downtown austin

Fareground Austin Making Progress

The renovation / remodel of the plaza in front of 111 Congress Avenue, being branded as Fareground Austin,  has been underway since last year, and things seem to chugging right along. The project has received loads of press in all the major news outlets and recently unveiled new renderings and announced an operator of the restaurant concepts that will be housed there.

Fareground Austin has utilized local talent for many aspects of the project, including dwg, Michael Hsu Architecture, lookthinkmake, and ELM Restaurant Group, among others.

Parkway Properties took full ownership of 111 Congress and San Jacinto Center last year and both properties have received / are receiving exterior improvements.

New Co-Working Space at San Jacinto Center

Another big player in the co-working vertical comes to the CBD.  We’ve written about other spaces before, and TechSpace seems to fit right in with the crowd, offering 28,0000 sf of flex co-working in a modern setting – perfect for small business enterprise.

New Juice Shop at 603 Brazos

A permit is currently under review for a new juice shop to take over 820 sf of ground floor space at 603 Brazos (across from The Driskill and also referred to as 200 E 6th).  The concept will be named Jugo.  No other information as of now, but we’re definitely in support of the general concept!

Application Filed for Demolition of Austin City Music Hall

It’s looking to be imminent: Austin Music Hall is out, and Third + Shoal is in.  The demolition permit was filed a couple of weeks ago, and is still pending, but Third + Shoal is pushing forward and putting out some nice marketing.  Check out the “preview book” by clicking on the image above.

Rainey Street District Gets Dry-Cleaning Service

As Rainey continues to grow, so do the neighborhood services options!  Recently, a neighborhood dry-cleaning service opened, One-Click Cleaners.  Welcome to the neighborhood, One-Click Cleaners, and we’re looking forward to seeing more resident-centric operators come to Rainey!

Bowling alley coming to downtown Austin

I hold the belief that the Big Lebowski made bowling cool in America again.  It is certainly a cool thing to do in Austin, with the Highball, and lest we forget Saengerrunde Hall has been keepin’ it real since 1879!

Now, a new bowling alley is on tap for downtown Austin at the former Miller Blueprint building at 501 W. Sixth Street. Public records seem to tie this effort to the team behind the Goodnight, the adults-only gaming venue on Anderson Lane. If true, a downtown Goodnight should do very well on West Sixth.

The two-story building – abandoned since Miller Blueprinting relocated – is slated to be redeveloped into a four-story mutli-use building with a restaurant, cocktail lounge, event space and 9,500 square foot bowling alley.

The project will also bring Great Street improvements, which makes it a win/win/win for downtown Austin. The timeline is to-be-determined, but paperwork is flying at the city’s planning office, which indicates this project is far beyond conception and well into execution.

Seaholm Intake redesign delayed indefinitely

After spending $110,000 on two design competitions, baiting the Austin public into thinking they actually have a voice, and formally adopting a design the city Parks Department is flushing the Seaholm Redesign progress down the toilet.

There are few examples to epitomize the military acronym of a SNAFU, but this is one of them.

In 2013, there was a Seaholm Intake design competition and in September last year, the city fooled us into thinking there was two finalist designs. The winning design, by Stratus, was officially adopted in October and envisioned metallic spiral corkscrewing through the facility, along with canopy roof, would create an iconic landmark that future generations would associate with Austin.

But, hold the phone! Preservation Austin then got up-in-arms that given that the building is on the National Register of Historic Places the adopted design would fly in the face of rules that only minimal changes take place.

How the Parks Department missed this point is beyond me, but they announced they are hitting reset on the whole endeavor.

Planning Commission votes to reduce One Two East proposal

In it’s-downtown-enough-for-us-to-care news, the Austin Planning Commission has voted 7-3-1 to only partially allow the proposed zoning change for One Two East that would boost the building height to 180 feet from the 150 allowed.  Basically, they voted to cap one of the two twoers at 150 feet and allow the other to go to 180 feet as requested.

Exactly how the move will impact the highly controversial project is to be determined, and it heads to Austin City Council in April, according to an Austin Monitor report.

In my opinion, nixing the zoning request on moral principles is faulty logic.

At the end of January, the master plan to redevelop the 14.3-acre Brackenridge Hospital campus in the northeast quadrant of downtown Austin got the go-ahead from Central Health board. The plan envisions up to four new skyscrapers, an open air market, housing, basically everything to run a small town.

There is a lot of fanfare about the master plan, with the grandfathers of downtown Austin development lining up to give quotes to the Statesman about the magnitude of the site.  But if the lesson of major public-private redevelopment (see: Seaholm, Greenwater) is anything, it is that the story rarely goes the way you have in mind.

These medical developments are MAJOR redevelopment efforts in Austin.  It is not just another tower.  This medical district will feel like a self-contained small city.  I think it is important to give a basic breakdown of what’s going down, so here’s what will be happening in the next 12-24 months at the site:

• The new a new medical school, research building and teaching hospital under construction at Red River and 15th Street is opening, thus Brackenridge will be shuttering.
• Central Health will seek proposals from developers to redevelop the property, probably tease the public with some of the proposed renderings from the suitors, and ultimately choose a company to negotiate a Master Development Agreement or some other arrangement. (Although I should caution: Such deals are precarious until the ink has dried on signatures and prone to unexpected delays. Expect the unexpected.)
• Wrecking balls will start to swing, and the buildings that make up the campus will be demolished.

The approved master plan stretches all the way out 2035 in multiple phases. So those sexy renderings of an open air market, and beautiful skyscrapers? Well, we might all be locked into a global war with AI robots by then, so I’m not even going to touch anything past Phase 1, which stretches from 2017 to 2025.

So if you live downtown, or are buying downtown, here is what to expect, according to the plan for Phase 1:

• The nine-story University Medical Center Brackenridge Hospital Tower stays operational through 2017, then it is demolished to make way for a public market/plaza.
• The single story building to its south is obsolete and is wiped from the Earth.
• The three-story office building and helipad are demolished to allow for the realignment of Red River Street through the Brackenridge Campus.
• The nine-story, 1,400 car space garage stays put because it is a revenue generator and will continue to be.
• In total, this demolition will allow two new development blocks to be created as soon as possible, as well as the first phase of new streets, public open spaces, and infrastructure that define them. Also envisioned during this phase is the construction of a building that would be attached to – or line – the west façade of the Main Garage.

Again, Phase 1 is what is manageable right now. What does Phase 2 and 3 have for us?

Phase 2 (2025-2030)

• The Original City Hospital Block: The Clinical Education Center (CEC)
• Block 166: The CEC Parking Garage
• Block 167: The North Wing of the Hospital Tower

Phase 3 (2030-2035)

• The “Main” Parking Garage at Block 168

Yes, even in 2035, parking garages might still command the center stage of real estate development.  Sigh.  Here is a link to the master plan (pdf).

-Jude

At some point you have have sympathy for the cats who have to build the iconic set on KLRU’s Austin City Limits. During the show’s first two or three decades, the two-dimensional backdrop featuring Austin’s skyline didn’t require a whole lot of tweaks. But since the turn of the millennium, it seems that just about every other week a new tower rises over Bat City’s central core, sending the ACL crews back to the lumber yard in order to keep up.

After the official groundbreaking of The Independent condos on Monday, those poor souls will soon have their work cut out for them yet again. The 58-story residential tower will soon rise in its singular disjointed fashion as the brand new centerpiece of the downtown Austin skyline. Dubbed the “Jenga building” for the eye-grabbing way that it jukes and jives from the top of its parking plinth to the high heavens above, The Independent will be — as its developers are quick to remind you over and over and over again — the tallest residential building west of the Mississippi (And according to my own half-assed research, it may well also be the tallest one east of the Yangtze. Top that, Navy Town, Alaska!).

Yours truly had the fine privilege of crashing the groundbreaking party on Monday afternoon at W. 3rd Street and West Avenue. The crisp weather didn’t deter a crowd of well over a hundred people from packing into the large fenced off area just beneath the almost-finished Seaholm Residences building. It’s a testament to the explosive growth of Downtown that one can stand on the future site of a major high-rise, do a full 360-degree twirl, and not see a single building old enough to be know how to tie its own shoes yet.

Monday’s affair was part-groundbreaking for this single project and part pep rally for Downtown Austin as a whole. In fact, it almost came off as a sort of quinceanera/coming-out ball for modern Downtown: The growth spurt is at full speed and maturity is finally at hand.

Mega-developer Perry Lorenz, who has a hand in The Independent, presided over the speechifying part of the ceremony and introduced former Mayor Kirk Watson as the visionary leader who helped turn Downtown from a low-rise, dusty pancake of government offices and industrial wastelands into the vibrant-if-slightly-pubescently-awkward urban neighborhood it is today.

For his part, Watson — and this may shock you, dear reader — did not demur from the praise. “We said we were going to change the way Downtown looked because it would make a difference in our way of life and it would make a difference in our economics and it would make a difference in our tax base,” Watson, in his folksy, ebullient manner, drawled. “We didn’t have very many people living Downtown. One of the things we wanted to do was send a message to the private sector that we were serious about this.”

Watson framed The Independent as a sort of culmination of those efforts. “Not only are seeing the fruition of that vision, but we’re making history by building something this big, this neat, this cool.”

And big, neat, and cool it is! Say what you will about the arresting design (Watson, a noted non-architect, said it looks “like a Lego project gone wild.”), but give it a few bonus points for defying the cream-and-blue-glass trend of its immediate neighbors. A downtown skyline is essentially the physical manifestation of an entire city’s face, a window into its soul if you will. New York City is as timeless and commanding as the Empire State Building. Houston is as bland, lazy, and inexplicably large as the JPMorgan Chase Tower. And Dallas… well… Dallas’ most prominent landmark is a giant money-colored phallus, so God bless ’em.

Here now in Austin, we’ll soon see a weird tower with unusual, possibly stoned posture just sort of lounging around and soaking the sun by Lady Bird Lake. It will be that hippie-meets-yuppie combo of old-school militant individualism and the new go-go era of tech-money urbanism. And unlike those other cities, Austin’s largest structure will be made up of homes, not offices that are abandoned for the suburbs after 5 p.m. An asinine writer might even go so far to suggest that The Independent’s most towering statement is that Downtown Austin is for l-i-v-i-n, man.

Further proof of that is seen in the extended list of other residential developments that have preceded The Independent in recent years in the southwestern section of Downtown near Shoal Creek. That club includes Spring condos, 360 Condominiums, Seaholm Residences, the Bowie, 5th and West, two or three of the various Amlis, the Monarch, and several more whose names I don’t have on instant or even gradual recall in my brain. The Independent is merely the latest step in the long march towards former Mayor Will Wynn’s pie-in-the-sky-for-its-time goal of getting Downtown’s population up to 25,000 residents. Granted, we’ve passed Wynn’s deadline for that goal last year, but if any of the predictions I made ten years ago came true, the War in Afghanistan would be over, cell phone cameras would be as laughable as New Coke, my journalism degree would have secured me reliable employment in a stable industry, and Sean Penn would be interviewing billionaire cartel kingpins for Spin magazine. So you see how perilous the field of prognostications can be.

The Independent is also a stellar example of how Downtown essentially bankrolls the rest of the city.

Mayor Steve Adler, who has a remarkable ability to cater his message to the audience at hand, told the crowd on Monday that Downtown is the “the city’s piggy bank in a very real sense.” To wit: The Independent, Adler said, will be worth a grand total of $18 million to the city’s affordable housing trust fund.

As the mayor explained, “That’s the equivalent of going to the voters in the city of Austin and asking for their approval in a bond election.”

I try not to let stuff like that go to my head, but it’s awfully hard not to feel proud about my neighborhood essentially bankrolling the rest of the city. The large-scale densification from Rainey Street over to North Lamar has set the template for a true urban neighborhood where car ownership is an option rather than a necessity. The Independent will stand as the slightly awry exclamation point to Watson’s vision and the efforts of so many others who have worked to make it a reality. And if its likeness does make it onto the set of a certain long-running live music program on public television, it will serve as a reminder that behind the creative culture of this city stands the dynamic economic energy of an emerging urban success story.