No way, Cesar Chavez as a freeway? Way.
The thinking back in the ’60s was that Cesar Chevez (née 1st Street, née Water Street) should be an expressway.
Check out this map making the rounds on Twitter, recently. Note that the red dash lines are planned expressway lanes, just like MoPac. (Keep in mind, the waterfront wasn’t what it is today, and Lake Lady Bird had only just formed after the completion of Longhorn Dam in 1960.
Office tower proposed at 5th & Colorado
The ABJ reports the surface-parking-lot-cum-mobile-food-vendor site is slated to be a 9 story office tower, being developed by Lincoln Properties. What’s not clear is where the 6 stories of parking will go. Is it a 15 story building? Is parking below ground? Nobody seems to know the height.
Plans murky for former Children’s Museum site
I posted recently about a zoning change filed on the block surrounding the 56-story Austonian skyscraper last week, where developers are seeking a change in zoning that would allow them to build taller.
Developers indicated in plans their intent to develop the two properties adjacent to the Austonian into a 58,880-square-foot retail development and a 1.5 million-square-foot office development, according to the ABJ.
But the zoning request has been withdrawn, the newspaper reported, and there is not a clue about what is planned next. The ABJ noted that when the lot was sold in December, it went for between a very large amount of money: $35 million to $45 million. Whatever ends up being built won’t be small potatoes.
Striking public art coming to the Pfluger Pedestrian Bridge area
A pretty eye-catching public art project, to memorialize the loss of the over 300 million trees that died in the drought of 2011, is coming to downtown this fall. (A site plan has just been submitted to get the city approvals underway.)
Envisioned as a large scale, site specific installation located on Lady Bird Lake, THIRST is a project that will install a white “ghost tree” similar to a white-painted ghost bike in the water between the Pfluger and Lamar bridge, and also hang Tibetan prayer flag-like along the north and south shores on the trail.
The art seeks to acknowledge the devastating impact that changes in weather patterns have had on Austin and also sound a call to action for conservation and sustainability.
The project is brought to us by the Women & Their Work organization, which was awarded a $50,000 Artistic Innovation and Collaboration Grant by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.
Women & Their Work invited visual artist Beili Liu to serve as lead artist. In addition, to some others, downtown’s own Daniel Woodroffe is also collaborate.
You can read more about the project here.
