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…
retail
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 of 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…
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…
Hotel and Restaurant Project Planned for Downtown Austin’s ‘Lawyer District’
A rezoning case filed earlier this month for an assembly of two adjacent properties near the intersection of West Avenue and West Ninth Street could bring more life to the so-called “Lawyer District” on the west end of downtown Austin, a region largely excluded from the rest of downtown’s denser zoning and defined by older single-family homes often converted…
Searching for Gaylord Sackler
The Gaylord Sackler Memorial Skate Park opened in the Mueller neighborhood of Central Austin last summer, an approximately 15,000-square-foot haven for skaters also featuring the first concrete pump track for BMX bikes ever built in Texas. Part of the master-planned neighborhood’s large Southeast Greenway park space envisioned by Mueller’s lead developers at California-based real estate firm Catellus and local landscape architecture…