For decades, residents of the Govalle neighborhood in East Austin have enjoyed a grove of roughly 75 pecan trees planted in an unusually neat orchard-like grid on undeveloped land at 1129 Tillery Street, the site serving the community as an ad hoc neighborhood park and also supplying a healthy crop of pecans for pies and pralines. The city-owned site…
parks
The City’s Long-Awaited St. John Housing Plan Polishes Up Its Park
The long and winding road to the City of Austin’s development of a roughly 19-acre land assembly in the historic St. John neighborhood with mixed-income housing and park space only has a few twists and turns left. You’ll agree that’s good news considering the timeline at play here — the adjacent tracts at 7211 and 7309 North Interstate 35, once respectively occupied by a Home…
Austin’s Fannie Davis Town Lake Gazebo Could Seek Historic Landmark Zoning
Constructed on parkland along the south shoreline of downtown’s central waterfront in 1969, the Fannie Davis Town Lake Gazebo is one of Austin’s most important and recognizable works of small-scale architecture. As the first structure built to beautify the shores of the new lake crossing the heart of the city after the completion of the…
Rainey Street’s Opening a Temporary Pocket Park This Summer
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…
An Unsung Green Space Plans a Better Skyline View at West Austin Park
West Austin Park, located at 1317 West 10th Street just a few blocks west of downtown, isn’t one of Austin’s better-known outdoor destinations compared with the more cosmopolitan reputation of the nearby Pease Park — but despite looking a little rough around the edges, this three-acre neighborhood park dating back to 1930 has its own pleasant appeal…
Is This Downtown Austin’s Silliest Parking Lot?
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,…