Here's a question for you that sounds almost offensively simple until you start thinking about it: Where's downtown Austin's "heart?" You'll see that phrase -- "the heart of downtown Austin" -- in glossy hotel brochures and Airbnb listings and even on this very site, but where do you think of when you see it? We asked some people around the office and got different ...
placemaking
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 ...
TEMPO 2D Public Art Program Commissions 12 New Austin Murals
For 33 years, the City of Austin's Art in Public Places program has worked with artists -- some local, others national -- to create eye-catching works of public art around the city. Along with permanent installations like the variety of art pieces planned or already in place at our new Central Library (check out those glowing-eyed owl statues at the bottom of the page), ...
We’re Getting an East Side Pedestrian Bridge Near Longhorn Dam, Eventually
If you've hoofed or pedaled around the section of Hike-and-Bike Trail surrounding Lady Bird Lake east of Interstate 35, it's no shock to you that the area has some issues, namely the "bottleneck" of poor connectivity along Longhorn Dam at the eastern edge of the lake. As part of a larger assortment of improvements in the planning stages at the Holly Shores / ...
A Modest Proposal for Connecting Four Blocks in Downtown Austin
Remember when there weren't any major Austin condo or office towers west of Guadalupe Street in downtown? It's kind of quaint to look back on now -- I'm not old, but I'm old enough to remember the opposition to the 7Rio condo tower proposal at Seventh and Rio Grande Streets back around 2007, which eventually lost about half its height and became the SEVEN Apartments. Back ...