Image: Austin History Center
As Austin prepares to vote on the historic $7.1 billion transit plan known as Project Connect, we thought it might be a good time to look back at the history of public transportation in our fair city — and the Austin History Center clearly feels the same, uploading this priceless video to its YouTube page earlier this month:
Released in the 1970s by the city to inform the public of the newly-operating Austin Transit System, the film known as “We’re Going Your Way” after the system’s slogan portrays a form of local mass transit running more than a decade before the vote to establish Capital Metro as a taxpayer-funded public entity in 1985. As explained in the video, this system, which started with a relatively small fleet of 55 buses and 107 drivers, was instead a public-private partnership between the city’s Department of Urban Transportation and the American Transit Corporation, one of the largest private transportation operations in the country at that time.
Austin American-Statesman clippings from 1974 provide information about the city’s new pubic transit system and use that catchy slogan “We’re Going Your Way.” Images: Austin History Center
At around 0:16 in the video we see the alternative to mass transportation that foreshadows the current state of the city — gridlock, just with bigger 1970s cars. Prominent on the skyline in this view is the “golden mirror” of the American Bank tower, completed in 1974 — but you can also see the black monolith of the Austin National Bank Tower peeking out just behind it, meaning this video must have been shot either in a late period of its construction or after its completion in 1975:
Image: Austin History Center
You see that “Jay Smith” sign in the background on the image’s right side? That’s the Jay Smith Chrysler-Pontiac dealership, located at 841 West Sixth Street — a good reminder that this area, now considered part of downtown, used to be dominated by car dealerships and other businesses you’d now expect to find way further from the urban core. Here’s a current view from roughly the same spot:
At 40 seconds into the video, we get a better view of the mid-1970s skyline from Zilker Park’s Lou Neff Point — you can see the respective gold and black American and Austin National Bank Towers, but also prominent on the far right are the stacks of the Seaholm Power Plant, then very much in operation generating electricity rather than its current use as a Trader Joe’s and condos, among other things:
Image: Austin History Center
Here’s how the same view looks now:
At 6:50 we pass the Lammes Candies still standing at 5330 Airport Boulevard — the sign hasn’t changed, but its surroundings certainly have:
Image: Austin History Center
Finally, don’t let the suspenders of the dapper fellow at 5:40 distract you from what you should really notice in this shot, which looks south from Congress Avenue — the density of pedestrian traffic, which reminds us of a street shot from New York or another large city punching above Austin’s weight. This is the type of scene you’d find in downtown pretty much every day back when department stores and other retail operations still focused some energy on the downtown core, their stores not yet completely funneled into malls or suburban commercial nodes like the Domain — and it’s the kind of urban environment efforts like Project Connect hope to foster by allowing public access to downtown without full dependence on cars and parking.
Image: Austin History Center
Austin’s come a long way from many aspects of the 1970s, but it’s hard to look at the image above and not miss the pedestrian life from this older version of downtown. It’s obviously going to take more than a train to make this sort of walkable urban environment possible once more, but as cities including Austin work to recover from the pandemic in the hopefully-near future, it’s the kind of historical perspective we’d like to maintain moving forward. Plus, aren’t all the outfits great?
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