardless of the context. Since coming across this phrase last year in a 1963 edition of the Austin Statesman, I'll catch myself incessantly repeating it in my head, brain clapping like a trained seal, until all semantic meaning fades away -- Sex Party Tree House, Sex ...
Here’s What We’re Calling Downtown Austin’s Unnamed Northwest District
What should we call the northwest corner of downtown? That's the latest burnin' question we asked our readers earlier this month, in an effort to define the identity of a growing neighborhood that we've seen called Uptown, North Side, Museum District, and so forth. We ended up with 75 responses -- and counting -- from Austinites willing to humor us on the subject. That's ...
In Downtown Austin’s Northwest Corner, a Neighborhood Cries Out for a Name
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 ...
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 ...
